Unsung San Juan Treasures

February-March 2004

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Russel Barsh

The remarkable, protected inner waters of the Pacific Northwest—home to the Salish people for thousands of years before the coming of Europeans. Map from Wave of the Future.

San Juan Islands are part of the archipelago in the Gulf of Georgia/Puget Sound area, formerly one place, one people. Map from Wave of the Future.

Visitors to the San Juan Islands are treated to a feast of fjords, islets, seabirds and marine mammals. Brochures, guidebooks, and parks extol the islands’ natural beauty, unspoiled vistas, and undiscovered hideaways. However, there is little mention of the fact that the islands are also rich in history, songs and stories, archaeological sites and other culturally significant places. Some of us who love the islands have begun to work together to make traveling the archipelago even more rewarding, through restoring its Native American legacy.

Speakers of the Northern Straits Salish language in Washington and BC have their historical roots in the San Juan Islands: the present-day Lummi, Saanich, Samish, Semiahmoo, Songhees, and Sooke. All peoples of the Salish Sea visited, traded, and fished with their Salish relatives in the islands. Adult salmon pass through the islands on their annual migrations to Puget Sound and the Fraser River, with a hungry, appreciative escort of orcas, porpoises, seals, sea lions and bald eagles. The archipelago has been an ecological and cultural crossroads for millennia—a place of great productivity, cultural interchange, human conflict and wealth.

Although there is archaeological and historical evidence for at least a dozen great cedar plank-house villages in the San Juans—including two houses that were still occupied when settlers arrived—not one of these sites is today marked with signs or displays. Indeed, a visitor to the islands’ many federal, state, and county parks and recreational areas would be hard pressed to find any acknowledgment whatsoever of the more than 7,000 years of Coast Salish history.

Viewpoints, picnic areas and campgrounds in most of the San Juan parks were built atop archaeological sites. Tens of thousands of boaters and kayakers visit state and county parks each summer, but few are aware that Coast Salish people walked, ate and played on the same beaches for three hundred generations before them. State policy has been to conceal the presence of archaeological sites to protect them from vandalism. Some Indian tribes and archaeologists agree. Others— and we Samish are among them—believe that an educated public will value the archaeological heritage of the Salish Sea, and is the best defense against looting and disrespect of Coast Salish treasures.

Archaeology is not the only unsung treasure of the islands. The land and sea are embedded with hundreds of traditional names and stories: every point and rock is part of the original Coast Salish storyscape of the San Juans, yet there is no map, guidebook, or roadside signage to inform the interested visitor. Who would know that Stuart Island, popular today with whale-watchers, was traditionally called qw∂ n∂ s, the whale? Songs were also an important part of Coast Salish geography: a songscape as complex as the mosaic of names and stories.

The landscape itself—if you know how to look at it—reveals the fingerprints of Coast Salish cultures. The first people completely transformed the visual aesthetics of the islands through the extensive clearing of forests and meadows with fire, and intensive cultivation of food plants such as camas ( Camassia quamash), tiger lilies, chocolate lilies, and onions. Nowadays, visitors associate the San Juan Islands with very dense young fir forests. We estimate that there was half as much forested land in 1800, and the clearings were oceans of blue, yellow and red flowers rather than fields of grass.

Visit the state park at Reid Harbor on Stuart Island today, and the south arm of the island is mainly unbroken fir forest, dissected by the few dirt roads that lead to residents’ homes. When members of the Northwest Boundary Commission climbed TipTop Hill in 1860, what they recorded was an extensive mosaic of cultivated camas fields—in spring, the island would have been a continuous carpet of lighter and darker blue blooms.

Stand on Chadwick Hill, a Lopez Island treasure administered by the Bureau of Land Management, and you look down over Samish reef-net fishing grounds and summer campsites that were in continuous use for thousands of years, up to the 1920s. Not only is there no historical signage—the Bureau won’t allow the Samish to erect any. Happily, most other federal and state land managers are welcoming our efforts to mark culturally and historically significant places, restore cultural landscapes, and make the Coast Salish history of the islands an integral part of the islands experience for visitors.

Echo Bay public picnic area on Sucia Island, where the archaeological remains of Coast Salish fish camps could once be seen. Most ‘improvements’ in federal, state and county parks were built at the expense of Coast Salish archaeological and cultural heritage.

Echo Bay exemplifies all that boaters and kayakers associate with the San Juan Islands: scenic and ‘unspoiled’. This was an important summer base camp and seal hunting stopover for Coast Salish fishermen for thousands of years.

Lime Kiln light (San Juan Island), ever popular with tourists and whale-watchers, looks over an important traditional Saanich reef-net fishing ground. Park interpretive signs are devoted to ‘natural’ marine ecosystems, and the remains of an early 20th Century cement factory.

English Camp (San Juan National Park), one of the most popular destinations in the islands, preserves a British fort built on the site of a native village, remains of which can still be seen throughout the park. The interpretive focus of the park is on the one decade of British military occupation; the story of millennia of Coast Salish occupation is not told. Although considerable archaeological work has been done at English Camp, no artifacts or interpretive exhibits can be seen there. Park Superintendent Peter Diderich is hard at work on a new plan for the park that would remedy this omission.

