Witnessing What?

Nostalgia, Memory, and the White Frame on Missoula's Levasseur Street

A response to ‘A home in witness’ published in The Pulp, May 5, 2026

Near the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork River in Missoula.

Witnessing What_.pdf

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A recent article in The Pulp about a cherished little blue house on Missoula's Levasseur Street stirred something familiar in me — the grief we feel when a beloved place is threatened by development. I've felt it myself, many times, in the 45 years since I first called this city home.

But the article also stirred something else: a question about whose history and memory we are actually grieving, and from inside what frame.

A little online research into the name Levasseur turned up some hard truths — about settler hostility toward Indigenous people in early Missoula, about blackface minstrelsy as civic entertainment, about whose stories get enshrined as local lore and whose get buried under city streets.

And it brought me to Agnes PokerJim Paul, a Salish elder born in 1910, whose family camped and fished along the Clark Fork half a mile from the little blue house — a site of deep-time Indigenous memory that is now, as far as I know, unmarked.

The attached essay (see .pdf) is an invitation — to those of us who love this place — to examine the frame through which we see it. Not to feel shame for our attachment, but to ask whose histories have been excluded from our nostalgia, and what it might mean to sit with the discomfort of a fuller understanding.

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