The record • Canoes, racing, journeys
Everything in this building exists because of what is outside the door. Start there.
The hulls
The people of Puget Sound and the Straits kept a whole naval architecture, and the 1920 survey that documented it counted six distinct canoe types, each matched to its water (Waterman & Coffin, 1920). The shovel-nose river canoe, square at both ends, poled up the shallow rivers. The great ocean-going canoe with separate carved bow and stern pieces pegged and lashed on to throw aside the seas, recorded at lengths up to eighty feet. The ethnographer who wrote that survey put it plainly, that no better craft for rough water had ever been devised. When you see a canoe in this shed, you are looking at the oldest continuously refined technology on this coast.
Two of those lineages are alive within earshot of this building. The broad traveling canoe carries families on the summer journeys. The eleven-man racing canoe, sleek as a needle, evolved out of the war canoe across the last century and a half and never stopped being taken seriously.
The racing season
War canoe racing is a living circuit across the Salish Sea, clubs on both sides of the border, dates set by tides. The oldest gathering in these waters is the Lummi Nation’s Stommish Water Festival, founded in 1946 to welcome home the nation’s World War II veterans and running ever since. The Lummi festival history gives the word Stommish as “warrior” (Lummi Nation Stommish Water Festival, 2026). The same hull form that once carried fighters now carries pullers, and the beach still fills with people waiting to meet them. If you want the longer story of Salish warfare and the waters between, the Reading Shelf’s third reading walks the whole record.
The journeys
In 1989, for Washington’s centennial, the Quinault educator Emmett Oliver organized the Paddle to Seattle, and canoes from seventeen tribes came ashore at Golden Gardens (HistoryLink, n.d.). Four years later the gathering at Bella Bella turned it into a tradition, and the Tribal Canoe Journeys have crossed these waters nearly every summer since, including the Paddle to Lummi in 2019. The protocols are performed in public and belong to the public record. Canoes pause offshore. A speaker asks the host nation’s permission to come ashore and names the canoe family. Permission is granted, and the welcome begins (Duwamish Tribe, n.d.). Asking permission to land is the whole philosophy of this coast in one sentence, and it is why this site keeps asking versions of the same question.
What happens in the evenings of a journey, the songs and the sharing, happens by permission of the families who own them. The log keeper’s job on that subject is to point at the door and say that it is a good door, and that it is not ours to open.
References
Duwamish Tribe. (n.d.). Canoe journey. https://www.duwamishtribe.org/canoe-journey
HistoryLink. (n.d.). Tribal canoes participating in the Paddle to Seattle arrive at Golden Gardens Park on July 21, 1989 (Essay 20269). https://www.historylink.org/File/20269
Lummi Nation Stommish Water Festival. (2026). History of Stommish. https://www.lummistommish.com/history
Waterman, T. T., & Coffin, G. (1920). Types of canoes on Puget Sound. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. https://archive.org/details/typesofcanoesonp00wate