Watchlist: ‘A History of the Muckleshoot Canoe Journey’

By Kamiah Koch

Social media/digital journalist

While canoe families are underway on the annual canoe journey, the Muckleshoot Tribe posted a video to its YouTube channel explaining the history of the Muckleshoot Canoe Journey.

Muckleshoot is the host Tribe for the 2023 canoe journey and canoes are expected to land on Alki beach in Seattle on Sunday, July 30.

Executive Director of Culture and Heritage for the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe Walter Pacheco starts the video by explaining the origins of the canoe journey event.

“The Paddle to Seattle was the first official canoe journey that was set up and there were Tribes from as far as Canada that came,” Pacheco says. “That was the start, the beginning of the annual canoe journey.”

According to Pacheco, that first canoe journey in 1989 highlighted Tribal people’s desire for gathering and potlatches, as a way to reconnect to tradition and culture.  

“We had to get back to our spiritual ways and that really brought us closer to who we were as a people and where we needed to be,” Pacheco says.

Annual powwows were a way of celebrating Native culture for Muckleshoot, but Pacheco says gathering on the water with other Tribal canoe families was where they found their songs and reconnected with that spiritual strength.

In a 2003 interview, a younger Pacheco was featured in another video discussing how the Muckleshoot Tribe acquired a canoe. He details the six months it took to find the funding for a canoe that was for sale in British Columbia.

“We had that Coast Salish culture that we never practiced because our people were living in a society that didn’t accept that,” Pacheco say. “They were penalized for practicing their culture.”

The video shows footage from the 1960s and 1970s Fish Wars where Native people were being pulled from canoes and detained.

“We never forgot who we were,” Pacheco says. “We never gave up, that was very important to us. We think of how much value it has in sustaining us.”

You can watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcsn7JLeg8E and read more about the 2023 Canoe Journey in the Aug. 15 edition of Smoke Signals.