Creating Constitutive Solidarity in Seattle: Praxis between the Duwamish Tribe and the Real Rent Duwamish Movement

ABSTRACT

Solidarity is valuable praxis in this unequal world. The Real Rent Duwamish movement stands in solidarity with the federally unrecognized Duwamish Tribe. Real Rent Duwamish asks people who live in the Seattle area to pay rent as a way to redistribute resources and recognize continuous colonization. As a white European who sought to stand in solidarity, I wanted to learn about such praxis. I approached it through the intertwined concepts of transformative recognition and redistribution. Through research with the Real Rent Duwamish, I identified the praxis pertaining to each concept and the interconnections between them. Analyzing secondary sources, I will show that redistribution without recognition does not hold a transformative potential. Building on the transformative recognition/redistribution, I will show how the Duwamish Tribe and the Real Rent Duwamish movement partake in constitutive solidarity. Solidarity praxis, thus, has the potential to be constitutive and foster long-term solidarity while allowing for collective and separate development of both groups and transfer of responsibilities without neglecting the underlying solidarity mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• praxis
• Duwamish
• Indigenous
• settler

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the Duwamish Tribe for allowing me to study the Real Rent Duwamish movements and for the RRD volunteer willingness to talk to me. I am especially grateful to Patrick Tefft who spent his time sharing his opinions with me. I am also grateful to assistant professor Jakub Havlíček for his advice during the research project and professor Richard Feinberg for reading and commenting on this article. This article would not have been possible without the thorough review of the editor Renee Galliher and the two anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable insight to strengthen the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Geolocation information

Seattle & King County, WA

Notes

1. Snelgrove et al. (2014) view the term “settler” describing somebody who is occupying land of Indigenous peoples, whether or not legally according to the current system. For this article, I use that definition.

2. The language surrounding Indigenous peoples is complicated and impactful (Peters & Mika, 2017, p. 1230). Following Kashyap (2019, p. 549), Smith (1999, pp. 6–7) and Thrush (2017, p. XV), I decided to use the term Indigenous with capital “I” to recognize both their claims to land and political struggle. I, however, also recognize the dangers of homogenization of the term (Peters & Mika, 2017, pp. 1229–30), which is why, when possible, I use the Duwamish people or the Duwamish Tribe. The word tribe itself has a colonial history and resulting legal standing (Peters & Mika, 2017, p. 1229). Patrick Tefft, an activist I interviewed, informed me that Duwamish people refer to “those who lived in this geographical area for millennia prior to colonization, continue to live here, AND the diaspora of people living in Washington State and beyond” (P. Tefft, e-mail communication, July 10, 2019), and using the Duwamish Tribe recognizes the Duwamish people as an organized entity that struggles to have their status federally recognized.

3. There are many ways to spell the name of Chief Si’ahl (such as Seattle or Sealth). I use the spelling presented at the official Duwamish Tribe website (https://www.duwamishtribe.org/).

4. In our interview, Patrick mentioned that he prefers the term “movement” over “group” or “campaign”. Group is too organized, and campaign indicates an end while a movement is fluid and long-term.

5. All Word pages are in APA format.

Additional information

Funding

The paper was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Czech Republic, and by the Palacky University, Faculty of Arts, grant project IGA_FF_2019_023 (Social Sciences 2019)