This week more than a hundred canoes moved down the Salish Sea, and the water between Vashon and the mainland carried a good number of them.
The 2026 Tribal Canoe Journey, Paddle to Nisqually: Medicine Creek Potlatch, is hosted by the Nisqually Indian Tribe, with the gathering and protocol running July 31 through August 5 at Sequalitchew Creek in DuPont. The Journey’s theme is Healing Through Our Waters By Honoring Our Ancestors. Some canoe families began pulling from the Washington coast and from northern Vancouver Island more than two weeks ago.
Suquamish, Alki, Puyallup
The Suquamish Tribe hosted at the House of Awakened Culture on the Port Madison Indian Reservation from July 27 to 29, receiving dozens of canoes along with several thousand pullers and support crew.
On July 29 the canoes crossed roughly thirteen miles from Suquamish to Alki Beach, where the Muckleshoot Tribe welcomed them ashore in the early afternoon and hosted camping, food, and cultural sharing at their campus in Auburn. In 2023 the Muckleshoot welcomed 126 canoes at that same beach.
They pulled out from Alki the next morning between six and eight, bound for the Puyallup Tribe of Indians landing in Tacoma. That leg runs the length of Vashon and Maury Island. Anyone on the east-facing shore on Thursday morning was watching a piece of the Journey go by.
What is being honored
The Journey descends from the 1989 Paddle to Seattle, organized in part with the Suquamish Tribe, which restored an annual practice of canoe travel, protocol, song, and dance among Northwest Indigenous nations. Each canoe family is welcomed at every stop by the host community with food, songs, and protocol. Responsibility on the water is shared and explicit.
The name of this year’s Journey points at Medicine Creek, where the 1854 treaty of that name was signed in Nisqually territory. That treaty and the fishing rights bound up in it sit at the center of more than a century and a half of Nisqually, Puyallup, and Squaxin Island history, including the fish-in movement and the litigation that followed. To bring the canoes home there, and to name the potlatch for it, is not incidental.
Why we are noting it here
Regenerate Vashon works in the waters of the Salish Sea, on land that is the home of the sx̌ʷəbabš, the Swiftwater People, and within the wider territories of the Puyallup, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and Nisqually. The Journey is not our event and we make no claim on it. It is the oldest continuous practice of moving through this bioregion by its own waterways, carried by the people who have been doing it longest.
Part of what bioregional work means is learning to see the place you live the way it is actually organized: by water, by passage, by relationship, and by the sovereign nations whose territories these are. For one week each summer, the Salish Sea is legible that way to anyone standing on a beach.
Our respect and our thanks to the Nisqually Indian Tribe as hosts, and to the Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and Puyallup for receiving the canoes along the way.
Information on the Journey is published by the Nisqually Indian Tribe. Protocol and landings are hosted by the tribes; please follow guidance from the host nation before attending.