In Seattles Past, a Harbinger of Standing Rock
Pretty good article on the building of the Ballard Locks and the effect on Seattle's Native American population.
What Hiram Chittenden’s life tells us about the government and the land it conquered.
If Hiram Chittenden had been present at the big solidarity-for-Standing Rock rally held outside the Army Corps of Engineers’ Hiram Chittenden Locks in Ballard two weeks ago, he probably wouldn’t have been surprised that Native Americans were once again going head-to-head with the Corps.
After all, be it an Army Corps dam that’s going to flood Native land or a pipeline that’s going to poison it, the Corps has never been popular with the continent’s original inhabitants. To Chittenden, who spent his career with the agency and designed the Locks, the most surprising thing about the protest would have been that 99 years after his death, Natives still survived. He was so positive they’d all be dead by now that he even wrote a poem from the perspective of the last Native on Earth, “The Redman’s Farewell”:
The full poem goes on for pages, but its gist is that Natives are naturally allergic to the future, and would die out no matter what. With all the Earth’s “barbarian” races subdued, and war between the “civilized” nations becoming unthinkable, it seemed as if the future wouldn’t even have need for a military, Chittenden thought, which is why in his 1911 book War or Peace (published five years before the first World War) he proposed that all the world’s armies be dismantled and replaced with a one-world government to solve future disputes. He was still firm that non-whites not be allowed to enter the United States, even under the one-world government, for fear of racial mixing. He also acknowledged that without war we would need a new form of population control, and proposed that society should gather those with “natural infirmities and put them out of the way by any of the painless processes known to science, thus accomplishing at insignificant cost the double purpose of restricting population and improving its quality.”
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/how-the-army-corps-of-engineers-has-trampled-on-indigenous-land-from-standing-rock-to-salmon-bay/
