we are an ecosystem
Inspired by and cousin of Rewild Portland, we are an emerging organization that weaves together placed-based and ancestral skill shares, existing land-based initiatives, and social technologies for hospicing modernity.
The Salish Sea spans from the city of Olympia, WA to Neah Bay to Campbell River, British Columbia, including the Olympic Peninsula, Seattle, Bellingham, and the San Juan and Gulf Islands.
Freedom From the River to the Sea:
A 25-Mile March for Peace and Liberation in Gaza
We grieve more than seventy-five years of unbearable loss of life and freedom in occupied Palestine. On Sunday, May 26th, we will join together to walk 25 miles—the length of Gaza—as a symbol of solidarity. Let our collective movement be an act of bearing witness and protecting hope, from every river to every sea. 🍉🍉🍉
This walk is organized autonomously by a group of local community members who are unified in our desire for a free Palestine. Read the full statement of purpose here.
marchforpalestine.seattle
The Tree in the Machine
This phrase is from the work and teachings of rain crowe, and her course, “The Burning Times Never Ended.” A powerful way to disrupt and dismantle modernity is to root down into the Machine and break the gears with metaphoric roots.
Learn more at her Refugia Village Mystery School and Dream Temple
The Rewild Salish Sea network
Check out our map of organizations, education programs, tribal centers, mutual aid, and other rewilding resources in the Salish Sea region.
About Rewild Salish Sea*
Rewild Salish Sea is inspired by Rewild Portland, a non-profit organization serving Portland, Oregon and the surrounding wild and rural communities. Rewild Portland’s mission is to foster resilience through place-based arts, traditions, and technologies. This mission comes to life in the form of community-building, ecological restoration, and education.
Rewild Portland began with a monthly Free Skills Share, which are community offerings of ancestral and earth-based skills like foraging, friction-fire starting, and increasing physical/mental health.
What does our regional Salish Sea community want to weave together? What already exists? What kinds of skill shares would be desired? These could be physical skills, conceptual frameworks, idea sharing, relational practices, and more.
We can't (and won't!) do it alone! To start, we’d love to have several conversations with the community envisioning what events and organizations are here already, and what Rewild Salish Sea can become for the benefit of all.
We’ll be announcing several dates, both in person and online, based on an upcoming Doodle poll. We'd love to know if you’re interested in getting involved and doing some imagining on how we might work together.
Rewild Salish Sea needs your help!
Are you a person who has skills to share with the community? These could be “physical” like mending, foraging, and friction-fire starting, ro they could be “somatic” like increasing physical/mental health, and relational practices?
Do you like planning and organizing and supporting events, both in-person and online?
Is social media and communications your jam?
Help us grow Rewild Salish Sea in 2024! Email us for more details
Values we hold
Community-driven, always non-profit
“Enoughness” rather than “Growth”
Decolonization, from allyship to kinship
Non-discriminatory, open to all
Free Classes Regularly
Learn to fail with grace: mistakes will be made, and that’s OK
Mindful stewardship; ethical foraging and land use
Cultural competency and archaeological ethics
Our principles can grow and change
About the place name “Salish Sea”
Photo credit: the Salish Sea from the International Space Station (NASA)
Coast Salish people & languages
The term “Coast Salish” refers to a language family, including two dozen distinct languages and many dialects, and is used to indicate the cultural group of indigenous peoples who speak or spoke these languages.
The Coast Salish-speaking peoples have lived in what is present-day western Washington and southwestern British Columbia for more than 10,000 years. Their geographic territory includes the lands bordering what is known as the Salish Sea—Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, Gulf Islands, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Strait of Georgia—as well as the Pacific coast of Washington and northern Oregon.
View maps of the many territories of the Coast Salish
Learn more about the history of the Coast Salish people
Understanding tribal treaty rights and individual treaties in Western Washington
Find the native lands that you live on at Native Land Digital
Origins and usage of the term “Salish Sea”
Salish Sea describes the integrated inland sea located in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. state of Washington. It includes the so-called Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, plus an intricate network of connecting channels and adjoining waterways. The names of these three main bodies of water carry a colonial legacy:
Puget Sound: named in 1792 by George Vancouver, a British Royal Navy officer, for Peter Puget, a lieutenant who accompanied him on the Vancouver Expedition; originally it described only the waters south of the Tacoma Narrows.
The Strait of Juan de Fuca: named in 1787 by the maritime fur trader Charles William Barkley, for Juan de Fuca, the Greek navigator for a Spanish expedition in 1592 to seek the fabled Strait of Anián which is a semi-mythical strait that is part of the Northwest Passage conquest project.
The Strait of Georgia: named “in honor” of King George III in 1792 by Captain George Vancouver, an English “explorer.”
The name “Salish Sea” was proposed in 1989 by Bert Webber, a white, Canadian-born professor of geography and environmental social studies from Huxley College (Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA), in response to the plans to bring crude oil from Alaska’s arctic shores into Washington State’s inland marine waters for refining in the mid-1970s. There was much (well-deserved) concern over oil spills, which of course do not recognize national borders.
At the time, there was no encompassing name for this interconnected inland sea that spanned coasts in the northwestern US and southwestern Canada, so he proposed the name “Salish Sea” to help people envision one body of water and one ecosystem. The Salish Sea Institute was opened in 2019. Webber’s intention was to reflect the entire cross-border ecosystem and to honor the indigenous people who were the first to live in the region, and who live here still. Both Washington State and British Columbia voted to officially recognize the name “Salish Sea” in late 2009.
And like all colonial overlays, it’s complicated. Some say that the name is appropriation or even a complete misnomer. David Buerge, a white Seattle-based historian of the Duwamish people who reside in the area known as Seattle, says that it is a “white” term (“Why We Should Stop Calling it the Salish Sea”).
However, other tribes and peoples embrace the name, like the Samish tribe (in what is known as Washington State), the three W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations (Tsartlip, Tseycum, and Tsawout, in what is known as British Columbia), and Stz'uminus elder George Harris, who brought the idea of a name change to British Columbia in 2008. The Coast Salish Gathering, a yearly gathering for tribes and nations in the region to find common ground on environmental and natural resources issues and projects, has been using the term “Salish Sea” since 2007 and celebrated the official government recognition of the Salish Sea in 2010.
We recognize the complexity of using the name “Salish Sea” and are interested in continuing the conversation.
Current spaceholders
Paule Wood has a background in Human Centered Design and has been professionally designing complex systems for two decades. In addition to being a practitioner of de-armouring and Northern European earth-based personal/ceremonial magic, they are involved with Rewild Portland and are inspired by their community-building work.
Avery Fisher is a somatic therapist at The Living Room, a collective of politicized mental health practitioners and a hub for community organizing. They have been a member of the Duwamish Solidarity Group since 2020. Their work is deeply informed by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective.
Land acknowledgment
We reside on the unceded, ancestral land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish, among other Indigenous Peoples, who are the original stewards of this land and water, and who carry on that stewardship today. We acknowledge the historical and ongoing reality of physical and cultural genocide, which continues to impact Indigenous Peoples and damage the ecosystem we are part of. We reaffirm our responsibility and commitment to supporting Indigenous Peoples to have their stolen lands returned and their livelihoods restored, as well as interrupting the normalization of colonialism.
The Duwamish Tribe remains unrecognized by the U.S. government. We pay Real Rent, which goes directly to Duwamish Tribal Services. For more information, please check out this source, among many others.
Site header image: Saysutshun (known as Newcastle Island Marine) Provincial Park, located on a small island off the coast of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. by Kjfmartin, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.