Doe-Kag-Wats: How the Suquamish Tribe Told Its Own Story to the National Register

The Suquamish people have lived on the Kitsap Peninsula, on the shores of the Salish Sea west of Seattle, since time immemorial. They are known as Chief Seattle's people: Seattle (siʔał in Lushootseed), the nineteenth-century leader for whom the city is named, followed a path of accommodation with white settlers and helped negotiate the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855, which established the Port Madison Indian Reservation.

Since the late 1960s the Tribe has organized to claim its legal and civil rights on a path toward self-determination. In the second half of the 1900s it was recognized as a sovereign nation with its own constitution and government, and despite the damage done to reservations by federal land policies under the Dawes Act, it has reclaimed some of the land lost to non-Indians. Today the Tribe runs a museum, a casino, commercial fisheries, public parks and many social services, and more Suquamish people have been returning to their ancestral lands.

This story comes from a conversation between the National Park Service's Park Cultural Landscapes Program and Dennis Lewarch, an archaeologist who has worked with the Tribe since the 1990s and in 2007 became its first Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO).

Two places

Old Man House (dxwsǝqwǝb, "place of clear salt water") was a longhouse that sheltered many families and was the center of Suquamish life, supporting a large village from the late 1700s until U.S. authorities deliberately burned it in 1870. The Suquamish stayed on the site afterward, but by the end of the century Indian agents enforcing allotment were pressing them to leave it, take up farming and abandon their traditional ways.

Many sought refuge at another shoreline site where they could keep their practices away from outsiders' eyes: Doe-Kag-Wats (dxʷqigʷəc, "the place of the deer"). Where fresh water meets the Salish Sea, its upland forest, marsh and shoreline have always supplied food, materials and places to live. Overlooking the sea toward Mount Rainier, it is still a place for gathering, recreation and spiritual renewal — and, in the Tribe's care, it escaped the changes that European American settlement brought to the region's other coastal wetlands.

Map of Port Madison, Washington Territory, U.S. Coast Survey, 1868 (Register No. 1087, Jas. Lawson). Used in the nomination to show the continuity of the landscape at Doe-Kag-Wats. NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection.

A different kind of nomination

With the Tribal Council's oversight, Lewarch won a grant from the Underrepresented Communities program — run by the National Park Service to diversify the National Register of Historic Places — to nominate Doe-Kag-Wats as a Traditional Cultural Place (TCP). A TCP nomination differs from others because a place's significance and integrity are defined largely by the traditional community that still uses it. National Register Bulletin 38 first set out how to document such places in 1990, and consultation with tribes has changed a great deal since.

Lewarch saw the need from an earlier document: a 1990 National Register nomination for the Old Man House archaeological site that had no tribal input and did not connect the site to important people in Suquamish history — Chief Seattle among them. It convinced him the tribal story of a place had to be told alongside the archaeological one.

In the tribal archives he found oral histories that two young tribal members, Marilyn Jones and Leonard Forsman, had recorded with Elders in the 1980s about Doe-Kag-Wats and what it meant to the community — buried until then in technical reports. They became the basis of the 2018 nomination and an educational tool for sharing tribal history more widely. The work took 13 months and included the written nomination, outreach in the community, new oral history interviews, archival research and regular reports to the Tribal Council.

Bringing Elders into it

Persuading Elders that they had something to share was harder than expected. Suquamish people 70 and older had been sent to boarding schools where traditional practices were forbidden; they had not learned Lushootseed and thought of themselves as uninformed. The team called them "Culture Bearers" to stress the value of what they remembered, and found that interviewing them with children present put them at ease — instead of the old ethnographic practice of interviewing people alone, the interview became a chance for Elders to tell stories to children, a familiar custom.

Lewarch suspects the Suquamish were overlooked by early twentieth-century anthropologists precisely because they were close by and part of Seattle life. Much of their history was known but never brought together; the nomination helped make it a coherent whole.

What followed

In 2019 Doe-Kag-Wats became only the fourth listed TCP in Washington State. When the team presented its findings to the General Council, the Tribe received them with pride. Since then Elders have visited more often, gathering and weaving have increased, the Tribe's Chief Kitsap Academy holds biology and plant-identification classes there, and a Tribal Traditional Plant Specialist leads traditional food-plant gatherings — alongside the fishing, shellfish collecting and picnicking that have always gone on. By documenting continuous spiritual, educational, recreational and subsistence use, the listing also strengthens the Tribe's hand in caring for the place over the long term.

Building the capacity

Lewarch credits Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, whom President Obama appointed to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in 2013, for encouraging tribal members to take TCP training from the Advisory Council and the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers. Grants made the work possible: in 2007 the THPO office hired a review specialist, Stephanie Trudel, and then Marilyn Jones, the former museum director, as Tribal Heritage Specialist. An early project was a GIS map of culturally sensitive places, used in reviewing building permits with local governments. Before it had a THPO, the Tribe was often asked to comment on regional development but had little capacity to shape it; now it takes part in more planning.

His lessons: pay Elders honoraria for their time and knowledge, and expect to work to reach people — the team sent hundreds of questionnaires, advertised in the local paper and spoke at the Tribe's daily lunches and Elder meetings, and in the end interviewed more than ten tribal members. Lewarch sees part of his own job as training someone to take it over, and believes the future of archaeology will be by and for the tribes.

Sources

• National Park Service, Park Cultural Landscapes Program: "Preservation Profile: Dennis Lewarch," with Lewarch's words paraphrased. The article's "Point Elliot" is corrected to Point Elliott. A photograph credited to the Washington State Coastal Atlas and a portrait are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.