SUQUAMISH — It’s only been 139 years coming.
The Suquamish Tribe today celebrated the opening of a new longhouse near the waterfront downtown, the first time the tribe has had such a facility since 1870, when a deliberately set fire destroyed their previous one.
“There’s no words to describe how each of us are feeling today about this new home you have given to us,” tribal elder Marilyn Wandrey said during a blessing and prayer. “Our spirits are excited and our ancestors are here and celebrating with us. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve had a home to call our own.”
For Pacific Northwest American Indian tribes, the longhouse was historically a community gathering place for celebrations and ceremonies, and for the Suquamish a place to assemble in the fall after the salmon harvest.
“So many of these things were not allowed for us to do for a long, long time,” Wandrey said. “So it is with excitement that these things are coming back.”
Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman said there were several forces driving construction of the new 6,200-square-foot longhouse, named “sgwedzadad qe altxw” in the traditional Suquamish language of Lushootseed. The name means “House of Awakened Culture.”
One force was an effort by local tribes to bring back communal gathering places and revitalize cultural traditions.
The last longhouse the tribe had was at Old Man House Park, which is where the famous Suquamish Chief Seattle lived and died in 1866.
“It became known in the Pacific Northwest as a place of great concourse,” Forsman said.
In the late 1800s, government, religious and economic forces were pushing American Americans toward individual homes and assimilation, Forsman said, and in 1870 a U.S. Indian agent burned the deteriorated Old Man House.
Bringing back such buildings is possible as tribes become more prosperous. Benefactors and grants from the state also helped in the construction of the new longhouse.
Since 2006, the neighboring Port Gamble S’Klallam tribe has had a longhouse of its own, which stands in a four-building House of Knowledge complex that includes an elders center, library and career center.
Aside from cultural and social gatherings, longhouses serve as a source of pride for local tribes, and a reminder of how far they’ve come, Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe Chairman Ron Charles said in an interview.
“In my lifetime things have changed so dramatically, we wouldn’t have ever envisioned having something like that when I was a kid,” he said.
Forsman said that Tribal Journeys, a long journey in traditional cedar canoes every summer by dozens of local tribes, also served as a driving force behind the construction of the “House of Awakened Culture.” Many coastal tribes in British Columbia had longhouses.
Construction was done rapidly because the Suquamish Tribe will host Tribal Journeys this year, and 5,000 to 6,000 people are expected to end the long canoe journey in Suquamish.
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