Pre-Contact indigenous cultures are only part of the untold story. Most of the early European settlers in the islands from the 1820s to 1870s married into Salish communities, as documented in works by islands historian Karen Lamb. ‘Pioneers’ and their Coast Salish in-laws lived and worked side-by-side in the islands for two generations, planting orchards, raising livestock and building Western style houses alongside their relatives’ traditional reef-net fisheries and camas gardens.

A relic of this period was the San Juan Islands’ reef-net fleet, which only became predominantly non-native in the 1920s. Summer visitors to Stuart Island can see one of the last reef-net gears in operation; once Saanich and Lummi, it has been in the Chevalier family since 1894. A well-preserved boat stands in front of the Shaw Island Library, but skeletons of the islands’ distinctively shaped reef-net boats can be found neglected and in a state of decay at Deer Harbor (Orcas Island), Squaw Bay (Shaw Island), and elsewhere. Most visitors to the islands learn nothing of the old reefnet fleet, or its role as a symbol of the time when settlers and Indians lived together as neighbors and kinfolk.

Other symbols of the islands’ unique cultural history have passed from sight even more completely. Until the 1920s, Fourth of July celebrations were not only popular with island residents, native and non-native, but attracted hundreds of Indians from mainland reservations. Orcas Island historian Fred Splitstone wrote in 1946 about old celebrations at Eastsound where white families served fried chicken to Indian visitors and “feasted on salmon baked by their Indian friends”. Indian canoe races were popular throughout the islands until the Depression, using very long, shallow, cedar shells resembling sculls built competitively by traditional Coast Salish carvers and decked in colorful team liveries. A few painted canoe paddles from the racing days can be seen at the Orcas Island Museum. The Samish racing canoe, Telegraph, rests in a shed outside the blockhouse in Coupeville (Whidbey Island), one of the many old towns where it once competed.

In the 1880s, the second generation of island settlers launched a campaign against “squaw men” and their “half-breed” families. East Sound pioneer Frances Tulloch wrote in his diary that all of the children in island schools were “half-breeds” when he arrived in the 1870s; he had “worked hard to get in the white families”. His first neighbors “were fairly honest and were hospitable in their homes,” Tulloch conceded, adding that “but for having intermingled with the Indians they might have been very good average people”.

As the population of the islands shifted from predominantly mixed, to assertively white at the end of the 19th Century, disdain for families of mixed ancestry grew. As late as the 1940s, popular books written by islanders described Indians as filthy, incoherent, and dangerous. Fortunately, nearly all of this literature has vanished from bookshelves, and if rediscovered would undoubtedly shock the conscience of contemporary residents. (One holdover is Betty McDonald’s 1946 autobiographical work The Egg and I; she lived near Port Townsend, once the service center for the San Juan Islands.) As recently as the 1950s, guidebooks for Puget Sound depicted local Indians wearing Sioux war bonnets and brandishing tomahawks! This negative image gradually gave way to an equally fictitious positive one: totem poles, which belong to the Pacific Coast, not to Puget Sound.

Despite efforts to dislodge them, many native families remained and prospered in the islands. Henry Cayou pioneered the fish-trap industry, while the Reeds, Browns, and Barlows did well in shipping and shipbuilding. Downplaying their Salish roots was a price of their success, however. As a result, the historical evidence of Coast Salish participation in the islands’ pioneer era has largely been forgotten.

No better metaphor for this loss of memory can be imagined than the skeletons of Coast Salish plank houses that survive, concealed behind the facades of some early barns. The native foundations remain, just below the surface of what to all outward appearances is an entirely ‘white’ island society.

Things are about to change, and summer 2003 marked a turning point in the story. Islanders offered to host the annual intertribal Canoe Journey, and Coast Salish exhibits were seen again at the San Juan County Fair. The town of Friday Harbor made the down payment on a spectacular Susan Point carved cedar gateway for the waterfront, and there are initiatives on Lopez Island and Orcas Island to erect traditional welcome posts and other public artworks commemorating the Coast Salish presence in the islands. For Coast Salish peoples, these story poles are invitations to come home and celebrate!

Efforts are also underway at the Lopez Island Historical Society and Orcas Island Historical Society to inventory collections, strengthen their presentations of Coast Salish cultures, and incorporate the ‘halfbreed’ story into their exhibits of the pioneer era. An interpretive kiosk is planned in connection with an ecosystem restoration project at Deer Harbor, site of a pre- Contact village and fish weir, and home to the Cayou family. More broadly, the Samish Indian Nation is collaborating with State Parks on a review of all of the state marine parks in the archipelago for opportunities for restoration, archaeological protection, and new interpretive signage and exhibits. This State-Tribal partnership aims at making state recreational sites more educational and enjoyable, while exposing visitors to Coast Salish history, landscape aesthetics, and ecological knowledge and values.

With the growing good will and energy that I see islanders devoting to the recognition of native cultures, it is only a matter of time before visitors to San Juan County will receive a special map and passport to the islands with the inscription “welcome to the crossroads of the Salish Sea and Coast Salish cultures!”

© Russel Barsh is director of the Center for the Study of Coast Salish Environments (Samish Indian Nation), with offices at Anacortes and field programs on Cypress, Lopez, Orcas and Waldron Islands. He lives on Samish Island above an old clam drying camp.

Editor’s Note: The Suquamish Tribe in Washington State is trying to get Old Man House State Park, a small waterfront park on their reservation and former home of Chief Seattle, returned from Washington State Parks. For more information, contact Leonard Forsman, Suquamish Tribe: 360- 394-8461 Office; 360-340-0986 Cell.