For those who engage in learning and research activities, including students, researchers, faculty, staff, scholars, and artists at FHL, knowing the history of our place and the context for our activities is an intellectual and ethical responsibility. We therefore strongly encourage you to read our Land and Waters Acknowledgement Statement and consider our collection of resources. Moreover, we ask you to recognize the history of the first peoples on our land and waters and think critically about colonial ideologies and wrongdoings that altered their lives- wrongdoings that continue to impact the ability of Coast Salish peoples to manage land/water resources in accordance with cultural practices necessary to sustain the ecological health of the Salish Sea region. Finally, we ask you to join us as we seek to honor and understand our sense of place in these ancestral land and water environments.
To this end:
The Friday Harbor Laboratories, College of the Environment, University of Washington, acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land that touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Lhaq’temish (Lummi), Lekwungen (Songhees), Swinomish, Semiahmoo, Samish, T’sou-ke, WSÁNEĆ, and Jamestown S’Klallam.
We recognize that the establishment of FHL and our work here has only been possible because of the external and internal colonization of this region, forced removals, and efforts to render tribal and First Nations invisible, assimilated, and/or disappeared. We also recognize the continuing systemic harms from settler colonialism, nationalism, and White supremacy, that often play a role in educational and research endeavors. We will not ignore relocation (and in some cases, removal) of Coast Salish peoples from these lands in the Straits of the Salish Sea. We also recognize that even though the Coast Salish peoples were granted rights to fish and harvest shellfish by treaty, they were forced to file suits in U.S. Federal Courts to gain access to resources guaranteed by these treaties.
We commit to engage with the people who, as a group, have an unbroken history of living on the land, shores and waters that lie within the San Juan Archipelago region of the Salish Sea. We recognize and acknowledge their resilience, the intellect of their languages, and their important Traditional Knowledges (TK) including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) which through ceremony, practice, teachings, and management protect this region from harm. We strive to actively increase our understanding of place-based knowledge and other ways of knowing. While we celebrate the accomplishments of scientific inquiry, discovery, and education at FHL, we value the complementarity of tribal knowledge and world view and seek to learn from Coast Salish peoples in pursuit of our shared goal of living sustainably.
At FHL we actively seek to develop meaningful relationships, provide opportunities for further edification, and support specific actions and programs as a result of our recognition and commitment to Coast Salish peoples and the land and waters we share (see Addendums I and II below).
Addendum
Additional information and resources:
I. Maps
1. Tribal land can be found at Native Lands: https://native-land.ca
2. Samish Nation map with Coast Salish place names of the Salish Sea: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9b0f86b51e054ba78b83ab39c4d0b1a6
II. Legal Documents and Treaties
1. Douglas Treaty of 1849 (Canada) on Hudson’s Bay Company instructions for colonization
“With respect to the rights of the natives, you will have to confer with the chiefs of the tribes on that subject, and in your negotiations with them you are to consider the natives as the rightful possessors of such lands only as they are occupied by cultivation, or had houses built on, at the time the island came under the undivided sovereignty of Great Britain in 1846. All other land is to be regarded as waste, applicable for the purposes of colonization. The right of fishing and hunting will be continued to the natives, and when their lands are registered, and they conform to the same conditions with which other settlers are required to comply, they will enjoy the same rights and privileges.”
2. Treaty of Point Elliott of 1855 (US)
https://goia.wa.gov/tribal-government/treaty-point-elliott-1855
“ARTICLE 5.
The right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the Territory, and of erecting temporary houses for the purpose of curing, together with the privilege of hunting and gathering roots and berries on open and unclaimed lands. Provided, however, That they shall not take shell-fish from any beds staked or cultivated by citizens.”
3. Carson, R. (2014). Boldt decision has rippling effect 40 years later. Native Times. https://www.nativetimes.com/90-news/wildlife/9575-boldt-decision-has-rippling-effects-40-years-later
“The court ruling Boldt handed down 40 years ago (1974) is a decision now recognized as one of the most sweeping documents of economic and social reform in Pacific Northwest history. The central question in United States v. Washington concerned tribal fishing rights, but ripples from the decision went far and wide. It changed the empty concept of “tribal sovereignty” into something that needed to be taken seriously.”
III. Decolonization
1. Jagodinsky, K. (2016). A Tale of Two Sisters: Family Histories from the Strait Salish Borderlands. Digital Commons. University of Nebraska. 178. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/178
“Together, the tale of two sisters reveals the frustrating fallibility and promise of historical evidence in recording the presence and significance of borderlands family histories that continue to rustle in the breezes of Garry oaks throughout the San Juan Island chain. Fanny’s and Ellen’s histories, in tandem with many others cited here, should raise doubts about common tropes in histories of the North American West: that miscegenation dwindled in the late nineteenth century, that Native people yielded to pressures to move onto reservations, that hardening national and racial borders slowed the geographic and social mobility of indigenous people in the twentieth century. These metanarratives are like invasive species that can dominate borderlands family histories the way English ivy can choke out a stand of Garry oaks. Pruning back such assumptions and cultivating borderlands family histories like this one are an important step in identifying the personal and political histories of the North American West.”
2. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630
“For the past several years we have been working, in our writing and teaching, to bring attention to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational research in the United States and other settler colonial nation-states. These are two distinct but overlapping tasks, the first concerned with how the invisibilized dynamics of settler colonialism mark the organization, governance, curricula, and assessment of compulsory learning, the other concerned with how settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives – repackaged as data and findings – are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures.”
