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Where I live now
Jul. 16th, 2010 07:11 pmVashon drama.
I want to do some landscaping on our slope--the property behind our house is pretty steep and mostly covered with ivy and I wanted to put in native plants and stuff. Mom and I already hauled a couple of bales of hay up there for an archery target.
Also, our septic system is on its last, uh, legs, and we're trying to get someone to do something with that. So we hired a surveyor to come out. "Oh," the neighbors said, "be sure not to hire so-and-so, he's terrible. But so-and-so was the surveyor and we'd already called him.
And he came back with these crazy fucking results. Like for instance, the corner of our house isn't actually on our property, it's on our neighbors'. However, the shed right by their house that the residents there have used for decades IS our property somehow.
G, our neighbor on the other side, does not own the property his house is on, but he does own the water in front of him. Or some shit like that. Somehow we don't own the property directly behind our house, but something all slanty that goes up the slope. I dunno. Those were his results at least, based on a reconstruction of god knows what from back when there were different trees and different roads. So we're not happy with that, but he insists he's going to officially register it with the county anyway.
On top of that and numerous other ridiculous red-tape things too numerous and exasperating to go into here: a week or so ago we received a letter. Some archeologists invited us residents to the Burke Museum to talk about their project they just got a grant for, the Manzanita Beach Public Archeology Project.
I thought it was really cool and fascinating and I looked through this book they had that had old Lushootseed names for areas around our house. One area translates as "the place where monsters are," and another is something like, "the place that is cuddled on both sides." So that's awesome and the local languages own and it was really cool to read about it.
But also horrible. The anthropologist a lot of that manual thing was based on did his work in like the 1920s, and of course his informants were local native people. There was one extremely old man who was one of his important informants, who lived with his even older wife, who was crazy. In 1919, they died of starvation, in West Seattle. They were that poor.
They used to live on land around here. Until some white guy tricked him into signing something, giving the man the property in exchange for one dollar.
There was a village, of the Puyallup people I think, quite near our house as well. A very large longhouse, more of a fort, really--the channel narrows here and it would be a good place to cut off any invaders who were coming through on canoes.
Then in the 1850s or 1860s some white people burned it down, so that the Indians would have to leave, and they could take their land.
The lady who told the anthropologist this was quite old, when she spoke to him. She had been a girl, maybe 12 or so, when people were still living there; it was a sort of winter camp. Later she was sent off to a school for Indian children, the kind that's meant to take away the territory inside you. If they spoke a single word of their own language, if they were caught, they would be locked in a dark closet.
And here's these white people, myself included, living there now. It's there, the record, the drawn maps, the stories in plain printed text. And it's so clear, that taking, and so recent. Right. There. Where that dot is, I know the view from there. They had a name for it, names for every spot along the shore, based on long familiarity. Beautiful To The Eye, one is called.
I could talk about the kids, down for the summer, their bikes strewn across the dusty gravel road. The kids build structures out of driftwood and jump in the freezing water. It's July, and there were fireworks. Our neighbor sells them in town, we got a bunch including a few parachute men that float down after the explosion.
Our parachute man landed in the water, and I had wanted to give it to my niece and I was afraid of something eating it or getting tangled, so I put on my suit, scraped my feet on the algae and barnacles on the last corroded steps of the stairs off the neighbor's dock, and went out after it. Maybe twenty yards. But I was glad to turn back and reach shallower water again, glad to be near the stairs--my breath was thick and hard to pull in, the cold does that faster than you'd expect, even though it's been hot, so hot that in the dark, the cement bulkhead was warm as I sat to rest.
They clapped and cheered my name, when I lit those small fireworks. Nothing impressive, one bright ball at a time shooting up and then dying, white light crackling in a fountain and making a loud noise.
I could talk about this neighbor and that neighbor, the ones whose family has been here a few generations, the ones who just moved from California. Local details, local drama that absorbs you only if you live here.
"Oh, no," the archeologist laughed, when we asked about artifacts, who finds them, what happens when they do. Do they belong to the tribe? "They're not interested in the land."
By which she meant not that the Puyallup people didn't care, but that they knew any attempt to recover their land was hopeless, that they needed to focus on other battles instead, like disputes over shellfish harvesting areas. "They know that the state it that 100 percent. There's no argument about that."
That man had his home stolen for a dollar, a dollar that went quickly. That village burned, and someone must have raked the blackened ground, had the slope graded, said, "Here's where the new house will be."
Now, on any private property, any archeological objects discovered belong to the property owner. If the archeologists want to take so much as a bag of dirt off your land, you need to sign over a deed to it. That's the law.
If I found an old tool, a carved bone earring, it would, legally, belong to me. How could it be mine? We are on this land like the crust on a wound.
