A rock wall takes shape for a clam garden on Kiket Island, west of La Conner, on Aug. 12. (John Ryan / KUOW)

A rock wall takes shape for a clam garden on Kiket Island, west of La Conner, on Aug. 12. (John Ryan / KUOW)

Swinomish Tribe builds modern clam garden, reviving practice

A knee-high, 200-foot-long rock wall on Kiket Island in Skagit County captures sediment and expands habitat for butter clams and littleneck clams. It’s believed to be the first new clam garden in two centuries.

  • By Wire Service
  • Thursday, September 8, 2022 2:32pm
  • Northwest

By John Ryan / KUOW

By the time you read this story, what it describes will probably have disappeared beneath the waves.

That’s how it was meant to be — and how it used to be.

Since time immemorial, as the saying goes, people in what is now Washington and British Columbia farmed the sea with a type of environmental engineering called clam gardening.

Around the time Europeans showed up here, the practice was lost.

“It was stolen from us,” Swinomish Tribal Senator Alana Quintasket told KUOW. “All of our teachings, all of our practices, our connections to this place, our connections to each other, our connections to all living things was stolen from us with settler colonialism.”

Quintasket stood in the mud where Skagit Bay becomes Kiket Island, west of La Conner in Skagit County.

“We’re working hard to restore these practices, to bring back these teachings, and to restore our relationships,” she said.

A few dozen people in work gloves and rubber boots gathered on that small island, during one of the lowest tides of the year.

“We are starting to build the rock wall for our clam garden,” Quintasket said.

It’s believed that a clam garden — a traditional, Indigenous way of boosting shellfish production — hasn’t been built in the United States for close to 200 years.

Rock by rock, this muddy gathering is changing that.

As beefy men strain to push wagons of boulders through the mud, adults and children form a long line down to the water’s edge. Each link in the human chain twists at the waist to hand a heavy rock to the next person until it nears the nascent wall. Conversation and laughter abound.

“We’re passing rocks,” said Marcia Julius of La Conner, a Swinomish Tribe historic preservationist and tribal member. “This seems to make more sense than all of us going back and forth.”

If you’ve ever heard the tribal saying, “when the tide goes out, the table’s set,” then you have a sense of how important shellfish are to Native cultures in this part of the world.

“It’s definitely a part of who we are,” said Julius, who was helping build the wall with her three kids. “Our lives work better when we’re able to eat our traditional foods.”

Gradually, 33 tons of hand-carried rocks coalesce into a wall about knee high and nearly 200 feet long. It arcs along a contour line 2 feet below the typical low tide. Most of the time, the wall will be submerged, invisible to visitors to the Kukutali Preserve, co-managed by the Swinomish Tribe and Washington State Parks.

Over time, the sturdy but porous structure should capture sediment on its upland side and expand the shallow, gently sloping habitat for things like butter clams and littleneck clams.

As with any backyard garden, continual tending — in this case, by clearing rocks and algae from the clam-growing areas and digging into the sediment with sticks to aerate it — will be part of ensuring a productive harvest.

Clam gardens grow four times more butter clams and twice as many littleneck clams as unterraced beaches do, according to a study of dozens of ancient clam gardens around Quadra Island, British Columbia. Young littleneck clams planted in the centuries-old terraces grew nearly twice as fast, making more local protein available to shellfish harvesters.

Michael Wilson of the Pauquachin Nation on Vancouver Island has come down from Canada to help.

“Seaweed, crabs, clams, oysters, everything comes right in behind his wall, and it gets protected, and it’ll get more nutrition than when there’s no wall here,” Wilson said.

In British Columbia, a few First Nations, as Indigenous groups are known there, have rebuilt clam gardens, traces of which had survived centuries of disuse.

“We wanted to have as much food as we can for our people,” Wilson said.

Members of those First Nations are sharing their expertise and muscle across the invisible, watery border with Washington state.

“These teachings have been with us for thousands of years. Government didn’t want us to do this,” said Woody Underwood, visiting from the Tsawout Nation on Vancouver Island.

Carbon dating has shown some clam gardens near Vancouver Island to be as old as Egyptian pyramids: 3,500 years or more.

Between forced relocation and other human rights abuses, Canadian governments almost stamped out this ancient practice.

“In Canada, we were colonized by the plow,” Underwood said. “They wanted to turn us into farmers.”

Underwood says it’s been a long haul, but Coast Salish people on both sides of the border are bouncing back.

“So seeing us here today, guess what? We didn’t only survive, but we’re thriving,” he said.

“I’m just grateful my kids were able to be here and to witness and be a part of what will be here for generations to come,” Julius said.

How soon all the rock hauling on Kiket Island will benefit Swinomish diets is unclear.

It takes a butter clam about three years to grow to harvestable size, according to Western Washington University marine ecologist and Samish Nation member Marco Hatch.

“What we’re doing here is something that hasn’t been done in living memory, which is build a clam garden from scratch,” Hatch said. “So we don’t really know how long does it take for those sediments to fill in or what that’s going to look like.”

