The People of the Water: Squaxin Island and the Southern Inlets

The southern tip of Budd Inlet is where freshwater and saltwater have mixed for as long as water has been here, which is to say as long as anyone has been here to notice. The Squaxin Island Tribe call themselves the People of the Water. Their ancestors occupied the shores and watersheds surrounding the seven southernmost inlets of Puget Sound for thousands of years before any European vessel rounded the headlands to the north.

The inlet directly beneath what is now the Washington State Capitol was called Steh-Chass. It was not a peripheral edge of Squaxin territory. It was a center of it. From Steh-Chass and the neighboring inlets, the people harvested salmon on the Deschutes and other rivers, gathered shellfish from the tidal flats, and dug camas roots in the upland prairies. Excavations at the site called Qwu'gwes have recovered large quantities of shell and vertebrate bone, physical evidence of sustained settlement and sophisticated resource management across centuries.

The Squaxin people speak dialects of Lushootseed, the language family of the southern Coast Salish world. Their oral traditions describe a people shaped by the specific ecology of these inlets, by the particular rhythms of tidal exchange, salmon return, and cedar growth. They did not move seasonally in the sense of wandering. They moved purposefully, following resources they had cultivated and tracked across generations.

The tidal flats at the head of Budd Inlet are now a managed freshwater lake. The Squaxin Island Tribe has supported a recommendation that the lake be returned to an estuary. They are still the People of the Water, and they are still here.