Feature
Practicing his culture
A police officer shot and killed a seventh-generation carver
John T. Williams, with his brother, Rick, right Photo courtesy Williams family
Rick Williams carves a totem at the Seattle intersection of Boren Avenue and Howell Street where a Seattle police officer shot and killed his brother John on Aug. 30 after the officer saw him carrying a legal carving knife and wood. "I'm the older one," Williams says. "Let them come and shoot me."
Rick and Eric Williams sit at the end of a long row of wooden benches that line the Pike Place Market’s Victor Steinbrueck Park in Seattle. Pocket knife in one hand, small pieces of wood in the other, their heads are bowed in concentration as they slowly cut and etch the details of ravens, eagles and other mythic animals.
They will sell the finished totems – done in Dididaht tribal designs passed down for generations – to people passing by. It’s how they’ve always made their living and what their brother, John T. Williams, was doing at the corner of Boren Avenue and Howell Street in downtown Seattle on Aug. 30 when a Seattle police officer got out of his car and shot him four times after he failed to obey commands to drop his pocket knife.
It’s unlikely that Willliams, 50, ever heard the commands, Rick says, much less lunged at the officer with his pocket knife, as police first claimed. He was deaf in one ear, Rick says, walked with a limp, and his eyesight was poor – details that came out last week at a news conference with tribal leaders and civil rights activists who called the shooting a travesty and demanded a transparent investigation and review of the Seattle Police Department’s use of lethal force.
One after another, people who knew John T. Williams and those who didn’t come up to the brothers to express their condolences. That includes Seattle police officers, who have been calling Rick Williams away from the bench to express their sympathy as well – men who work for a department that first described John Williams to the media as a good-for-nothing and homeless “Mr. Trouble” who was “well known” to police.
To Rick, it’s an outrage. His brother was a funny, gentle soul, he says, who gave his time and money to anyone who asked, even though he had nothing. The middle name on his birth certificate was, in fact, “Trouble,” longtime friend Susanne Chambers says, but that was a joke of his parents. John was never violent and the few run-ins he had with the law over the years never involved violence, recklessness or even resisting arrest, she says. Mostly they involved detox.
The Seattle police, on the other hand, have a long record of beating up Native Americans and minorities, tribal and community leaders said Friday at a news conference held at the Chief Seattle Club, a service center where John was a much-loved member. “He was always thinking of other people,” says friend Trina Thornton. “He was never thinking of himself.”
The police officer who shot his brother didn’t see that, Rick says. He only saw a stereotype of a drunk Indian. Now Seattle officers are calling him aside at the Market and saying they’re sorry, that they had seen his brother “whittling” for years. “Pretty words,” says Rick, who says using the word whittling instead of carving is demeaning. “I stand and stare and watch, never saying what I want, because [officers] said [to me] today you’re striking out in anger.
“So you’re judging us still?” he asks. “What makes you better? Because you own a home and have a credit card and you’re unhappy? You have everything. We have what we make out here.
“I want someone to tell the true story of John T.,” Rick says. “I want [people] to see the big picture the way it was for us, the reality of the world we’re in.”
The reality is that John T. Williams never had a chance at a middle-class American life. He came from a family of 12 brothers and sisters whose parents drank and beat them, scattering the children between the streets and foster care at an early age.
Their father, Ray, taught them all to carve in the tradition of their tribe, the Dididaht of Vancouver Island, the family’s original home before coming to Seattle. The elder Williams sold his work to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and other stores, as John would later, but family members spent much of their early years piled in motel rooms, Rick says, that their father’s or, later, their own carvings might buy them for a few days or a few weeks at the old Atwood Hotel, the Hillside, the Seal or the Thunderbird.
John started carving when he was 6, was drinking at 7 and had only finished the second grade when his father moved back to Canada for a time. Two older brothers, Sam and Dave, followed, leaving Rick and John to fend for themselves as children on the streets of Seattle. Each later established a spot at which to carve and sell their totems – John at the Pike Place Market or on the waterfront and Rick at the Seattle Center, where he carved for 28 years before later moving to Concrete, Wash.
Only three brothers remain now, and only Rick and Eric still carve. Sam died in a hotel room, Rick says. Dave froze to death on a park bench in Vancouver, B.C., with $5,000 in tribal money in his pocket because he had no identification and couldn’t get a motel room. The youngest brother, Nathan, had been drinking when he suffered a heart attack and fell over a wall at the Pike Place Market.
Of the 12, John had been the most talented carver, the brothers and friends say, and a storyteller who always had a tale ready to cheer up a friend. Unlike other carvers, he didn’t need to sketch a design on a piece of wood before starting to cut it with his pocket knife. “He never needed a pencil to draw,” Eric says. “He could just see it.”
“[He could] take a piece of nothing, a piece of log or a two-by-two like you use for railings on a deck [and] flip it one way and carve and flip it another way and carve and in two hours he’d have three different characters on it, all cut through,” Chambers says.
The trouble is that a Native American trying to sell a carving on the street can’t get anywhere near its real worth. “I ask them for $200 and they give me $150 – just so long as I eat,” Rick says – and he’s from a family of known carvers. Years ago, says sister Barbara, who drove down from Canada with other family members on Friday, she can remember John and her father making and selling $5,000 worth of totems each to stores in one day.
