The Skokomish: People of the Big River

At the southern tip of Hood Canal, where the Skokomish River fans out across a wide delta before emptying into the Great Bend, you are on land that the Twana-speaking people have called home for thousands of years. The largest and best-known of the nine Twana communities was called Skokomish, a name meaning big river people, and the landscape around you shaped everything about their way of life.

The Skokomish were, at their core, salmon people. The river and the canal provided chinook, coho, and chum in extraordinary abundance. Cedar was equally central. Massive western red cedars were split and carved into canoes that could handle open water, and their bark and roots were woven into mats, clothing, ropes, and some of the most intricate baskets on the Northwest Coast. Twana basket work, with its distinctive twined designs, became a recognized artistic tradition. Winters were spent in longhouses along the lower river; summers pulled the people outward by canoe to fish, trade, and gather.

First contact with European culture came in seventeen ninety-two, and with it arrived a smallpox epidemic that devastated the Twana communities. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, the pattern of treaty-making under Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens had arrived. On January twenty-sixth, eighteen fifty-five, at a place called Point No Point on the northern Kitsap Peninsula, Stevens convened a council with the S'Klallam, the Chimakum, and the Skokomish. The resulting Point No Point Treaty ceded an enormous territory in exchange for a reservation of three thousand eight hundred and forty acres at the head of Hood Canal, plus sixty thousand dollars in payment, and the reserved right to fish at usual and accustomed grounds.

That fishing right proved critical. In nineteen seventy-four, the Boldt Decision restored the Skokomish Tribe's treaty fishing rights, which had been eroded for a century, affirming that the original language of the treaty meant exactly what it said. Today the tribe is actively restoring salmon habitat and water quality throughout the Hood Canal watershed, the same waters the Skokomish have depended on since long before the treaties were written.