I
f you’re driving on I-5 past the Port of Tacoma at night, you’ll see that it makes up many of the city lights that are part of the Tacoma skyline. If you ever smell the “Tacoma Aroma,” you’re experiencing the environmental effects of the Port’s industrial activity. As students at UPS, we live and study on land taken from the Puyallup Tribe, who lived off of the shoreline and surrounding forests of the South Puget Sound. Industrial development inhibited Native uses of the land such as fishing and destroyed an important estuarine habitat. The Port was declared a Superfund site in the 1980s after incredibly toxic levels of pollutants were found in marine life and the environment. However, Indigenous-led resistance spurred many environmental policy changes in the Port, and the Puyallup Tribe is a leading voice in environmental politics today. The Northwest Detention Center, a private detention facility operated by ICE, is also located in the Port. The inhumane detaining of immigrants on polluted and stolen land highlights the complexity of the industrial development of the Port. Only a few miles
from our campus, the Port of Tacoma has undergone a dramatic environmental transformation as a result of settler colonialism and white supremacy. When we are given the opportunity to learn at Puget Sound, it is critical to understand the history of Tacoma and how it affects our community now. Pre-white settlement, the tide flats surrounding the confluence of the Puyallup River and Commencement Bay formed a habitat extremely important to marine and terrestrial life. As an estuary (where a freshwater source meets the ocean), the tide flats supported mergansers (a riparian indicator species), beavers (a keystone species), and prodigious runs of salmon (1). In the surrounding lands, old-growth forests were capable of supporting elk, an indicator species of forest health. The waterfront and
BELOW: Aerial photo of the Port of Tacoma, with the University of Puget Sound (upper mark) and Northwest Detention Center (lower mark) indicated. Photographed by Derrick Coetzee, July 2012
White Supremacy in the Port of Tacoma: An Environmental and Social Perspective BY ANNA DUPONT
UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND | 15
