(Image from December 2023 council-committee agenda, incorporating Google Maps photo)
Not including the Duwamish Tribe in a highly visible Native-art project barely a mile from their Longhouse would be a “systemic erasure,” the City Council’s Transportation Committee was told by tribal officials this morning.
The committee, chaired by District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka, was scheduled to be briefed and to possibly vote on the project at today’s meeting, three months after the previous membership of the committee tabled it at the request of Saka’s predecessor Lisa Herbold. At the start of the meeting, Saka announced that it would not be voted on today; then after the previous two (unrelated) agenda items ran long, he announced the art-project briefing would be tabled entirely, “possibly” to an unspecified later date.
Though this project has been in the planning stages for almost two years, it was not mentioned publicly until the agenda emerged for a committee meeting last December. The project is proposed to involve the Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes, sharing an estimated 15 West Seattle Bridge columns and $133,000 from the West Seattle Bridge repair/mitigation project. The Duwamish say the art project was never even mentioned to them (and the slide deck prepared for the meeting bears that out). At the committee briefing in December, SDOT countered by saying the Duwamish Tribe was involved with a different art project – but it turned out to involve the sidewalk close to the Longhouse, and, according to the tribe, was in the works long before this came to light.
(WSB photo, Council Chambers today)
At the start of the meeting, the public-comment period included more than half a dozen people telling the committee that the Duwamish Tribe should be included in the bridge-columns project. Here’s our video of the entire public-comment period (including several speakers talking about other agenda items); the first speaker, reading a statement from Duwamish Tribe chair Cecile Hansen, was Longhouse director Kristina Pearson:
Several of the Duwamish representatives who spoke said they’re being excluded because their tribe is not federally recognized, a status they’ve been fighting for years to regain. And to add insult to injury, said one speaker, the project excluding the Duwamish Tribe is in “an area that is culturally sensitive to” them.
Saka noted from the dais that he will be visiting the Duwamish Longhouse soon for a meeting; before adjourning, both he and the committee’s vice-chair, District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, thanked the Duwamish members for coming to City Hall. She said, “You being the original caretakers of this land, when you speak, we need to listen.”
(Side note – we will cover the rest of the meeting, which focused on the Seattle Transportation Plan and a “State of the Bridges” overview, in a separate report.)
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