Kikisoblu ( She/Her Per Current Historical Records)

By Omen Jackson (They/Them)

Do you know the land you occupy?  You may have heard of Kikisoblu, or more likely, Princess Angeline; however, that was not her real name. Kikisoblu, the daughter of Chief Siʔaɬ (Seattle), was a Duwamish woman born in the early 1800s in what is now called Seattle, Washington. Her Lushootseed name was changed to Princess Angeline by a white colonizer who insisted she was “too pretty” to carry a Native name. Despite framing the name change as a compliment, name changing was actively used as a central tactic of the colonial project and was used often and widely on humans and landmasses. And yet, despite everything that was done to remove her and her people, Kikisoblu remained.

In 1855, the U.S. government signed the Point Elliott Treaty, which forcibly removed the Duwamish people from their ancestral land. But Kikisoblu refused to leave. While many members of her community were forced onto reservations, she stayed. She lived in a modest shack on the Seattle waterfront, near today’s Pike Place Market. She made a living washing colonizers’ laundry and selling handwoven baskets, doing what she could to survive in a city built on stolen land. Her life was hard, and given the circumstances, her survival in itself was an act of fierce resistance in the face of continuous indigenous genocide.

In previous tellings of Kikisoblu’s story, colonialist historians describe her as a pitiful figure, romanticize her poverty, and turn her into a symbol of a “vanishing” people. But this narrative comforts colonialist guilt and is not accurate. Kikisoblu made a strategic choice to remain in her homeland, even when it meant working within a hostile colonial system. She was frequently photographed, turned into postcards, and commodified by white colonizers and tourists. At one point, she was even asked to join a traveling freak show. She refused.

Reframing and retelling her life through an Indigenous lens makes it clear that her continued presence was not a symbol of defeat; it was a statement of sovereignty. She refused to be removed.

Today, Kikisoblu’s image is still used in disrespectful ways, on postcards, tourist displays, and local knick-knacks. But when we look beyond the colonial lens, what we see is a woman who challenged the very foundation of settler Seattle with every day that she remained on her land. She did not go quietly. She never left.

Kikisoblu’s story reminds us that resistance doesn’t always look like war paint or battles. Sometimes, resistance looks like doing laundry, selling baskets, saying no, and simply staying put. She resisted with her body, with her choices, and with her refusal to disappear. She stayed on her land until the day she died in May 1896. Her life forces us to ask: whose stories get told, and why?