Where Do We Come From?
Where Do We Come From?
On the Homogeneity of American Towns
As most people do, when asked where I’m from, I often say “Seattle,” the largest city adjacent to my real hometown, Newcastle, which is a mildly sized suburb about half an hour away from the major Washington State city. As with most cities in the United States, my hometown, as I now know it, is relatively young in the history of human civilization and even younger than most American towns in general, given that it’s west coast-bound.
Before white settlers showed up, the Puget Sound region was largely occupied by Coast Salish people. The Duwamish Tribe has specifically resided in the Seattle and greater King County area since the end of the last glacial period, which was in 8000 BCE (about 10,000 years ago). Coast Salish people moved with the seasons, dispersing in the spring to hunt deer and elk, gather berries to eat and preserve, and collect bark from local oaks to protect from fires. The summer encouraged more foraging and congregation to hunt salmon - an integral part of Duwamish culture and diet. Winters were largely spent in village longhouses.
On January 22, 1855, Chief Si’ahl was one of the first to sign the Treaty of Point Elliot. The Duwamish Tribe points out that his name - which is what “Seattle” is named after - was placed at the very top of the treaty, indicating his personal importance and that of the tribes. The Treaty of Point Elliot guaranteed hunting and fishing rights to all Tribes represented by Native signers. In return, the Duwamish exchanged over 54,000 acres of land, including what would become Seattle, Renton, Bellevue, and much of King County. Despite the treaty’s promises, European American immigrants soon violated them, as state and federal governments restricted fishing rights and bolstered commercial and sports fisheries dominated by white Americans. Today, the Duwamish tribe, which consists of about 600 people, continues to preserve and celebrate Duwamish culture and fight for federal recognition, which has never been granted to the tribe, despite being the Seattle area’s only indigenous tribe.
In 1869, Newcastle transitioned from a small agricultural village into a booming coal mining town. Tall smokestacks and mine cars lined the wooded hillsides. A railroad from Seattle reached its last stop at Coal Creek Parkway, a street that intersects with Coal Creek, a sleepy, trickling of water protected by forest brush and home to deer, squirrels, the occasional bobcat, and many smooth rocks. Newcastle became the most successful coal mining town in northwestern Washington, extracting 75-100 tons of coal a day and amassing a larger population than Seattle at its peak. When the Pacific Coal Company left the region in 1929, many coal-dependent towns dissipated. Mining activity officially shut down in Newcastle in 1963. Newcastle was officially incorporated as a city in 1994, six years before I was born. The city currently has a population of about 12,000, modest when compared to Seattle’s 700,000.
If you visit Newcastle today, this history - bloody, prosperous, and poignant - wouldn’t be immediately known to you. Instead, you would see a Safeway. A Starbucks drive-thru and a Key Bank that used to be a Blockbuster where I would rent weekly DVDs for the weekend. A Great Clips where I would get botched haircuts. A Mexican restaurant franchise where soccer teams and high school theatre casts congregate.
You can drive up the hill past the fruit stand and wind your way up to the lush golf course and country club where I had my prom. You can drive down the Parkway and into the trees and you’ll come upon a trailhead or two, where you can trod through the muddy forest and read plastic placards detailing small bits about the town’s coal mining history. Along some of the trails, some of these placards are accompanied by rusty wheelbarrows and pick axes, local artifacts once used to extract fossil fuels from land that was once used for another kind of fuel. In some areas of the trails, you may even stumble upon the mouths of old coal mines, where hopeful miners descended with headlamps. If you try to walk too far into them - as my friends and I have attempted - you’ll see that they’re sealed off. On the drive back, you’ll pass people in their Suburus, Priuses, and Teslas, many of whom are employees at Microsoft or Amazon.
My hometown, like many hometowns throughout America, reaps its sentimentality from simply being my hometown. It’s not an exceptionally well-planned place to live - like many American cities, it’s dominated by cars, contains little to no mixed-use space, and has more and more old businesses dying off each year. There are, of course, some uniquely beautiful areas - a couple parks, sparkling lakes tucked beneath highways, and lookout points with great sunset views at the top of the hilly neighborhoods.
If I linger too long in the plaza containing the Safeway and the Key Bank that used to be a Blockbuster or park outside of the Allstate Insurance that used to be the dance studio I spent fifteen years in, I will burst into tears. A passerby wouldn’t know what all the crying is for. They’d wonder what’s so upsetting about affordable groceries and insurance. Little do they know that I’ve imbued these spaces - mundane, highly sanitized, and commercialized spaces that have existed for less time than I have - with sacrosanct memories. How funny is it that we all probably have a Target near the towns that we grew up in that could bring us each to tears?