But sometime in the ‘90s, Barbara says, a relative in Alaska discovered mass-produced versions of her father’s totems in a store in Alaska. It turned out that a major Indian arts and crafts distributor that she, her father and John had been selling their work to had taken molds of the work and were selling copies.
It’s a common problem, says Adam John, an Alaskan native carver and member of the Chief Seattle Club, that has left native artists like the Williams brothers competing with goods made for pennies in China. John saw no reason to do anything more than make exactly the number of totems he needed to buy what he or his friends might want in a day, Barbara says, which is how the seventh-generation carver came, in the end, to be selling his work for beer and cigarettes.
He had tried many times to quit drinking, says Chambers, who took John in years ago after seeing him carving on the sidewalk in a snowfall. He stayed with her five months and quit drinking, but it didn’t last. Over the years, Chambers says, there were many other attempts, but the bouts of sobriety became fewer and farther between.
That doesn’t mean he was homeless, she says. He lived at 1811 Eastlake, a residential facility for alcoholics that accepted him back even after he exposed himself to staff and threatened to pee on a counter if he couldn’t have more beer. “People do silly things when they’re drunk,” Chambers says. Alcoholism is an addiction, she says, but one that starts for psychological reasons – and John had more than his share.
“I used to get drunk to forget what I’d seen, the way [the police] talk to us, the way they judge us because I’m a long-haired Indian and I’m ‘making a mess on the streets’ [by carving],” says Rick, who is now nine years sober. “Other carvers — I could say names from Alaska to Canada – got into other drugs that killed them or they’re in prison forever. And no one cares …”
But, this time, Rick says, it’s going to be different. “They took something precious from Seattle,” he says of his brother. Rick has a lawyer now and plans to make sure it doesn’t happen again. “My people and I are going to stand up,” he says. “We’re going to make a difference and fight back.”
Comments
i’m sorry for your loss i’m origianily from seattle but in ohio visiting when i saw this on facebook my preys are with your trib and i wish ya to get the leagal help ya desearve i’m half apachee and beleave the police of seattle take things way to far i was homeless in seattle for 7 years i got told do this don’t do that so i understand your pain
I am so sorry about all of this. Our whole family was shocked and saddened. We worry about other people meeting the same fate. We do not believe anything that was said about your brother. We threw up a flag immediately.
So many of our people (Native and First Nations) feel the wrath that has come our way because those who came from Europe wanted our lands.
My own family was touched by alcholism and dysfunction. Several of the 8 children my mother and father had made it away from that, several did not and sadly will never make it out.
I am now a teacher, hoping that with the pain that has encompassed my life, I can show a less painful path for our children away from the things that hold our people down and cause others to look at us with disgust in their eyes.
We are capable, we are loving and we are worthy. We just have to make sure our children see this at a young age and keep showing them until they take the reigns and do it for the young in their lives.
Until then, Mr. Williams story needs to be told. We need to strengthen ourselves against the treatment that he got and tell everyone that we will not take it anymore.
Peace to you all,
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity~Horace Mann
The title/subtitle of this article seems to apply to both John T, the carver, as well as Ian Burk, the police officer who shot him. I’m curious to see which culture gets defended by whom among the people of Seattle.
for the family that lost their brother due to the brutality of the officer that shot Mr. Williams my heart goes out to the family we as Indian people are really stereotyped as nothing but drunks and drug addicts,but you don’t see anything about the white people or any other nationality in the news being arrested for public drunkiness or raising cane this goes to show you where we stand I will keep praying for you and your famly and that things will get better for all of us keep strong
John T. Williams’ death is a tragedy. Part of the tragedy is knowing that the Dididaht culture is being demeaned by the Seatlle Police Department to the point where shooting and murdering a Street Person (John T. Williams) for what appears to be frustration on the shooter’s part, almost appears to be condoned by Seattle Police Department. The police officer’s frustration appears to be that he resented John T. Williams to the point that he took Mr. Williams’ life. Mr. Williams’ art is exactly that: art. His art is just as much art as the late Arthur Thompson’s art was, both rooted in their Dididaht culture. Ver sad.
i would have help protest but i was thrown in jail for demanding money already earned from 2 different fishing companies…too bad those who make money “solving homeless problems” couldnt help john t williams get a house or a bettor food supply than the local convenience stores offering malt liqour for less than water
My heart and prayers are with you. I was on a Minority Task Force in Bellingham back in the1980’s to try and hold the police there accountable, and make policies to change the treatment of Native people and people of color. I know things can be made better and the police held accountable but only if there is continued community pressure for CHANGE!. Any real change also has to do with the leadership in the PD because thats where the street cops take their lead. I’m in my late 50’s now, and learned long ago this battle never ends. We have to keep fighting and standing our ground and teaching our young people to carry it forward. My heart goes out to John’s family, and all the Native people of Seattle…John shouldn’t have died this way! This officer needs to lose his gun and face what he’s done, and not be allowed to feel he was jusitified. Just hearing he shot John four times tells me this was a very angry cop and that he will be a continued menace to the lives of others if he stays in uniform. I hope some tough Native lawyers step forward and help in this situation.
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