Seattleਸੀਐਟਲ

Seattle is a seaport city on Puget Sound in Washington state, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, and the big city of a metropolitan area where one of the oldest Punjabi communities on the West Coast has put down deep roots. The city itself counted 737,015 people in the 2020 census, but the Punjabi story here is a metro story, centred on the suburbs of Kent, Renton and Federal Way south of the city.

Where is Seattle, and why do Punjabis live there?

Seattle sits on a narrow strip of land between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, in King County, whose county seat it is. It was incorporated on 2 December 1869, grew on timber, shipping and the Klondike gold rush, and is known worldwide for the Space Needle, built for the 1962 world's fair. Its metropolitan area counted 4,018,762 people in the 2020 census.

Punjabis first came to this corner of America for the same work that drew them to British Columbia just across the border: lumber mills, railways and farms. After immigration reopened in 1965, families settled across the Seattle suburbs, and later arrivals added technology, transport and service work around one of the fastest growing metros in the United States. Seattle is one of the cities listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

The United States census does not ask about religion, so every Sikh figure for Seattle is an estimate and is labelled that way here. What is counted is Punjabi language and ancestry. In the 2017 to 2021 American Community Survey, the Seattle and Tacoma combined area counted 15,743 Punjabi Americans, 0.34 per cent of its population, and Washington state counted 18,410. Newer DataUSA figures, drawn from the ACS, count about 17,536 Punjabi speakers in the Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue metropolitan area.

The suburb pattern is the real story. In the same 2017 to 2021 ACS, the Kent area in south King County counted 4,236 Punjabi Americans, 3.35 per cent of its population, one of the largest Punjabi district totals in the country. Washington also holds an outsized share of Sikh America: about 6 per cent of all Sikh Americans live in Washington, the third largest state share after California and New York, on the population distribution compiled from the 2020 census.

Punjabis in the Pacific Northwest: an old, hard beginning

Sikh workers were in the Pacific Northwest within years of the first Punjabi arrivals in America. In the years just after 1900, hundreds of Sikhs worked in the lumber mills of Bellingham, north of Seattle. In 1907, in what is now known as the Bellingham riots, a mob of 400 to 500 men attacked the Sikhs' homes and drove the East Indian immigrants out of the town.

Exclusion laws then froze the community for decades. Only after those laws fell, and after family immigration reopened in 1965, could Punjabi families settle permanently in the Seattle area, this time in the suburbs rather than the mill towns, and build institutions of their own.

Gurdwaras in Renton, Federal Way and Bothell

The metro's best known gurdwara is the Gurdwara Singh Sabha of Washington in Renton, the suburb immediately south east of Seattle, which has served the community since 1993, was expanded in 1997, and describes itself as the largest congregation managed gurdwara in Washington. In Federal Way, further south, the Khalsa Gurmat Center has served families since 2006 as an independent Sikh school and community centre, with Gurmat and Gurmukhi teaching at its core. North of the city, the Sikh Centre of Seattle in Bothell serves families in the northern suburbs.

Kent, between Renton and Federal Way, is the suburb where the Punjabi presence is most concentrated, and public life there reflects it. In November 2017 Satwinder Kaur became the first Sikh elected to the Kent City Council. The same month, in a statewide race, Manka Dhingra of the Seattle suburbs became the first Sikh woman elected to a state legislature in the United States.

Seattle's Punjabi community today

Today the Seattle area community is a suburban one: gurdwaras in Renton, Federal Way and Bothell, Punjabi spoken in thousands of homes from Kent to Everett, and a history that runs from the Bellingham mill towns of 1907 to the city councils of King County. It is the Pacific Northwest counterpart to Richmond Hill in New York. For the full map, see Punjabi places in the United States.