Squaxin Island Tribe

A nation today

Lidar and photo blend of Mount Rainier showing the 14,410-foot stratovolcano and its glacier-carved upper slopes.
Washington State Department of Natural Resources (lidar hillshade / photo blend), via Flickr · CC BY-SA 2.0

Background

People of the Water is the name the Tribe goes by, and its own page describes the Squaxin as descendants of the maritime people who lived along the shores and watersheds of the seven southernmost inlets of Puget Sound for many thousands of years. That page says the Treaty of Medicine Creek was negotiated in Chinook Jargon on Christmas Day, 1854, signed December 26, and was the first treaty signed in Washington Territory, and that the land it ceded ran 4,000 square miles, or 2,560,000 acres, from the Cascades east to the Black Hills west. Only one small island, four and a half miles long and half a mile wide, was reserved as the main place for all of the people to live, and the Tribe's history tracks the population on it down: about 50 residents by 1862, four year-round residents by 1959, and none today, though members still fish, gather shellfish, camp and hunt there with permits from the Natural Resources Department. That page lists the old village names in Lushootseed beside their English forms, sx̌əƛ̓əb for S'Hotl-Ma-Mish, sqʷax̌səd for Squawksin, sʔəhiw̓ for Sa-Heh-Wa-Mish, təpikʷsəd for T'Peeksin, sq̓ʷayaił for Squi-Aitl, st̓əč̓as for Steh-Chass, dəxʷč̓aʔč̓aʔał for Noo-Seh-Chatl. Tribal headquarters are in Kamilche, and a General Council of all members elects a seven-member council that oversees every branch of tribal government.

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Visit and learn

Squaxin Island Tribe's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Lidar and photo blend of Mount Rainier showing the 14,410-foot stratovolcano and its glacier-carved upper slopes.Mount Rainier National Park

The Squaxin Island Tribe's own history says the 4,000 square miles its people ceded in the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek ran north to the divide between the Puyallup and White Rivers, and that the treaty was negotiated on Christmas Day and signed on December 26, the first in Washington Territory. Source

Programs

  • Cultural Resources Department

    The department says it is charged with preserving and protecting cultural resources it calls irreplaceable and endangered, which it defines as the management of ancient and contemporary cultural use sites and resources fundamental to traditional life ways, values and histories. It is separate from the Tribe's Museum Library and Research Center, and it carries the Tribe's regulatory and cultural obligations for tribal cultural sites, traditional cultural properties, archaeological sites and pioneer era sites, working through federal and state law and environmental project review. The Tribe's address is 10 SE Squaxin Lane in Shelton, Washington.

    https://squaxinisland.org/government/departments/cultural-resources/·preservation

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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