A Final Canoe Journey for Mary Ann
Community members mourn the passing of an Indigenous woman and prepare for her transport by canoe to Victoria.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Last evening about 6 o'clock a death occurred at one of the Indian camps along the beach near the coal bunkers. An Indian maiden, Mary Ann by name, passed peacefully into death in the presence of a large concourse of people. There was weeping and wailing among the brown and dusky people. As the child died she was held in the arms of the parents, and upon the body trinkets of all kinds were strewn. This morning the klootshmen were sitting by the foot busily engaged in sewing white muslin for a shroud in which to bury the deceased. She will be put in a canoe and transported by canoe to Victoria.
“There was weeping and wailing among the brown and dusky people.”
This brief, respectful account of a death in an Indigenous camp near the Seattle waterfront reminds us that before the modern city took its current shape, the shoreline was home to diverse Indigenous communities whose traditions—like water-borne funeral rites—were a visible part of daily city life.
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