Description
The Pacific Northwest is home to a unique legacy of Native American protest from the 1850s to the 1970s. The protests were played out in court cases and in acts of civil disobedience. From treaty rights battles, to hops fields strikes, to fish-ins, to urban demands, the Pacific Northwest became a hot bed of successful Native protest activity. This dissertation focuses on how and why Native American protests in the Pacific Northwest were successful in meeting many of their demands, as well as how and why the protests developed and proceeded. The major focus is on the Fort Lawton occupation of 1970 and the creation of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in 1975 in Seattle. The Seattle occupation was both a local phenomenon with roots in the history of the Pacific Northwest and a national event that garnered considerable media coverage. Yet it has never been analyzed either in its local or its national context. This study utilizes several lenses with which to study Pacific Northwest Native identity and the events that shaped the activism of the region. The first lens is Native culture and society. The second lens will be to look at the treaties and treaty negotiations that took place between the government and Indian nations in the Pacific Northwest from 1854-1856 and to discuss how these dealings with the U.S. government influenced later Native American efforts to retain fishing rights and urban lands. The next lens is labor and economics. How did labor practices change over the centuries and how did they transform first into the hops fields labor strikes of the 1890s and then, in the 1940s, change again to the protection of fishing rights? These questions are significant because they can help answer the questions of how and why organized protests for the protection of Native American treaty and civil rights in the Pacific Northwest succeeded in achieving their demands when similar protests elsewhere, such as the better known Alcatraz Island takeover of 1969, were unsuccessful. Summer 2010
