Camus

Kwiaht and the Coast Salish cultural association PKOLS began fundraising this week through the San Juan Island Community Foundation for experimental restoration of part of the Cattle Point meadow at the lighthouse trailhead. The goal is not just to replace sheep grass and weeds with wildflowers, but something closer to what this landscape was like in 1826: a mosaic of gardens with blue-flowered Camas, Chocolate Lilies, Columbia Lilies, and other edible native flowering plants, carefully tended and maintained by Coast Salish families from villages here on San Juan Island, southern Vancouver Island, Guemes, Fidalgo, and Lummi islands.

It was known as Tl’ikweneng, the “place of peas,” referring to the regionally scarce Seaside Lupine (Lupinus littoralis) that blanket the dunes with pale blue flowers in spring. Lupines grow pods of small pea-like seeds that were sometimes pounded into flour and eaten after repeated leaching in fresh water. Below the dunes on the flats, scores of gardens would be dark blue with flowering Camas (Camassian leichtlinii), the primary plant food of Coast Salish peoples with its dense hard bulbs that become soft and sweet with two or three days of pit- or platform roasting.

Camas is a permaculture like an orchard. Once it has been established, a well-maintained Camas garden continues to produce new bulbs by splitting, and by self-seeding. Older, larger bulbs can be dug and harvested, leaving behind the smaller bulbs and the seedlings. Gardens located near seashores were fertilized with raked seaweeds, weeded in the spring, and every few years, burnt off in the fall. Deep-seated Camas bulbs are unaffected by a light, brushy surface fire. The sandy soil at Cattle Point is black with powdery charcoal from centuries of small garden trash fires.

Cattle Point was of such importance that it had its own guardian or watchman who kept a house at Fish Creek, and a lookout where today you can see the concrete shell of a 1921 naval compass radio station. When the Hudson Bay Company established its farm on San Juan Island, the Coast Salish watchman at Cattle Point was Kwaya’nexw, called Captain George by the Hudson Bay men. He had a Klallam father and Samish mother, and from his lookout on what is now a DNR parking and picnic area, you can see all the Samish traditional reef net sites on southern Lopez Island. 

Under the aegis of the Bureau of Land Management, the Cattle Point garden project will combine traditional Indigenous knowledge with recent botanical research, working with families that cultivated parts of San Juan Island for centuries before Spanish and British sailors set eyes on our shores. Like all attempts at recovering parts of our native landscape from disruption and weeds, this will be an experiment that will take years. Results will be monitored closely, and the site will remain in public view as it evolves. Community participation is also welcome, and neighboring homeowners are already helping provide seeds for what we hope will become a beautiful and meaningful community asset.

Contributed by Russel Barsh (Kwiaht)​