Wesley "Wes" Uhlman was the mayor of Seattle from 1970-1978. He was presented with this hockey puck from when the Seattle Totems hosted the championship Soviet Union Red Army team on December 25, 1972. Sadly, the Totems lost 9-4 that night but went on to beat the Soviet team 8-4 in a rematch in 1974.

The appropriation of Indigenous names for professional sports teams has been popular since the 19th century, and the design of the Seattle Totems logo was based on the art from the tribes of Canada and Alaska. Visitors to Seattle started to incorrectly associate the northern totem poles with the city in the early twentieth century as a result of a displayed totem pole in Pioneer Square, which was stolen from a Tlingit village in Alaska by Seattle business leaders in 1899. Native artists from this region, notably Chief William Shelton (Tulalip) and Joseph Hillaire (Lummi), began carving Coast Salish style totem poles in the 1920s and 1930s to connect a demand for totem poles to the traditions of Indigenous peoples of the area.