Also hi I want to be more active on here, and I'm probably gonna rebrand a bit, but Tumblr is like the last refuge where I can talk about doing sex work with my whole chest
I noticed that there's very little understanding of the phrase "Oh, sure" used in the context that I'm familiar with here. ppl take it as acquiescence rather than understanding and like, where I'm from
"Oh, sure" is a neutral acknowledgement, it's "hey I hear what you're saying, and-" and it's "I mean that's possible, but-" and it means "you're the client, so I'mma do my best to accommodate your needs but if shit is whack imma tell you"
By the time you read this story, what it describes will probably have disappeared beneath the waves.
Thatâs how it was meant to be -- and how it used to be.
FTA: âIt was stolen from us,â said Swinomish Tribal Senator Alana Quintasket. âAll 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.â
Quintasket stood in the mud where Skagit Bay becomes Kiket Island.
âWeâre working hard to restore these practices, to bring back these teachings, and to restore our relationships,â she said.
A few dozen people in work gloves and rubber boots gathered on that small island about 50 miles north of Seattle, during one of the lowest tides of the year.
âWe are starting to build the rock wall for our clam garden,â Quintasket said.
Itâs believed that a clam garden â a traditional, Indigenous way of boosting shellfish production â hasnât been built in the United States for close to 200 years.
Rock by rock, this muddy gathering is changing that.
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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 tendingâin this case, by clearing rocks and algae from the clam-growing areas and digging into the sediment with sticks to aerate itâwill 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.
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Michael Wilson of the Pauquachin Nation on Vancouver Island has come down from Canada to help.
âSeaweed, crabs, clams, oysters, everything comes right in behind his wall, and it gets protected, and itâll get more nutrition than when thereâs no wall here,â 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.
âWe wanted to have as much food as we can for our people,â Wilson said.
Members of those First Nations are sharing their expertise and muscle across the invisible, watery border with Washington state.
âThese teachings have been with us for thousands of years. Government didnât want us to do this,â 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.
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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.
âWhat weâre doing here is something that hasnât been done in living memory, which is build a clam garden from scratch,â Hatch said. âSo we donât really know how long does it take for those sediments to fill in or what thatâs going to look like.â
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âWeâre supporting our relatives of the sea in a time of crisis,â said Quintasket, the Swinomish senator. âItâs 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 theyâre surviving with us.â
While the ecological benefits might take years to materialize, the human benefits have already begun.
âOur people getting to know each other is as important as the restoration work we do,â Underwood said, âbecause weâre restoring our culture.â
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.
âItâs 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,â 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.
âItâs brought nations together that havenât been brought together in generations, you know?â she said.
Some walls divide communities. This one is bringing them together.
cottagecore vegans buying chickens bc tiktok told them chickens are cute and fluffee, then watching said chickens fucking obliterate any small mammal they see, and then getting upset about it has to be, hands down, some of the funniest shit in the world
besties, you bought fat velociraptors. and you're going to have to come to terms with that
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