This past summer solstice, we offered a recognition of presence for Vashon and Maury Island, rather than a land acknowledgment. The distinction matters to us. A land acknowledgment can harden into a stale script, one that becomes performative and frames the people of a place only in the past. A recognition of presence is meant to center something living instead: an ongoing relationship and a practice, the Swift Water People who are here now, and the island itself as it holds us through the turning of the year. It is written to be spoken aloud, and to be revised as the seasons change. What follows was written for the solstice.
We stand on Vashon and Maury Island in the fullest light of the year. The days are stretching as long as they will go. The sun rose this week at its earliest, and at the solstice it will seem to pause at the top of the sky before the year turns slowly back toward the dark. We begin in this fullness by recognizing where we are.
This ground is the gift of ice. The last great glaciation to shape Puget Sound carries this island’s own name, Vashon. It ground south under more than half a mile of ice, more than 2500 feet thick, and as it withdrew some fifteen thousand years ago it left the hills, the steep bluffs, and the layered beds of sand and clay beneath our feet. Every drop of fresh water on this island falls here as rain and is held in the island’s own aquifer. Vashon makes its own water. When we drink, we drink the rain this place has kept.
This is the land of the sx̌ʷəbabš, the Swift Water People, who have lived with these waters since time immemorial and who are here today as members of the Puyallup Tribe. Their relatives among the Coast Salish peoples, the Suquamish and others, have long moved through these shared waters by kinship and trade. The name we use most often, Vashon, was written onto a chart by a British navigator in 1792, for an admiral who never came.
The older truth is that this is the land of the Swift Water People. A woman named Lucy Gerand, born at Quartermaster Harbor, carried many of this island’s names forward so they would not be lost. We recognize honestly that under the Treaty of Medicine Creek, signed in 1854, the people of this place were removed to the Puyallup Reservation, and that our presence here continues a history whose aim was to end the relationship they have never stopped keeping. Their language, once called dead, is not. It is being spoken and taught again.
In that language, this moon of mid-June is named for the salmonberry, the first fruit of the year. Walk the edge of the woods right now and you will find it ripening orange and red, the first sweetness after a long wet season. This is a moon of first foods and of going out onto the water. The living island is busy with it.
Along the alders of Mileta Creek, where great blue herons once gathered in one of the great rookeries of the Sound, bald eagles have come, and the herons have moved on to quieter nests. Fawns lie hidden in the salal. Young salmon move along the shallows, feeding and growing in the eelgrass and the kelp, and the bull kelp itself climbs toward the surface a hand’s width a day. Here in the Salish Sea, at midday last Sunday, it was the lowest tides of the year which drew the water back and we got to enjoy it with friends, and walk along it as part of the low tide festival that happens here each year.
We are part of that sea, and we name what is thriving and what is in trouble, because honest recognition does not look away. A century ago this island was a mature coastal rainforest, and then it was logged so completely that you could see from the north end to the south. It is an island healing now, its forests returning, the western red cedar, the tree of life to the people of this coast, growing back among the second growth.
Quartermaster Harbor once held the largest herring spawn in the south Sound, the small silver fish on which nearly everything else depends, and in our own lifetime that spawn has fallen nearly silent. The Chinook salmon and the endangered orcas who travel Colvos Passage along the island’s west side go hungry for want of them. We hold all of it, the abundance of this ripening season, the wounds, and the healing we are called to continue.
We name our teachers. We learn the names and the language of this place from the Puyallup Tribe, to whom those words belong, and we hold them with respect and without claim. We learn this island from those who have tended it, from those who tend it still, and we tend and steward in our turn, for the generations still to come. Life creates the conditions for more life.
So at the height of the light, before the year turns, we recognize the Swift Water People, present and enduring, and the living island that holds us. We commit to right relationship: to the water we drink, the salmon and the herring, the cedar and the heron, and the people who are still here. We commit to put back more than we take. We commit to the future.
From this fullness we begin the turn, and we carry the work home into the season ahead.