Published in The Seattle Times on-line on Sept. 5, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 8, 2024

In Suquamish hearts, long-burned ‘sacred’ longhouse lives on

by Jean Sherrard

Last week, we visited the Suquamish reservation, a vibrant stop on the 35th anniversary of an annual canoe journey that began with 1989’s Paddle to Seattle.

For Suquamish elder Barbara Lawrence, the event bracingly reinvigorates her culture. “Today, my children and grandchildren only know canoe life,” she says. “They assume that making canoes, paddles and cedar hats, and bringing back our songs, dances and languages, is just a normal part of their lives.”

But celebrating gains doesn’t negate almost unfathomable losses that devastated Indigenous peoples.

Lawrence, a tribal education outreach specialist, directed me to the site of a legendary longhouse burned to the ground 154 years ago. Although white settlers called it “Old Man House” from Chinook jargon, its original Lushootseed name has not yet been recovered.

Built around 1800, the vast, cedar-plank structure housed up to 600 people, including Chief Kitsap and his close relation, Chief Seattle. It served as a winter village, hosting weighty rituals and potlatch celebrations.

The largest construction of its time in the Northwest, its massive cedar posts and beams supported what historian David Buerge has called “the most remarkable structure ever created on Puget Sound.”

Following Lawrence’s directions, I walked a half mile past waterfront homes (with signs asserting that the beach was private property). I discovered a one-acre park given by Washington State Parks to the Suquamish Tribe in 2004. While nothing remains of the original longhouse, this sliver of land chronicles trauma and erasure.

The decades after its construction exposed its inhabitants to explorers and settlers — “the invasion,” Lawrence calls it — along with disease, religion and broken promises.

When she was a young researcher collecting oral histories for the Suquamish Museum, she elicited a story from elder Bernard Adams about the last hours of the longhouse.

In 1870, federal authorities, intent on removing the symbol of communal living, ordered its destruction.

When Chief Seattle’s daughter, Kikisoblu (aka Angeline), living in his namesake town, heard that the longhouse was burning, “she got into a canoe and came over. As it burned down, she was screaming and throwing sand on the cedar posts in a desperate attempt to save anything, crying out, ‘Me Sapa house!’ [my grandfather’s house] over and over again.”

Defying federal pressures, however, remaining tribal members soon erected a cluster of “little houses … just above and behind where the longhouse had been, as close as they could be to each other.”

While the Suquamish continue to address painful legacies of the past, they are no less committed today to revitalizing community and culture. As Lawrence says, “All the doors are open for us now.”

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