(calm music) - The Duwamish is responsible for generating the wealth of the city.

It fueled the growth of the city and the wealth of the city, but at the expense of the survival of this place and its people.

We did, in fact, build right into the river channels.

We also extracted all of the wealth of this land.

How we have treated this river reflects how much we value its people.

The Duwamish people have occupied this area for over 10,000 years.

Where we're sitting right now was one of their village sites.

And that is the only reason why this piece of waterfront.

And this little river bend behind us here still exist, because archeological remains of that village were found here.

- The communities here are older than the city of Seattle.

Georgetown had its city hall before the city of Seattle had a city hall.

And South Park was the breadbasket.

And that's what started to supply the Tight Place Market that we all know downtown now.

And these communities were established well before the straightening of the river.

- The lower five miles of the river was once about 12 miles of river when it was meandering.

Now it's straightened deep.

And we did that intentionally in order to create the industrial powerhouse to fuel the growth of the city of Seattle.

In straightening and deepening the river, we eliminated 98% of the natural habitat that was here.

We threatened the very salmon runs.

As the lands became occupied by industry, there was also a lot of uncontrolled industrial pollution that came into the Duwamish.

The nonindustrial areas of the city, particularly the wealthier areas, ringing a beautiful body of water, Lake Washington began to be worried about pollution there as well, because waste sewage was going into all of the water bodies in the area in the 1950s.

(dramatic music) So in order to clean up Lake Washington and restore pristine waters and beaches in the wealthier whiter parts of Seattle, that sewage and much of the stormwater over the years has also been rerouted to dump here into the Duwamish instead.

Today, there are public beaches, there are also now nice private shoreline beaches and their ability to both fish and swim there.

So the cleanup of Lake Washington, which was one of the greatest environmental success stories that is cited in the entire nation, was actually done at the expense of the Duwamish and the people who live here and were fishing here.

- There's a bag there if you need (woman speaking faintly) And we'll pick up the bag, we'll pick up all the trash.

So we only need two pickers.

When I first moved here, I wanted to live in a neighborhood where people would look like me.

I am from Ecuador and in my childhood, we got to be next to a lot of rivers, and the Amazon river west of me are one of my passions.

So I came here and then I learned this is the only river we have in Seattle.

- The Duwamish valley and Rainier valley, I think are the two most diverse zip codes in the entire nation.

And that includes both native people who have been here for millennia and the people who live along the river today, who were from all around the world.

But what they share is their marginalization.

- Usually, when you have what we call fenceline communities or communities that are affected by contamination, they move into it because the property is cheaper.

In this case, it was the industries that moved in.

And overtime bought more property, moved more people out.

And that environmental health situation down here deteriorated rapidly.

- We kind of have been the community that has been forgotten, because we are in the south, majority of people here are people of color.

- They are living side by side with industrial pollution, not just from the factories and the contamination of the river, but we also are in between two highways, we're under two flight paths, so air, water, and land contamination is something that everybody who lives here contends with.

People living in the Duwamish Valley have an eight year shorter life expectancy than the Seattle average.

They have a full 13 year shorter life expectancy than people living in the healthiest neighborhoods in Seattle, which of course, are much wealthier and also much wider.

- For so many years.

We have seen the lack of attention to our neighborhood and we think it's environmental racism.

We also talk about health.

We also talk about food.

We also talk about access to affordable housing.

So we could not see single layered in like, "Oh, we're gonna just be doing the cleanup."

We know that nobody's gonna be protecting us except for ourselves because it's impacting us directly.

- The Duwamish was listed as a Superfund site 20 years ago this year.

And we are not anticipating that this cleanup will be finished for another, at least 20 years.

We have been able to clean up half a dozen of the most highly polluted hotspots along the river.

And EPA estimates that in doing that, we've removed about half of the load of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, which are one of the most ubiquitous and toxic chemicals in here.

They're a cancer causing chemical.

So that's real progress, but it has not made the river safe or healthy for anybody yet.

So we still have a long way to go.

- There are communities that are fishing and some of them fish for recreation, but we have a very good amount of people that are there because subsistence.

There's still a lot of native fishing in there, they have the rights to do so.

- We don't wanna see one industry have to move because of the cleanup or anything else, because then, where are they gonna go?

They're gonna go someplace else and maybe make it dirty.

No, clean your act up here.

Be a good neighbor in that sense.

We're all connected here.

It's not us against them.

If we do a little bit of work, all of a sudden this place becomes a great place to come to and it's an asset.

We have a salmon run here, a wild salmon run in one of the most populated watersheds in the state of Washington.

It's not doing really well right now, but we're working on it.

And now we have Duwamish Valley Youth Corps, and these kids really start to get educated about environmental justice, about stormwater, about all kinds of different things.

And they start to learn about how important it is that they're doing this work and start to have little more pride in their community.

I was taught by my grandfather, the salmon and everything else that all related to me, that's part of my family.

Every year, we're doing something else that helps the river get better.

(calm music) (birds chirping) - [Narrator] This series is made possible by the generous support of the Port of Seattle.