A Resting Place

The new entrance to Tacoma’s most haunting and hallowed spot offers a window on a lost world and a critique of our civic soul.

Created by Puyallup tribe member Shaun Peterson, the cemetery’s eagle archway features a twenty-two-foot wingspan.

The most eloquent narrative of a society’s evolution is the most silent: its cemeteries. Roslyn, Washington, population 1,017, has about twenty-five small ethnic graveyards within its main cemetery – a microcosm of the immigrant experience. Pop culture devotees flock to Bruce Lee’s grave at Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetery and Jimi Hendrix’s at Renton’s Greenwood Memorial Park. Their historical importance, however, is dwarfed by that of a lesser-known Tacoma landmark, one of the most historically significant burial sites in the state: the Cemetery of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians.

The graveyard nestles on a bosky hillside overlooking downtown Tacoma, at 2002 East 28th Street. Its most revered occupant is Chief Leschi of the Nisqually tribe, hanged at Fort Steilacoom in 1858 for killing a militiaman during warfare. Represented by lawyer H. R. Crosby, Bing Crosby’s grandfather, Leschi pleaded innocent. Many agreed, whites and Native Americans alike, and his first jury was deadlocked. He was convicted in a second trial, in which the court suppressed potentially exonerating evidence. In 2004, the Washington State Senate formally exonerated him and proclaimed him “a great and noble man.” 

Other tribal leaders repose under the cemetery’s towering evergreens: Duwamish chief Charlie Satiacum, Puyallup chief Squatahan, prominent businessman Henry Sicade. Dotting the hillside, scores of weathered tombstones bear anglicized names, the record of a time when government-run schools stripped Native Americans of their traditions, their languages and their very identities. 

The cemetery changed Native deaths as well as lives. The indigenous Puyallup once practiced sky burials, in which the deceased was swathed in ceremonial robes, placed in a covered canoe, then suspended high up between two trees. “The higher in the tree, the more important the status,” says Seattle anthropologist and Lenape (Delaware) clan member Jay Miller. Over time, gravity would draw the vessel earthward, where a ground burial would be performed.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, many tubercular Alaska Natives journeyed to the Cushman Indian Hospital next to the cemetery, where the Emerald Queen Casino stands today. Many who perished there were laid in unmarked graves, or with headstones marked only “At Rest.” The tribe is seeking to compile death certificates from incomplete federal archives. The hospital was torn down in 2003. 

For years, the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery had no caretaker. It was overgrown, and vandals came to drink and deface markers. Today, it is bordered by a handsome, high stone wall, with old-fashioned lampposts that suffuse the grounds with a soft glow for the first time in memory. Artist Shaun Peterson, a member of the Puyallup tribe, created the magnificent eagle archway that overshadows the entrance with a twenty-two-foot wingspan. The newly clipped grounds are landscaped in the naturalistic manner of a nineteenth-century American cemetery, evoking the melancholy ode to death, art and nature common to the graveyards of that time. A monument-lined pathway winds up a green hill to a vista of snowy Mt. Rainier. Tribal members continue to be buried here, and recent graves are decorated with the offerings of the living: carvings of salmon and eagles, American flags, a child’s toy among angels. On a sunlit day, the place exudes peacefulness and solitude. The cemetery is one of the great historical jewels of Tacoma, and one of its most restful spots.

And yet, the very idea of an “Indian cemetery” is a contradiction in terms. “The cemetery is a Western notion,” says local historian Michael Sullivan, “a Western affectation.” The ancestral graveyard had a more unbridled quality. “A square cemetery has edges and right angles,” he explains, whereas Native burial grounds would have had no enclosure wall. The woodland would be open, the vegetation unfettered. “There are no straight lines in nature.” Miller adds that manicured landscapes are not in the Native tradition, because the resultant open spaces would be the spiritual equivalent of “wishing for more graves.” 

Peterson’s cemetery artwork gracefully embraces future and past. “Someday I will be there among my people,” he says. “Should my son or his children decide to become artists, I want to leave these specific pieces as an example of my work.”

In past times, says Sullivan, Commencement Bay was considered “a harbor of phantoms. It has always had an aura of a place of retreat.” It was a locus of contemplation. Secret burial locations have been discovered around the bay, including along Ruston – in fact, wherever rivers flow into the Sound.

Mystery surrounds us, if only we knew how to look. •