Settlers' voices take stage in drama of city's founding

James Rasmussen was in the jazz record store he owns in Pioneer Square last spring when an acquaintance, Greg Palmer, walked in carrying a manuscript.

Palmer is a playwright and a distant descendant of David Denny, one of Seattle's earlier white settlers. He'd written a play about the arrival of settlers -- such as his ancestors -- and their relationship with Native Americans -- such as Rasmussen's Duwamish ancestors.

Palmer wanted his play to tell the stories of native people. Only more so, he said, when a few people asked if proceeds from his play would go to help the Duwamish build a casino.

In fact, a performance earlier this month helped raise money for a traditional Duwamish longhouse and cultural center.

The playwright handed Rasmussen the draft "and told him he could change anything with which he had a problem," Palmer said in an e-mail. "I gave him a completely free hand and trusted him to improve the play. Which he did."

The play was performed Nov. 12 and again Tuesday to mark the arrival of Arthur Denny and 21 others on the schooner Exact at Alki Point on Nov. 13, 1851. It's Seattle's version of the Pilgrim story.

Rasmussen said at the cast's final rehearsal before the performances that, for Native Americans, Thanksgiving comes with mixed feelings. He'll still celebrate it this week, taking the holiday as a chance for the family to gather.

But the popular stories he heard of the settlers centered on those who came, not those already here.

Rasmussen said: "One of the things I deal with a lot of time when I talk to people, especially pioneer groups, is that they take real pride in still being around here. They don't look at the native people in the same way."

Rasmussen suggested only a few changes in the manuscript that Palmer handed him. He wanted to add a section about the Duwamish concept of "home," to show what's changed for the Duwamish and to remind those focused on the story of the settlers that the Duwamish had been here for centuries.

At the rehearsal came the voice of one of their ancestors, performed by Rasmussen:

"The settlers chose the Northwest to be their home, where they would build a community that could sustain them. For the Indians -- the Duwamish and the other families -- there was no choice, any more than there was a choice to breathe. Because the native people came with the Creation, they weren't on the land and the sea; they were an integral part of it. They didn't settle."

He read the speech again during the play's first performance at Salty's restaurant on Alki. As he, Palmer and the four other actors sat at the head of a dining room, reading scripts propped on the music stands before them, the city's night skyline was visible outside the windows of the Alki Room.

Brightly lit office towers and windows stood where a native people had once lived undisturbed.

Their home changed when the settlers arrived.

The voice of another actor, Deborah Fialkow, rose up as settler Catherine Blaine:

"I believe I have written about the men living with squaws.

"There was a man who bought one from her folks about three years ago and has been living with her ever since just as if she was his wife ...

"Yesterday for some trifling circumstances she became angry and when he had gone to work in the afternoon she hung herself and when found was dead. She never loved him nor wanted to live with him, and had run away several times, but he had followed and brought her back. This time she was beyond his reach."

In truth, most of the play is based on the stories of the settlers, whose letters and memoirs survived the past century and a half better than those passed on by the Duwamish.

Fialkow also portrayed David Denny's wife, Louisa Boren Denny, at Salty's:

"In the last summer of Louisa's life, she asked to be taken where she could see the water and hear the waves on the beach. There, in a little cottage facing west, she passed on to meet David on the other shore."

In the audience, Amy Johnson, Louisa's great-great-granddaughter, was watching. As she left the restaurant, a passerby said to her, "Louisa had dark hair, too."

"Yes, people say I resemble her," Johnson responded.

Outside it rained. She sent her son to fetch an umbrella from the car. "Just like when they arrived," she said, stepping into the weather.

On the stage was another ancestor of the settlers, Louise Jones-Brown.

Her great-great-great uncle, John Maple, came to Washington in 1862 and settled. In 1901, he gave a newspaper interview describing the wedding of his sister, Elizabeth, and Henry Van Asselt a month after he'd arrived.

More than a century later, his great-great-great niece, Louise Jones-Brown, read his words:

"While we were eating dinner the Indians outside looked into the windows. There was such an eager look in the eyes of all that it was decided to arrange some way in which they could all see the bride and groom ... Soon they all came in and took a look at the couple and passed on. There were in the neighborhood of 700 of the Siwashes who passed through in their gaudy costumes and looked with awe at the great white squaw. The looks on the faces of the Siwashes at that time made an impression on me that I will never forget as long as I live."

There was "anguish" being in the play, Rasmussen said.

Words such as siwash and squaw are highly derogatory terms for Native Americans. "Hearing them really hits you in the gut, real hard. But the bright side is we're starting to tell the story. It would be like talking about 1930s Georgia without saying the word 'nigger.' It's important to be honest and feel the pain."

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