White Supremacy in the Port of Tacoma: An Environmental and Social Perspective

BY ANNA DUPONT

If 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.

ABOVE: 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

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 surrounding lands were home to the Puyallup and Nisqually Tribes, who fished on the bay (1). White settlements such as Fort Nisqually were constructed in the early 1800s, and industrial development of the tide flats began when a sawmill was constructed on Commencement Bay in the 1850s (1). At the end of 1854, Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens negotiated the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek with local tribes including the Puyallup and Nisqually (2). This treaty ceded significant amounts of Native lands and rights to the government, but did guarantee their right to fish on their ancestral lands (3). Through further legislative manipulation, the US government forcibly removed Indians from prime real estate on the bay, which was then extensively dredged and remodeled for the needs of international maritime trade. The effects of pollution and physical disturbance to the estuary began to affect the health of wildlife, and logging eradicated the old-growth stands around the tide flats.

ABOVE: Birdseye view of Tacoma, 1892.

Although the Puyallup tribe suffered from the loss of land sovereignty, they continued to advocate for the protection of the remaining tide flats. In the 20th century, fish-ins were a form of Native resistance to being legally banned from fishing on their usual lands. Puyallup, Nisqually, and Muckleshoot Tribe members were arrested and beaten by wardens, but continued to practice their right to fish on the bay. After decades of protest, they reaffirmed their right to fish in the 1974 Boldt Decision, in which Judge Boldt ruled that the tribes had a right to fishing grounds promised to them in the Treaty of Medicine Creek (1). The Puyallup Tribe won other suits against the state and federal governments for the breaching of treaties and demanded restoration efforts on the tide flats, which were unbelievably polluted by the 1970s, and used settlement funds to create social programs for their tribe (1). Commencement Bay was declared an EPA Superfund site in 1981 due to severe industrial pollution, including arsenic and lead, PCBs, and a benzene plume (1). While cleanup efforts proved somewhat effective, there are still above-average levels of heavy metal pollution in the South Puget Sound, highly concentrated in the North End of Tacoma and south Vashon Island. In recent years, the Puyallup Tribe has continued to lead the way for environmental justice in the Port of Tacoma, including working with the #NoLNG253 movement to protest the construction of a Liquefied Natural Gas complex on Commencement Bay.

The Northwest Detention Center opened in 2004 in the Port of Tacoma under US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but is privately contracted to the GEO Group. There is a long history of human rights violations at the facility, where detainees are held indefinitely in terrible conditions. From an environmental justice perspective, detainees are also living on land so polluted it is not residentially zoned (3). When correctional facilities are located near Superfund or other polluted sites, they disproportionately harm the health of queer people and people of color, who are most targeted by the criminal justice system (4).The tide flats in the Port are also at significantly higher flood risk than the rest of Tacoma in the case of an earthquake (5). While Washington State has since passed legislation preventing new correctional and detention facilities from being constructed in the Port, they still refuse to actually shut down the detention center. The abolitionist collective La Resistencia has organized to demand a complete shutdown of the NWDC and the release of all detainees. They lead extremely important work and are one of many local initiatives to improve the future of the Port of Tacoma. Despite its violent history of white supremacist pollution, La Resistencia, the Puyallup Tribe, and other types of social collectives are bringing justice to the development of the Port of Tacoma.

Resources to learn more & get involved.