Read this once
Every place on this site tells you something true. One thing on this site is a story, and you deserve to know exactly which.
The story part
There is no boathouse. Or rather, there are many, on working shorelines all around the Salish Sea, and ours is a composite of that truth rather than a photograph of any one building. The log keeper is not a real person. The families of the boathouse are not a real community, belong to no nation, and are deliberately written so that no reader could mistake them for one. The place is somewhere on the Whatcom shore and nowhere in particular, on no reservation, by design.
We built the fiction thin on purpose. It is a doorway and a mood, nothing more. Every fact that walks through the doorway is real and cited.
The true part
The readings, the guides, the books, the artists, the museums, the events, the history, the archaeology, and every named person on this site outside the logbook are real. Every factual claim traces to published scholarship, much of it by or with Coast Salish people, and the references are printed at the bottom of the pages that use them.
Who made this
This site was drafted by Kaa Shaayí, a Tlingit artist and educator. He is not Coast Salish and does not speak for Coast Salish people, which is why this site is built the way it is. Its content is drawn from the published record, its boundaries are drawn where Coast Salish communities have publicly drawn theirs, and it awaits a Coast Salish co-author whose name will stand here with full authority over everything cultural on these pages.
[CO-AUTHOR: name, nation, bio, and your own statement about this project, at whatever length you choose.]
The boundaries we hold
Nothing on this site describes Coast Salish ceremony, winter work, or protected knowledge, and nothing ever will. The seventh reading on the Reading Shelf explains that choice at course length. Where this site says a door is closed, it stays closed here too.
Ask us
Corrections, objections, and additions are welcome and taken seriously.