Where did all the Indians in the Puget Sound go?

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Longhouse Chiefs
Tulalip News. (2018, July 27). The Treaty of Point Elliott: A living document. Tulalip News. https://www.tulalipnews.com/2018/07/27/the-treaty-of-point-elliott-a-living-document/


It was May of 2023, I was about to go on a road trip with my best friend Steve . I was waiting for him to finish work so that we could start the drive to Portland and drive the coast of the Oregon. Before we left, I stopped at a bookstore in Silverdale, WA and I bought a book, "Plants of the Pacific Northwest". This book has become my bible and ever since that road trip, I have developed a relationship with flora like never before and I appreciate the numerous benefits and wisdom offered by plants, mushrooms, and the forest. The book outlines how to identify, use as medicine, and the historical use of the many plants it indexes.

Learning all about indigenous uses of shrubs, trees, flowers, and other plants had me wondering: What even happened to all of them? There must have been such a rich, flourishing culture all around the Pacific Northwest, and area so abundant in edible plants, elk (well at least there used to be!), and huge salmon runs.


The Spirit of Pestilence arrived. Plague came and spread throughout the waterways and impacted different tribes to different degrees, but they devestated populations across the Pacific Northwest as a whole. Following the plagues and loss of knowledge and culture, Isaac Stevens signed the Treaty of Point Elliott with several Puget Sound tribes,  diminishing the Indians' rights to their nomadic lifestyle. See the full story on the Storymap.


ArcGIS Storymap

In this story map that I created along with support from some classmates (we all know how group projects can go), I showcase what exactly happened to the Indigenous peoples of the Puget Sound area as told by an annotated bibliography - and where they are now.

The story map can be found here as of March 18, 2025.


https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c42a75ebc0044f3fa14646269ab7dc65

https://arcg.is/100OT80


The main purpose of this blog post is to archive the work as I spent a lot of time and passion on this project. This was for a class called Intro to Research Strategies at Western Washington University.



Custer Died For Your Sins Chapter 6 - the historical ineffectiveness of government agencies in working with the tribes


While I am at it, for archival sake, I am going to throw in a link to a slide show I made for a module on Indigenous inequality in another politics class:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1A1i2S1Wm60KswWEOwNNDhBLlI2u7JbyJxLOl4vaORt8/edit?usp=sharing

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