Suquamish News
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A monthly publication of the Suquamish Tribe
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Volume 13 March 2013 Suquamish History Timeline Now On Display at Suquamish Museum
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From time immemorial to present day, new display weaves the intricate story of the people of the clear salt water by April Leigh
If you were standing in the middle of the Port Madison Indian Reservation 18-thousand years ago, you would not be standing on dry land, or even in the chilly waters of the Puget Sound. Chances are you would be standing upon a monumental glacier, one that covered the entire region before melting away into the ocean three thousand years later. This is where the new timeline in the Suquamish Museum begins, and where Historic Preservation Officer Dennis Lewarch and Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman began their historical lecture the first day the timeline officially opened to the public, Saturday, February 23. It takes Lewarch less than five minutes to span another two thousand years of changing shorelines and rising waters to the first evidence of people in the Northwest- a Clovis projectile roughly 13-thousand years old. According to Lewarch and other archeologists, such evidence is extremely difficult to find. The oldest shell midden in the Central Puget Sound dates back just five thousand years and is located at West Point, in Seattle. Projectile points found at Old Man House also date back to the same era. “Due to the changing nature of the tides, most of the shell middens in the Puget
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The new timeline spans the length of the main exhibit north wall, depticting Suquamish history from the recession of the glaciers in Puget Sound to the re-dedication of Chief Seattle’s gravesite in 2010.
Sound date only fifteen-hundred years ago, or even more recent,” said Lewarch. Changing tides are a constant in the thousands of years covered on the timeline- and in the lecture. The unending shifting of the shoreline made it difficult for modern archeologists to unearth the posts of Old Man House, the largest winter house in Central Puget Sound razed by Federal Agents just 150 years ago. Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, left, and Tribal When viewed from Historic Preservation Officer Dennis Lewarch, not pictured, spoke an archeological to a packed crowd at the Suqumaish Museum on Saturday, Feb. perspective across 23. More than 80 visitors turned out for the lecture, prompting a thousands of years, second session to accomodate everyone.
the roughly 220 year timeframe that has spanned since Suquamish’s first contact with Europeans seems less than significant. However, it is precisely this timeframe that is depicted along the largest
“Changing tides are a constant in the thousands of years covered on the timeline...” expanse of the timeline wall. Hundreds of years between datelines turn into decades beginning with first contact, the
Treaty of Point Elliot and the dozens of failed Federal Indian Policies that followed, showing the fundamental impact of European colonization on the Suquamish way of life. The last several feet of the timeline, beginning with self-determination and ending in the current cultural resurgence that continues to thrive on the Port Madison Indian Reservation today, detail the contemporary history of the Suquamish including the beginnings of Tribal Journeys, the creation of several culturally significant areas in Suquamish and the museum’s opening. The timeline is the final addition to the permanent exhibit, Ancient Shores, Changing Tides at the Suquamish Museum. It is open to the public 10a.m. to 5p.m. daily. To find out more about the Suquamish Museum visit them online at www.suquamishmuseum.org
Suquamish Tribe Has Long Ancestral Presence in Port Gamble Bay by Leonard Forsman
Recent articles appearing in Crosscut, High Country News and other media outlets have ignored, or at the least discounted, the antiquity of the Suquamish Tribe’s presence in Port Gamble Bay. It is true that the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe (PGST) has maintained a permanent settlement on the east side of the Bay dating from 1854 and that this settlement became their reservation in 1938. PGST, however, misleads the public with their unsupported claim of aboriginal inhabitation of the Port Gamble area. This new perspective incorrectly neglects the Suquamish Tribe’s ancient territorial presence in and around Port Gamble Bay dating from time immemorial.
ment-to-government relationships with federal, state and local agencies. Our tribal communities have always had a mutual respect for each other. We collaborate politically, culturally and socially through intermarriage, athletics and our respective cultural and economic resurgences.
This public denial of Suquamish’s use and occupancy of Port Gamble Bay is perplexing to us, especially since we acknowledge that ancestors of PGST used Port Gamble Bay and the Northern Hood Canal seasonally in pre-Treaty times. PGST’s historic roots in the area start with their gradual migration from present-day Dungeness, Sequim and Port AnFor decades the PGST and Suquamish geles to work at the Port Gamble Mill on have worked together to protect the Point Julia after Pope and Talbot finished bay through our respective govern- building it in 1854. Suquamish News
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PGST’s recent media campaign to overstate their aboriginal presence in the Port Gamble area is disconcerting because there is no history presently to support their claim. The Suquamish can no longer stand on the sidelines and allow such flagrant re-writing of history to go unchallenged. Ethnographic records of the north Kitsap region expose the inaccuracies of PGST’s recent media statements regarding the Suquamish use and occupation of Port Gamble Bay and vicinity. These records, gathered in the early 1900s by non-Indian scholars to understand and preserve Indian use and occupation of the area, not only dispel PGST’s claims but unmistakably reaffirm Suquamish’s long presence and influence in this area.
Suquamish elders in 1916, recorded a substantial inventory of Suquamish place names on Port Gamble Bay. Waterman’s Suquamish informants start
T.T. Waterman, a University of Washington anthropologist who interviewed
Birthdays & Anniversaries ..................15
...see Gamble Bay page 3
In This Issue News ................... 1 Community Calendar
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Education
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Government
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Sports & Rec
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Language & Activities
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Business ................. 12 Elders ................. 13 Community & Notices
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Vol. 13, No. 3