On the beach, the long chain of rock passers looks like an old-timey bucket brigade for fighting a fire.

But it’s more like a boulder brigade for fighting climate change.

Crushed shell bits are expected to wash in and pile up behind the wall.

They can locally neutralize some of carbon dioxide that’s making sea water more acidic and less hospitable to shellfish as well as overheating the planet.

“We’re supporting our relatives of the sea in a time of crisis,” said Quintasket, the Swinomish senator. “It’s not just climate change anymore. We are in crisis mode, and this is just a little bit of work that we can do to support their home to make sure that they’re surviving with us.”

While the ecological benefits might take years to materialize, the human benefits have already begun.

“Our people getting to know each other is as important as the restoration work we do,” Underwood said, “because we’re restoring our culture.”

Coast Salish people were cut off from many of their relatives and natural resources after the Oregon Treaty of 1846 drew a zigzag U.S.-Canada boundary midway between Vancouver Island and the North American mainland.

“It’s much more than just moving rocks and building a wall. This is bringing back who we are as Coast Salish people, as indigenous people to this place,” Quintasket said.

Quintasket says one of the biggest benefits of the muddy manual labor has been getting to work with tribal relatives from the other side of that saltwater border.

“It’s brought nations together that haven’t been brought together in generations, you know?” she said.

Some walls divide communities. This one is bringing them together.

Talk to us

More in Northwest

Breadson John, 8, was found safe in Missouri on Wednesday, Feb. 21, after going missing from Vancouver in June 2022. (FBI)
Vancouver boy, 8, missing since June, found in Missouri

Breadson John was found safe in Jasper County Missouri after being missing for 8 months.

Clay Siegall, cofounder and former CEO of Seagen. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
Why prosecutors say former Seagen CEO wasn’t charged after arrest

Edmonds prosecutors said there were contradictory statements on the night Seagen ex-CEO Clay Siegall was accused of domestic violence.

NO CAPTION. Logo to accompany news of Seattle.
Deputy shot, wounded in Seattle during eviction, 1 dead

A King County Sheriff’s deputy was shot Monday and a person inside the residence was later found dead.

NO CAPTION. Logo to accompany news of Washington state.
Man pleads guilty to stalking Washington state lawmaker

Isaiah Long, 34, of Bremerton, pleaded guilty to two counts of felony stalking Rep. Michelle Caldier.

X
Amtrak restores full daily train service to Vancouver, B.C.

Amtrak has restarted direct trips between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Leonard Cobb, co-founder of state’s first Medic One, dies at 96

An incident more than 60 years ago helped prompt creation of the groundbreaking emergency medical service.

A Value Village store is seen Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2017, in Edmonds, Wash. The company that operates 300 Value Village, Savers and other thrift stores in the U.S., Canada and Australia is suing Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, saying his office has violated its rights by demanding $3.2 million to settle a three-year investigation. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
Court rejects deception charges against Savers Value Village

The Washington state Supreme Court handed the thrift store chain Savers Value Village a unanimous win Thursday.

Seattle Council Member Kshama Sawant speaks to supporters and opponents of a proposed ordinance to add caste to Seattle's anti-discrimination laws at a rally at Seattle City Hall, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023, in Seattle. Sawant proposed the ordinance. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)
Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination

The Seattle City Council on Tuesday added caste to the city’s anti-discrimination laws, becoming the first city to pass such a law outside South Asia.

New Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant speaks during an inauguration ceremony for city officials on Jan. 6, 2014, in Seattle. One of Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather – a man she “otherwise loved very much” – utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid. Now an elected official in a city thousands of miles from India, she has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. (AP Photo / Elaine Thompson, File)
Seattle considers historic law barring caste discrimination

Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant wants to add caste to the city’s anti-discrimination laws

FILE - In this file photo dated Monday, March 11, 2019, rescuers work at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  The number of deaths in major air crashes around the globe fell by more than half in 2019 according to a report released Wednesday Jan. 1, 2020, by the aviation consultancy To70, revealing the worst crash for the year was an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX on March 10 that lost 157 lives. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene, FILE)
Judge rejects bid to nullify Boeing deal over Max crashes

District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth said federal law doesn’t give courts the power to oversee agreements that prosecutors make with defendants.

FILE - The logo for Boeing appears on a screen above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Boeing is reporting a money-losing quarter as both its civilian-airplane division and the defense business are struggling. Boeing said Wednesday, April 27, 2022,  that it lost $1.24 billion in the first quarter and took large write-downs for several programs.  (AP Photo/Richard Drew, file)
Boeing plans to cut about 2,000 finance and HR jobs in 2023

Boeing plans to outsource about a third of the eliminated positions to Tata Consulting Services in Bengaluru, India.

Logo for news use, for stories regarding Washington state government — Olympia, the Legislature and state agencies. No caption necessary. 20220331
Washington’s low-income tax credit available for first time

Up to $1,200 is now available for thousands of low-income working Washington residents, thanks to a 2008 law that has finally been funded.