Six narrators. The waterfront they knew — as Indigenous water, as contested labor, as a place where Black Seattle built power — told in their own words. No summaries. Follow the thread.
These oral histories were conducted through Wa Na Wari's Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute (SBSHI), 2021–2023, in partnership with Friends of Waterfront Park. We present their stories here to extend the reach of this community memory work. View the original exhibit, including audio recordings, at Friends of Waterfront Park.
Each narrator carries a piece of a history that Seattle has not always chosen to tell. Read, then follow the context links beneath each story to go deeper.
Marilyn Wandrey grew up on the Port Madison Indian Reservation — the land that has been Suquamish home since time immemorial — and still lives there today. She is a weaver, a poet, a teacher, and the captain of the Raven canoe. She has paddled Elliott Bay for nearly three decades.
The waterfront Marilyn knows is not the one on the tourism maps. When the Raven canoe and a container ship share the same water, the scale of what has changed becomes physical — felt in the body of everyone paddling. That encounter, the enormous ship bearing down, is a story about what the waterfront is for, and who it has always served first.
Marilyn has served on the University of Washington Elders Committee, the Suquamish Foundation board, and the Suquamish Museum board. She was the first Regional Administrator for Washington State Indian Policy and Support Services. Her relationship to this waterfront runs deeper than any of those titles.
The Suquamish word for the area around present-day Seattle is Dzidzilalich — "little crossing-over place" in Lushootseed. Coast Salish peoples have fished, traded, and traveled these waters for at least 12,000 years. The waterfront Marilyn paddles was never empty. It was always home.
Garry Owens was a Seattle-born organizer whose life tracks the arc of a movement. He was involved in the Franklin High School chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. He co-founded the University of Washington Black Student Union in 1968 — the same year the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party was established, the first chapter outside California. He was part of that too.
The Seattle Black Panther Party was founded in April 1968, weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when a group of young Seattle activists attended a conference in the Bay Area, met Bobby Seale, and came back to build. The chapter lasted ten years. It ran free breakfast programs for children, organized transportation for families visiting incarcerated loved ones, and operated a free medical clinic in the Central District.
The waterfront was never separate from this. The ILWU was one of the most racially progressive unions in the country. The Port was where Black workers had fought for and won economic power — the kind of power that made other organizing in Seattle possible. Garry Owens' story is part of that longer chain.
Kim Farrison won the Olympic regional trials for wrestling in 1980. He went on to serve in ILWU Local 19 and Local 52, eventually becoming the first Black Chief Supervisor on the West Coast in the clerk's division. He is active in his church, a proud grandparent, and continues union organizing work as a Business Agent.
The history Kim carries goes back further than his own career. Black workers first entered the Seattle waterfront in 1916, recruited as strikebreakers during a longshore strike — a fact that shaped the complicated, contested relationship between Black labor and the ILWU for generations. By the time the 1934 strike forged the modern union, Black and white longshoremen shared the victory. But equality on paper did not mean equality in dispatch, and the fight for real access — for the right to advance, not just to work — continued through Kim Farrison's entire career.
To be the first is to prove that the barrier was never about ability. Kim Farrison's story is that proof, held in one man's career on the Seattle docks.
Gabriel Prawl's path to the waterfront is a story of migration meeting labor. He came to the Pacific Northwest as a teenager and entered the ILWU as a casual worker — the lowest rung, day labor with no guarantee of tomorrow. He worked his way through Local 19, served on the Education Committee, and eventually became the first African American President of ILWU Local 52, where he fought for workers' rights and played a central role in union organizing.
The ILWU's founding principle — that an injury to one is an injury to all — was not just rhetoric for Prawl. It described a practice of solidarity that had to be built across race, language, and country of origin. The clerks' division that both Gabriel Prawl and Kim Farrison would shape was a space where that principle was tested and, through their careers, proven.
Gabriel Prawl's story is also about what it means to belong to a place that didn't originally claim you — and to claim it back through work, through organizing, through the quiet persistence of showing up for decades and doing the job.
LeRin Farrison is the daughter of Kim Farrison and the sister of Kim Farrison Jr. She grew up between Washington and California playing soccer competitively, scored the inaugural goal for the women's team at Seattle Pacific University, and then built a career on the waterfront — becoming the first Black woman longshore clerk and assistant chief on the West Coast.
What the Farrison family has built across three generations — Kim Farrison, LeRin Farrison, Kim Farrison Jr. — is not simply a record of firsts. It is evidence that access to a workplace, once fought for and won, can become something a family passes forward. And that each generation has to fight for it again, in new forms, against new resistance.
LeRin's achievement is her own — not derivative of her father's, but built on the same foundation: the belief that the work is worth doing and that a barrier, however long it has stood, is not permanent.
Kim Farrison Jr. is the son of Kim Farrison and the brother of LeRin. He grew up playing competitive football, born and raised between Seattle and Tacoma. He now works as a longshoreman on the Seattle waterfront — the same docks his grandfather Ted Farrison worked, the same union his father led to a historic first.
Four generations of the Farrison family on the Seattle waterfront is not a coincidence or a tradition in the sentimental sense. It is the result of specific, contested, hard-won access — access that began when Black workers first entered the ILWU in the wake of the 1916 strike, expanded through the 1934 organizing drive, and was widened with every first that Kim Farrison and LeRin Farrison achieved.
Kim Jr.'s presence on the docks today closes a circle. The waterfront his family helped shape is still the waterfront he reports to. That continuity — across a century of labor history, racial exclusion, and struggle — is exactly what an oral history project exists to hold.
These oral histories were created by Wa Na Wari's Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute in partnership with Friends of Waterfront Park. We present them here because oral history is most powerful when it moves — when it finds new audiences, opens new conversations, reaches communities that might not find their way to the original source.
South Park sits downstream from this history. The Duwamish runs through it. The labor organizing of the ILWU shaped the economy that shaped this neighborhood. The Suquamish paddled these waters long before Seattle had a name. These voices belong in our archive.
The context links throughout this exhibit point to HistoryLink.org, BlackPast.org, the University of Washington Civil Rights and Labor History Project, Wa Na Wari, the Suquamish Tribe, and Friends of Waterfront Park. Follow them. The story does not end here.