The Suquamish and Sinclair Inlet

Before there was a Bremerton, before there was a Navy yard, before William Bremer ever looked at a map of the Pacific Northwest, the waters of Sinclair Inlet belonged to the Suquamish.

The Suquamish are a Coast Salish people whose core territory centered on the Kitsap Peninsula and the western shore of Puget Sound. Their domain included the inlets that now carry names given by a nineteenth-century American naval surveyor: Port Madison, Liberty Bay, Dyes Inlet, and Sinclair Inlet. These were not empty waters. They were the Suquamish larder, their highway, the arterial system of a civilization built around the sea.

Sinclair Inlet in particular was salmon country. The Suquamish caught silver salmon in its protected waters, harvested clams and oysters from its shallows, and returned season after season to the same places their parents and grandparents had worked. The inlet's salmon runs were sustained by more than a dozen small creeks draining the surrounding hills, including Gorst Creek and Blackjack Creek, both of which still carry Chinook salmon today.

The Treaty of Point Elliott, signed in January of eighteen fifty-five, opened these lands to American settlement. In exchange, the Suquamish were promised reserved fishing rights and a reservation at Port Madison, a few miles north across the water from present-day Bremerton. Most relocated there.

Thirty-six years after the treaty, William Bremer bought the land at the head of Sinclair Inlet and sold it to the Navy. The inlet that had sustained the Suquamish for thousands of years became the industrial heart of a naval shipyard. A two-thousand-seventeen lawsuit filed by the Suquamish Tribe under the Clean Water Act, alleging that the Navy had scraped the hull of a warship without proper environmental permits, was settled in twenty-twenty. The tribe is still paying attention to these waters. They always have been.