The Alaskan Way Viaduct, the Black River, and the future Bridge
If you look up “Alaskan Way Viaduct” on google maps, you are brought to the page for a “Waterfront Park.” It is described as having “sweeping views, sculptures, & a boardwalk,” with additional information about ADA accessibility and restrooms. I remember the viaduct, the many times I looked out from the C Line through the rugged concrete columns at the sun over the Elliot Bay. For me, the Alaskan Way Viaduct represented an ugly passageway to some of the best views in Seattle, available to anyone as long as they could take the bus. I was one of many people who heard and saw the viaduct’s dissolution and felt a curious pang from my childhood memories. But any true sadness I felt was dampened by a phantom image in my mind. As the seemingly eternal pillars of the viaduct fell, I couldn’t help but imagine what the Seattle waterline used to look like– the river delta of the Duwamish, the marshes that once surrounded the coast. And I also imagined what the waterline will look like in the future. Will it see more bridges encrusted with cars, cementing the authority of automobiles in this city? Will it be tunnels, carving through the land, full of light rails and trains? Or will it be something else entirely?
As I sit on unceded Duwamish, Suquamish, and Coast Salish land, I see three image slides all layered on top of each other. I am haunted not only by the past but by the future– the light rails that may or may not be built, the tunnels that might one day be extended or filled up. The dams that may one day fall with a crash of dust and concrete. The release of water that has been pushing for decades.
It is easier for me to imagine what Seattle looked like before colonization because of a map: the Waterlines Project. The map places the viewer above, looking down at the vivid blues and greens of the Puget Sound, Lake Washington, and the land that is now known as Seattle. The map, however, portrays the shoreline as it was right before 1851, when settlers began their drastic and destructive changes to the people, the land, and the water. I have seen this map in many places, framed on walls on the University of Washington campus, in various liberal institutions in Seattle, as well as a crumpled version I lovingly folded and unfolded to put on my apartment wall through many moves.
The image seen is very different from what you’ll see above Seattle now. It shows the Duwamish river before its curves and whorls were straightened out by Governor Eugene Semple, destroying Indigenous access to the historic marshes and opening up the river to enormous ocean vessels. There are various locations labeled in Southern Lushootseed, the language of the Coast Salish people. Through this naming, you see where villages once sat, different fishing locations, and a spot called “a place to go calm down.”
Looking at the map, the viewer is forced to acknowledge the seemingly impossible– the radical, towering impact that settlers have had on this land in less than two hundred years. Swamps were drained and paved over. Bodies of water deepened and dammed. Entire rivers disappeared. Imagine that! A whole river, bedded with silt and stones, a place where people had fished for countless generations. You are forced to acknowledge that it’s gone. It’s all gone.
I keep in my house a poster from the Duwamish Longhouse, which depicts in black and white three figures on a boat in a body of water. In bold black print, the poster proclaims “Duwamish on the Black River.” It is a small reminder that sits right in the doorway, a reminder of a body of water that once ran through what is now Renton, where now a Safeway and Fred Meyer sit.
The destruction of the Black River is one of the most important historical events in Seattle history. The Black River sat along the Duwamish valley, in an area called Dxwdəw, meaning “Inside Place” in Lushootseed. It connected the Duwamish river and Lake Washington and was a site of many villages and fishing sites for the Indigenous people that lived there.
Thomas Mercer, one of the early settler colonizers of Seattle, marked the waters around him for change by naming them– an act that was both presumptuous and devastating in its projection of the future. It was he who “changed” the name to Lake Washington, from the Lushootseed name Xacuabš, meaning "great-amount-of-water." Just as significantly, he called XáXu7cHoo ("small great-amount-of-water") Lake Union, a reference to his desire to unite the waters of Lake Washington and the Puget Sound.
And unite they did. The Wikipedia page for the Lake Washington Ship Canal makes little reference to the Indigenous people of the land (though considering Wikipedia's constantly shifting language, perhaps one day it will). Through the collective minds of Thomas Mercer, Hiram M. Chittenden, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the land was sliced through– in its wake, the Montlake Cut, Fremont Cut, and the Ballard Locks remained.
It is impossible to fully state the impact these changes had. The cuts up north drastically affected bodies of water further south: when Lake Washington was connected to Lake Union, the Black River dried up. The land that it once flowed through is now a Boeing factory.
I didn’t know about any of this until I took the class Indigenous Feminisms at the University of Washington, taught by Iris Viveros Avendano. It was there that I first started to learn about the Duwamish people (though I had been vaguely aware of them since the Duwamish Longhouse had opened up by my childhood home). I watched the documentary film, Princess Angeline, about the daughter of Chief Seattle and the colonization of the Duwamish land. On many days that I felt like the land beneath me was physically shaking, the version of reality that I had been taught turning in on itself. I gained a burning hatred of the Ballard Locks, the structure that was used to justify the connection between Lake Washington and the Puget Sound. My childhood memories of watching yachts pass through were turned red with rage– why had so much been destroyed, the lands of so many people been warped– so that white families could go to Lake Washington for the fourth of July weekend. My anger led to mourning, which led to a blank hopelessness. I could see the land and water as it was, and I could peer into the past, through photographs and testimonials. A Duwamish man named Joseph Moses said in an interview on the Black River, “That was quite a day for the white people at least. The waters just went down, down, until our landing and canoes stood dry and there was no Black River at all. There were pools, of course, and the struggling fish trapped in them. People came from miles around, laughing and hollering and stuffing fish into gunny sacks.”
And what is left in the memory of my fellow settlers in Seattle? A parking lot. A dammed stream. Fireworks over the Puget Sound. A plaque. So, so many plaques.
But the river can never truly disappear. It took me a few years to realize that. There is a bright dot of hope in my mind, a belief that has only become larger in my mind the more that I read and research. The destruction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct added something to this hope, and as it came crumbling down I felt something like relief. The construction of the Viaduct starting in 1949 had been a continuation of the constant push to remove Native Americans from their own lands on the Seattle waterfront. In the late 1800s, Duwamish people were exiled to Ballast Island, and the burning of Herring’s House village alienated communities from West Seattle as well. Yet if the viaduct could be torn down, so could the locks. If the cuts between Lake Union and Lake Washington could be formed, they could be filled in as well. The Black River is not gone– it is still there, swirling in the waters of Xacuabš, waiting to be reborn.
Time and the environment are on the side of the Black River. The website for the locks asks visitors for donations, to maintain its now over-100-year-old structure. The West Seattle bridge will need to be destroyed or repaired. All over America, bridges are falling apart, and there are increased warnings of dams collapsing. Of course, these collapses affect everyone, settler or not, but the immutable fact remains-- the physical structures that created and emboldened the settler colony we live in are crumbling.
To understand how we might live in the future, I always find it helpful to look at the way Indigenous people have historically and currently lived. Here, Coast Salish people built longhouses that were dismantled and moved on regular intervals, traveling via canoe more often than by land. In an essay by Christina L. Wallace, she details the use of posts and beams, the complex wall assembly, as well as the multi-generational families that lived in them. In retrospect, the reality seems obvious– almost all of the physical structures people have built have been temporary, a blip in the endless history of the land. In so many western societies, there is a self-centered notion that whatever had been made most recently must be the best, that we’re always striving to become better and more efficient. Yet so many people live on pothole-riddled streets in neighborhoods designed for surveillance and policing. It wasn’t always like this– and the future is open to infinite possibilities. Regardless of what Seattleites do individually, the push of the water is constant, as unavoidable as time. As cracks in the colonial structure show, we must decide what will take that structure’s place.
By William Lau (he/him), essays editor for VIADUCT. His bio can be found here.