3. Walker, A. R. (2019). Seven Ways Tribes are Repairing the Salish Sea and Washington Waterways. Indian Country Today. https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/seven-ways-tribes-are-repairing-the-salish-sea-and-washington-waterways
“Tribal nations in Washington state are facing environmental challenges ranging from protecting wildlife habitats and waterways to protecting the livelihood of Washington state residents from toxic chemicals that have been released into the environment and water for decades. Here are seven eco-disasters affecting Washington tribes as well as efforts to improve the waters on which all inhabitants depend.”
4. Re-establishing indigenous place names. As an example, the channel between Shaw and Orcas islands was renamed in April, 2022: https://sanjuanislander.com/news-articles/government-news/state/34376/new-names-cayou-channel-and-basket-island-approved-by-state-committee
“Cayou Channel, named for local fisherman Henry Cayou, is the [official] new name for the waterway between Shaw and Orcas islands currently called Harney Channel. Cayou, a Lummi Nation member and 29-year San Juan Island County commissioner at the turn of the 20th century, was a successful commercial fisherman who lived and worked in the San Juan Islands until his death in 1959. Gen. William Harney, for whom the channel [was formerly] named, is best known for nearly starting the San Juan Islands “Pig War” between the United States and England in 1859. Harney killed an enslaved Black woman in 1834 and commanded the killing of Indigenous women and children during the 1855 Battle of Ash Hollow, among other ignominious acts.”
IV. Different Ways of Knowing
1. Lane, F. (2017). Lummi Elders Speak. “We are the Survivors of the Flood” by Chief Tsilixw (Bill James) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7ysJ7cfqpk
2. Tonino, L. (2016). Two Ways of Knowing: Robin Wall Kimmerer on Scientific and Native American Views of the Natural World. The Sun. 484. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/484/two-ways-of-knowing
“Science is often perceived to be at odds with indigenous values,” she writes. “The result is that Native Americans are barely present in the scientific community, where their unique cultural perspectives on environmental stewardship are greatly needed.”
3. Pidgeon, M. (2018). Moving between theory and practice within an indigenous research paradigm. Qualitative Research. 19: 418-436. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468794118781380
“It is only recently that Indigenous knowledges and ways of doing research are being articulated within academic realms in textual form such as articles, dissertations, and research reports. Indigenous communities and researchers have come to realize the limitations of non-Indigenous paradigms in accomplishing the goals they have set to articulate and implement research within their own Indigenous frameworks. […] An IRP actually pushes other paradigms to re-consider how research is conducted with, by, and for Indigenous peoples.”
4. Cullis-Suzuki, S., Wyllie-Echeverria, S., Dick, K.A., Sewid-Smith, M.D., Recalma-Clutesi, O.K. and Turner, N.J. (2015). Tending the meadows of the sea: a disturbance experiment based on traditional indigenous harvesting of Zostera marina (Zosteraceae) the southern region of Canada’s west coast. Aquatic Botany, 127: pp.26-34.“Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Coast Cultural Area of North America managed plant populations of many of the 100–200 species used for food and other purposes, through cultivation and selective harvesting. Eelgrass (Zostera marina, L.; Zosteraceae) was one of these species. The Kwakwaka’wakw harvested its sweet rhizomes in the springtime. Directed by the traditional knowledge of Clan Chief Adam Dick, whose hereditary name is Kwaxsistalla, of the Tsawataineuk First Nation of Kingcome Inlet (one of the many communities of Kwakwaka’wakw, or Kwak’wala speaking Indigenous peoples of the West Coast of British Columbia), we investigated the protocols of traditional harvesting and tending on typical Z. marinapopulations in the Discovery Islands area. We interviewed 18 Kwakwaka’wakw knowledge holders and conducted six harvesting demonstrations to determine traditional harvesting protocols. Based on traditional protocols and traditional Z. marina management inferences, we developed an in situ, subtidal, Complete Randomized Block Design removal experiment in an eelgrass meadow on Quadra Island, BC. In a first exploratory study, we removed Z. marina shoots at three different intensities using SCUBA in defined quadrats in the springtime. Shoots were counted at the end of summer to examine shoot recruitment post treatment over the growing season. Our preliminary results showed no significant difference between treatments. However, with more replicates, we might have strengthened the tendency of more shoots in the harvested quadrats. Here our main intention is to describe our unique study of a marine plant resource harvested in traditional times by Kwakwaka’wakw peoples and to outline a new experimental methodology to examine ecological rationale behind traditional knowledge. We hope to stimulate new and important avenues of research on this topic.”
V. Language and Communication
1. Language resources such as Tribal Word Libraries. For example:
1. Samish Word Library
https://www.samishtribe.nsn.us/departments/language/Samish-Word-Library
2. Tulalip Lushootseed Dictionary
https://tulaliplushootseed.com/words/
3. Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Library
https://library.jamestowntribe.org/home/KlallamLanguage
2. Examples of how to deal with cross-cultural conflicts. Very useful self-reflection/ checklist of what to work on or acknowledge within ourselves before multicultural meetings (or after conflict):
http://rapworkers.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/cultural-competence-selfassessment-checklist-1.pdf Presentation:https://www.ruralhealth.va.gov/docs/webinars/richardson-cultural-sensitivity-062712.pdf