I want to do some landscaping on our slope--the property behind our house is pretty steep and mostly covered with ivy and I wanted to put in native plants and stuff. Mom and I already hauled a couple of bales of hay up there for an archery target.
Also, our septic system is on its last, uh, legs, and we're trying to get someone to do something with that. So we hired a surveyor to come out. "Oh," the neighbors said, "be sure not to hire so-and-so, he's terrible. But so-and-so was the surveyor and we'd already called him.
And he came back with these crazy fucking results. Like for instance, the corner of our house isn't actually on our property, it's on our neighbors'. However, the shed right by their house that the residents there have used for decades IS our property somehow.
G, our neighbor on the other side, does not own the property his house is on, but he does own the water in front of him. Or some shit like that. Somehow we don't own the property directly behind our house, but something all slanty that goes up the slope. I dunno. Those were his results at least, based on a reconstruction of god knows what from back when there were different trees and different roads. So we're not happy with that, but he insists he's going to officially register it with the county anyway.
On top of that and numerous other ridiculous red-tape things too numerous and exasperating to go into here: a week or so ago we received a letter. Some archeologists invited us residents to the Burke Museum to talk about their project they just got a grant for, the Manzanita Beach Public Archeology Project.
I thought it was really cool and fascinating and I looked through this book they had that had old Lushootseed names for areas around our house. One area translates as "the place where monsters are," and another is something like, "the place that is cuddled on both sides." So that's awesome and the local languages own and it was really cool to read about it.
But also horrible. The anthropologist a lot of that manual thing was based on did his work in like the 1920s, and of course his informants were local native people. There was one extremely old man who was one of his important informants, who lived with his even older wife, who was crazy. In 1919, they died of starvation, in West Seattle. They were that poor.
They used to live on land around here. Until some white guy tricked him into signing something, giving the man the property in exchange for one dollar.
There was a village, of the Puyallup people I think, quite near our house as well. A very large longhouse, more of a fort, really--the channel narrows here and it would be a good place to cut off any invaders who were coming through on canoes.
Then in the 1850s or 1860s some white people burned it down, so that the Indians would have to leave, and they could take their land.
The lady who told the anthropologist this was quite old, when she spoke to him. She had been a girl, maybe 12 or so, when people were still living there; it was a sort of winter camp. Later she was sent off to a school for Indian children, the kind that's meant to take away the territory inside you. If they spoke a single word of their own language, if they were caught, they would be locked in a dark closet.
And here's these white people, myself included, living there now. It's there, the record, the drawn maps, the stories in plain printed text. And it's so clear, that taking, and so recent. Right. There. Where that dot is, I know the view from there. They had a name for it, names for every spot along the shore, based on long familiarity. Beautiful To The Eye, one is called.
I could talk about the kids, down for the summer, their bikes strewn across the dusty gravel road. The kids build structures out of driftwood and jump in the freezing water. It's July, and there were fireworks. Our neighbor sells them in town, we got a bunch including a few parachute men that float down after the explosion.
Our parachute man landed in the water, and I had wanted to give it to my niece and I was afraid of something eating it or getting tangled, so I put on my suit, scraped my feet on the algae and barnacles on the last corroded steps of the stairs off the neighbor's dock, and went out after it. Maybe twenty yards. But I was glad to turn back and reach shallower water again, glad to be near the stairs--my breath was thick and hard to pull in, the cold does that faster than you'd expect, even though it's been hot, so hot that in the dark, the cement bulkhead was warm as I sat to rest.
They clapped and cheered my name, when I lit those small fireworks. Nothing impressive, one bright ball at a time shooting up and then dying, white light crackling in a fountain and making a loud noise.
I could talk about this neighbor and that neighbor, the ones whose family has been here a few generations, the ones who just moved from California. Local details, local drama that absorbs you only if you live here.
"Oh, no," the archeologist laughed, when we asked about artifacts, who finds them, what happens when they do. Do they belong to the tribe? "They're not interested in the land."
By which she meant not that the Puyallup people didn't care, but that they knew any attempt to recover their land was hopeless, that they needed to focus on other battles instead, like disputes over shellfish harvesting areas. "They know that the state it that 100 percent. There's no argument about that."
That man had his home stolen for a dollar, a dollar that went quickly. That village burned, and someone must have raked the blackened ground, had the slope graded, said, "Here's where the new house will be."
Now, on any private property, any archeological objects discovered belong to the property owner. If the archeologists want to take so much as a bag of dirt off your land, you need to sign over a deed to it. That's the law.
If I found an old tool, a carved bone earring, it would, legally, belong to me. How could it be mine? We are on this land like the crust on a wound.
