Exhibit Celebrates Eastsound Salish Leader

Attend the Friendhship Feast on Saturday, July 27 at the Outlook Inn!

By Denise Wilk

A small log room at the Orcas Island Historical Society & Museum has been furnished with the look, smell and sounds of a Coast Salish home in Eastsound circa 1913.

The Orcas Historical Museum on North Beach Road feature’s Boston Tom’s home and the Salish culture — plan to attend the Friendship Feast on Saturday, July 27 from 1 to 4 p.m.

Not just any Native American home of that era, explains exhibit designer Russel Barsh, but specifically the home of “Chechilem, or Boston Tom”, the last leader of the Coast Salish neighborhood of Eastsound, who owned the reef net site at Point Doughty. Boston Tom lived at a time when half of the residents of Orcas Island were of mixed ancestry, and Coast Salish entrepreneur Henry Cayou owned the cannery at Deer Harbor.

“A century ago,” Barsh observes, “Native people were neighbors and co-workers on Orcas Island. “Their children attended county schools along with white children; they worked in canneries and sawmills; played baseball; then fought in the First World War.”

Boston Tom died and was buried in Eastsound in 1913. No photograph survives, so he is symbolically represented in the new exhibit by a top hat, walking stick, and Coast Salish woven cape.

Barsh based his reconstruction on interviews of Boston Tom’s granddaughter in the Lkungenung language a decade ago, recorded by Barsh and linguist Wayne Suttles on Orcas Island when she last visited her childhood home. “The thing to bear in mind,” Barsh says, “is that the leading Lkungenung men and women of Boston Tom’s generation were proper gentlemen and ladies with old-fashioned values that were not entirely unfamiliar to their white neighbors.”

They were practical people that wove cedar baskets, steamed split logs into canoes and smoked fish like their grandparents, but also surrounded themselves with conveniences, such as the phonograph and sewing machine seen in the exhibit. Barsh was assisted by Historical Society board member and exhibit chair, Denise Wilk and the expertise of Edrie Vinson, and by University of British Columbia graduate student Natalie Baloy.

This locally focused exhibit will complement the Burke Museum traveling exhibit “Coast Salish Bounty” that opened at the Historical Museum on July 20th.

Tickets are still available for the “Salish Bounty Friendship Feast” which is a benefit for the O.I.H. Museum and will be held on the grounds of the Historic Outlook Inn. Tickets are at the O.I.H. Museum or “Art of the Salish Sea” gallery next to “The Nest.”

The Feast is on the afternoon of Saturday, July 27, 1 to 4 p.m. Baked Salmon , Clams, Mussels, chicken , seasonal salad, blackbeerry cobbler are on the menu. Samish Elder Rosie Cayou will open with song, drumming for the health and connection to the Salish Sea. Samish Fry bread and jam will also be demonstrated out on the grounds. There will be speakers, exhibits and demonstrations on the grounds behind the Outlook Inn.

“Boston Tom’s Eastsound” exhibit and The Salish Bounty will be open at the Orcas Island Historical Museum until September 20.