Editor’s note: This week’s edition of Time & Again explores the history of Indigenous art in the region, and how the region’s Coast Salish artistic identity is being reclaimed.

Otis and Mary Baxter lived on Vashon Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mary was Makah, and Otis claimed to be a nephew of a Makah leader and identified his grandmother as Seminole.

Mary was a well-known and highly respected weaver, and Otis carved totem poles and art works in the Northern style for Tillicum Village and other commissions around the Puget Sound.

Otis, trained as a carver at the Makah Reservation, carved the pole that was located at the top of Vashon Heights at Top O’ the Isle Realty along Vashon Highway from the 1950s to 1970s.

That pole was one of the first things visitors saw when they came to the Island, but it helped misrepresent the Indigenous people of Vashon.

Later, in the early 1960s, Otis was commissioned to carve two Northern style 16-foot poles and a 22-foot crosspiece for the newly constructed Ye Olde Curiosity Shop building on Pier 51 in downtown Seattle.

The poles and crosspiece were delivered in early 1963 and formed the entrance to the shop until they were taken down as part of the Coleman Dock remodel in 2020. The poles and cross-piece were stored outdoors in Seattle, until they were going to be demolished and taken to a land fill in 2022.

Alex Kostelnix contacted the Vashon Heritage Museum to see if the Museum would preserve the poles until an appropriate location for them could be found. The Museum agreed, and last year took possession of the poles.

These Olde Curiosity Shop poles, and Otis Baxter’s other carvings, are part of a much larger, complex, and nuanced story about how Seattle, Tacoma, and the Puget Sound Basin, traditional lands of Coast Salish Indigenous people, became identified with Northern style totem poles from British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, while Coast Salish art and carvings were dismissed and ignored for over a century.

Theft and appropriation

Northern-style totem poles were used by commercial interests to “sell” Seattle and Tacoma as the gateway to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. In 1899, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce removed a 60-foot pole from the Tlingit village of Tongass in Southeast Alaska, without the knowledge or consent of the owner, the Kinninook family.

The pole was erected in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle in 1899, and thereafter became a symbol of the City of Seattle, whose businessmen were promoting the city as a gateway to Alaska. The 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle used the Seattle totem pole as part of its promotional efforts, making it a symbol of the fair as well as the city. Models of this totem pole were sold in large numbers as souvenirs to tourists.

Not to be outdone by Seattle, a group of Tacoma businessmen commissioned a taller pole (76 feet) to be carved in secret on Vashon Island and erected in front of the Tacoma Hotel, in advance of a 1903 visit by President Theodore Roosevelt. Said to have been carved by “two Alaska or British Columbia Indians” or “Tlingit Kagwantan carvers from Sitka,” there remains a question as to who actually carved the pole.

The price paid for the commission ($3,000) is much higher than the fees Indigenous carvers were paid at the time, and the style of the carving differs in many ways from traditional Northern Style poles. Given that the carvers’ identities were kept secret, it is most likely that non-Indigenous carvers created this pole working from photographs of Northern style poles.

The pole was later moved to Fireman’s Park and was restored several times, In August 2021 this pole was removed, following protests by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians that the pole did not represent the Coast Salish Indigenous people of the area, and replaced by a Coast Salish welcome figure carved by Puyallup artist Sean Peterson.

When the Seattle Seahawks professional football team was formed in 1976, the team’s logo was derived from a picture of a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask. After the Seahawks created their rendition of the mask, Native American Seattle artist Marvin Oliver created a refined version of the logo, which better adhered to Northern style Northwest Coast design principles.

Because of these “totem poles” in Seattle and Tacoma, and because of the efforts by these cities to use Northern style art to represent the region, capped off by the 1970s Seattle Seahawks logo, the Puget Sound region became identified by Northern style art instead of by the Indigenous Coast Salish style art of the original inhabitants of the region.

This cultural appropriation of Northern style Indigenous art for commercial reasons led to more than a century of suppressing and ignoring the Coast Salish style art of the region.

Identity and art

Despite this use of Northern style formline art to represent the Salish Sea region, Coast Salish art, while overshadowed, did not disappear. Indigenous Coast Salish artists continued to work in their traditional style.

Beginning in the 1980s, a resurgence of Coast Salish art began as Coast Salish artists including Susan Point (Musqueam), Gerald Bruce Miller (subiyay) (Skokomish), Ron Hilbert (Vadesqidab) (Tulalip/Upper Skagit), Shaun Peterson (Qwalsius) (Puyallup), and many others have fought against decades of underrepresentation and sought to revive and share their unique style of art.

Vashon Center for the Arts presented an exhibit last year titled “Indigenous Art of the Salish Sea” which highlighted how the mainstream art world has long prioritized northern Indigenous art from British Columbia and southeast Alaska over the less well-known Coast Salish art traditions and styles from the Salish Sea.

While this is a complex story about the cultural appropriation of Northern style Indigenous art to represent the Salish Sea for commercial reasons, Coast Salish style art is emerging as the true representative Indigenous art of this region. Preserving the Ye Olde Curiosity poles as a display until an appropriate location for them is found provides a way for the Vashon Heritage Museum to help tell this story.

By telling this story, the museum can help to develop the understanding of how Northern style art came to identify this region and how the struggle of Coast Salish artists to reclaim this region’s true Indigenous identity is beginning to succeed.

Bruce Haulman is an island historian. Terry Donnelly is an island photographer. An expanded version of this article appears online.