The North Kitsap Herald posted an article about area tribes kicking off the journey to Bella Bella, British Columbia for the 2014 Tribal Canoe Journey.
From the story:
Suquamish Chairman Leonard Forsman is pulling in the Suquamish canoe to Bella Bella.
“The Journey is a cultural, spiritual, ceremonial and social event,” he said. “The Journey can provide a platform for expressing our Tribal values that include habitat protection and improving or protecting water quality. Decisions on if and how to participate in political expressions are decisions made by each Tribal canoe family individually.”
Micah McCarty is a former chairman of the Makah Nation and a member of the board of First Stewards, which seeks to unite indigenous voices to collaboratively advance adaptive climate-change strategies.
He sees the Canoe Journey as an exercise in Tribal sovereignty, particularly in the realm of environmental education.
U.S. v. Washington, also known as the Boldt decision, reaffirmed that Treaty Tribes had reserved for themselves 50 percent of the annual finfish harvest; a later court decision extended that to include shellfish. In addition, Boldt established the state and Treaty Tribes as fisheries co-managers.
“The state-Tribal co-management relationship relative to … US v Washington is more effectively built on Tribal governments assuming more and more of the federal trust responsibility in the spirit of self-governance and by directly investing in Tribally determined education,” he said.
“Native sovereignty is as good as it is practiced and implemented. No one else can do this for us, and the best investment in sovereignty is education by Indian sovereign design — including curriculum pertaining to treaty resource damages [caused by] climate change and carbon pollution, particularly in the form of carbonic acid.”
More information can be found at: www.tribaljourneys.ca
An up-to-date map of the Canoe Journey participants can be found at http://www.canoejourneymaps.org