Colonialism and capitalism flatten publics. 10,000 years of civilization developed by Duwamish peoples is leveled and mined for coal, driving capitalist interests. And then the coal mines are sealed up and frozen yogurt shops and video rental shops materialize, energizing and entertaining the now small community of middle-class suburbanites. And then the land is bulldozed again, replaced with condos and Starbucks to house and caffeinate the buzzing tech millennials. The earth is tilled and turned over and tilled and turned over.
It’s not just the land that’s flattened. American culture becomes so homogenized, so defined by its corporate champions and stripped of culturally significant grounding, that returning to your hometown means yearning for a Blockbuster. And because this “culture” is so hollow, yet so stampable you can access it just about anywhere. Find new reasons to cry in new parking lots across the country.
Many, like myself, have flocked to so-called changes in scenery. We seek out the new - the romantic, the wild - only to find that the land doesn’t just till and turn over in your hometown, it’s in a perpetual state of mutation everywhere you turn. All contorting into the same reproducible iconography, making you associate “home” with Starbucks mermaids and Target bulls-eyes.
When once distinct ideas and groups merge into one loosely defined identity, people are simultaneously united and stripped of the differences that made them particular. For example, before the seventeenth century, Europeans differentiated themselves based on their country of origin and their religion. The identity of “white” had little to no significance, until a pan-European identity was invented and bolstered, in part, to help “justify” conquering land and enslaving Africans. Such a creation aided the circulation of an “us” vs. “them” mentality and a rallying behind common enemies (enemies who were also made homogeneous to seem easier to dehumanize). As a result, the common “white” American identity is devoid of any real nuance. Most white Americans lack any real ties to their lineage unless they descend not far behind recent European immigrants.
Capitalism similarly has a knack for lumping together ideas, people, and places that were once unique. Because once a place no longer contains the sentimentality of a mom-and-pop grocer or a community center, it can be raked, tilled, and commercialized until its residents feel stupid for crying outside a Target. Anthropologist Marc Augé refers to the homogeneity of urban spaces as “non-places,” in which history, identity, and human relations are absent. Non-places used to only exist on the fringes of public spaces, like airports and shopping malls. But now, the practical, sterile, steel boxes of drive-thrus and commercial retail are everywhere we look. The effect of non-places is numbing. Writer Darran Anderson describes it well in The Atlantic, writing: “Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.”
When we fail to preserve and honor the histories and peculiarities of our communities, we fail to care about them. Of course, “caring” alone isn’t enough to prevent the seizing of land and the extension of industry. If “caring” was enough, then land in King County would have never been overrun and mined for coal to begin with. Rather, like Anderson writes, it’s necessary for Americans to return to a sense of “place,” the opposite of non-place. Places contain the “resonances of history, folklore, and environment; the qualities that make a location deep, layered, and idiosyncratic.”
Transforming a town back into a “place” requires excavating the stories that have long been suppressed by empires and corporations (which are modern empires). It’s not that American towns are lacking histories - even my seemingly ordinary suburb contains interesting and important stories if you know where to look. I think many Americans are fearful of uncovering local histories, not only because mass corporate expansion is thought to be an urban asset, but because it requires them to reckon with the havoc and horror that American towns have been built upon. Restoring “placeness” necessarily requires a lens of social justice. According to Anderson, it asks people to “excavate the meanings behind street names, to unearth figures lost to obscurity, and to rediscover architecture that has long since vanished.” It requires a reconnection to the very earth the town resides on and the people who have stewarded it throughout time.
As with many matters concerned with social justice, turning our homes back into places requires ethical, economic, and cultural reconsiderations, forcing us to interrogate how history is retold and where we choose to begin our timelines. It requires us to evaluate whether towns should be built for the physical, emotional, and social enrichment of human beings or for the bolstering of consumers. As Anderson and others concerned with urban planning have vocalized, making everywhere look the same, makes everywhere nowhere. Rather than returning to a version of the same town - stripped of any cultural nuance that makes you feel particularly tied to it - people should be able to return to places. Places that are in tune with the land on which they reside and honest about the histories and people who have passed across their land for generations. People should be able to return home.
For more on restoring “places,” I suggest checking out this article from Architectural Review, which goes into greater depth discussing “critical regionalism,” or the process of re-localizing architecture, as well as various case studies.
Great resource to learn about the indigenous history of our places:
https://native-land.ca/
This is inspiring me to look at my town’s history too because in the 18 years I lived there it changed dramatically demographically. When I was there it was largely white and a horse town, now it’s largely populated by various Asian backgrounds. I always wondered why it shifted but as a kid never thought into it too much. Now, off I go to do some digging!
Great piece, thank you for sharing.