A familiar saga involving a "Notice of Proposed Land Use Action" sign had a happy ending in Tukwila last month.

After a three-year fundraising effort, the eight-acre property known as Grandmother's Hill, part of the historic Poverty Hill neighborhood, was acquired by the Cascade Land Conservancy for just under $1 million. The property is associated with Southern Puget Sound Salish oral tradition, and has been transferred to the Tukwila Parks and Recreation Department for management as that city's first cultural preserve.

How this property was saved from industrial development is a success story about grassroots activism, and common ground between land conservation and historic preservation efforts.

Neighbors Organize to Fight Demolition Proposal

Three years ago, residents of Tukwila's Allentown, Duwamish, and Poverty Hill neighborhoods felt a little bit like they were under siege. Sound Transit was considering proposed routes through the Duwamish Valley, the Environmental Protection Agency was preparing to list the Duwamish Waterway as a Superfund site. Several historic properties in the area had recently been sacrificed to various ideas of "progress."

But when neighbor Georgina Kerr found out that the owners of a large undeveloped parcel of land across the river from her house wanted to expand their trucking and storage operation by removing hundreds of tons of bedrock, she decided to get involved. Several concerned neighbors formed a "Friends of the Hill" group and started working to find a way to preserve the site.

"You should have seen the neighbors' faces when we told them about the plan to dynamite the Hill," explains Georgina. "There was absolutely no question that we had to do all we could to preserve it."

The Friends group contacted the City of Tukwila, the King County Landmarks Commission, the Duwamish and Muckleshoot Tribes, and anyone who would listen to their concerns. They got elected officials and journalists to visit the site, and the Cascade Land Conservancy agreed to take on the project of raising funds to purchase the property, which is on the Duwamish River just off of East Marginal Way at S 115th Street.

The Conservancy is probably best know for its work to preserve wilderness areas in the Puget Sound region, but the organization also works with community groups to conserve important parcels of land in densely populated areas.

Still, the Grandmother's Hill project represents a new direction for the Conservancy, in protecting culturally significant places. Conservancy Executive Director Gene Duvernoy explains, "Protecting urban open spaces is part of our mission, and this property had the added benefit of preserving a connection with our region's Native cultures."

Support for the acquisition of the Grandmother's Hill property came from a diverse range of funding sources, including the King County Conservation Futures, the Washington State Interagency Fund, the King County Landmarks Commission, the King County Cultural Development Authority, Boeing, SAFECO, and the Muckleshoot Charity Fund. Students at nearby Foster High School even joined the effort, by collaborating with artists from the Seattle Repertory Theater to write and perform an original play about the history of the Hill, and donate proceeds from ticket sales toward the site's preservation.

In addition to the site's association with Native American oral traditions, the property also represents a long-term opportunity for environmental restoration, as it includes 600 feet of Duwamish River shoreline. This part of the river is known as the "salt wedge," the uppermost tidal area on the river, where salt water and fresh water merge. The area is an important resting area for salmon as they migrate upstream, and includes many traditional fishing sites that are still used by tribal fishermen.

Association with Southern Puget Sound Salish Oral Tradition

Grandmother's Hill is part of a constellation of sites in the Duwamish River Valley that are associated with traditional stories told by Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and other Southern Puget Sound Salish people. The Hill is just a few hundred yards upriver from a well-known Native American cultural site called North Wind's Fish Weir, which has been determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.

The Fish Weir, Grandmother's Hill, and several other places along the middle stretch of the Duwamish River figure prominently in a series of stories from Southern Puget Sound Salish oral tradition.

These stories, originally told in the Lushootseed language, recount a battle between the North Wind and South or Chinook Wind for control over the Duwamish Valley and Puget Sound country. Anthropologist Arthur Ballard recorded several different versions of the stories told by Duwamish and Muckleshoot Indian elders in the 1920s, and published them in a book called The Mythology of Southern Puget Sound.

The characters of these stories, including South Wind's Grandmother, live on a series of hills that rise above the Duwamish River Valley.

Several of these hills have been extensively altered or destroyed by development, and Grandmother's Hill is one of the few relatively intact landscape features left in the Valley that provides a link to the mythological landscape. Native people's extensive knowledge of that landscape has also been preserved in a series of Lushootseed place names for village sites, myth sites, fishing sites, and many other important places. Names of places in the Duwamish River valley were documented by Indian elders talking to anthropologist T. T. Waterman in the 1920s, and they are included in the recent publication Puget Sound Geography by Vi Hilbert, Zalmai Zahir and Jay Miller.

Interpreting Cultural and Environmental History

In addition to its cultural significance, Grandmother's Hill is interesting for a variety reasons related to geological and environmental history. The Hill is part of the Tukwila Formation, an unusual outcropping of ancient bedrock which has been documented by geologist and paleoecologist Elizabeth Nesbitt of the Burke Museum. Grandmother's Hill contains marine fossil deposits that are over 40 million years old.

The Hill plays a starring if anomalous role in more recent environmental history as well. As glaciers scoured away the surrounding landscape during the last ice age 15,000 years ago, Grandmother's Hill and the other extant bedrock outcroppings remained intact. As the ice melted and sea level rose, what is now the Duwamish Valley became an embayment of Puget Sound, and the Hill one was of several small islands in the salt water bay.

After an eruption of Mount Rainier approximately 6,000 years ago, sediments flooded the Green River/Duwamish River and rapidly pushed the river's delta to the north, creating the contemporary landscape. It is likely that native plant populations that survived on Grandmother's Hill and other nearby hills when they were islands represent remnant populations that colonized the surrounding landscape as it emerged from salt water.

On a recent visit to Grandmother's Hill, members of the Muckleshoot Cultural Committee noted the presence of flowering red currant, licorice fern, wild strawberries, and other native plants that were used by Indian people for traditional foods or medicines. In addition, Grandmother's Hill has a healthy population of young madrona trees, another unusual natural resource in the region.

Grandmother's Hill represents a unique opportunity to develop educational and interpretive programs that integrate environmental and cultural history together, in a study of the Duwamish Valley landscape that is visible from the site. The view from the top of the Hill extends from Mount Rainier in the south to Elliott Bay and the Seattle skyline in the north, taking in a complex cultural landscape that has been greatly transformed by industrial development, but that still retains many of the features that make it a unique place.

Educational and interpretive materials to be developed for the site will include information about the Duwamish Valley's geology and ecology. Natural history can be woven together with the region's cultural history, which includes Native American archaeological resources dating back several thousand years, and recent historical sites associated with King County's first non-Native settlement in the region just over 150 years ago. Traditional Native American stories such as those about the War of the Winds represent a unique window into our region's cultural heritage.

Public Access: A Balance of Development and Stewardship

To facilitate public access to the site, a new trail system and parking area will be created over the next two years, after volunteer crews work to remove invasive plants. The Cascade Land Conservancy, which will retain a permanent stewardship easement on the property, will work with the City of Tukwila to plan and raise funds for site development and for cultural and natural history interpretation, in consultation with the Muckleshoot Tribe and the Duwamish Tribe. Discussions will also be ongoing with the Tribes regarding the potential nomination of the Duwamish River Valley to the National Register of Historic Places as a cultural landscape.

A public event will be held at the site later in the spring to celebrate the preservation of Grandmother's Hill as a unique cultural and natural treasure for the region. More information about the dedication event will be posted on the Cascade Land Conservancy's web site.

View last month's Preservation & Environment article

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