Rosalee Walz, a Chemakum Elder and chair of the Chemakum Tribal Council, addressed a packed-to-the-walls Carnegie Reading Room at the Port Townsend Public Library May 14 offering insights into her ancestral culture and history.

Walz opened by acknowledging how “we all come from different places, ways of knowing and experiences,” but were nonetheless brought together by “good intentions and spirits.”

Walz cited the ancient teachings of her peoples, passed down to her, which identified the Chemakum and Quileute as being the original tribes to inhabit this area’s lands, with no evidence they’d come here from another location.

“We were one nation, speaking the same language, covering the entire north end of the Olympic Peninsula for 10,000 years,” Walz said. “We hunted the mastodon and knew these lands intimately.”

Walz noted this runs counter to prior accounts accusing the Chemakum of being “interlopers” on their lands.

Walz also acknowledged the strife that had once existed between a number of Native American tribes in the area, as the Chemakum became an adversary that several of them shared in common as they vied for resource-rich territories, as well as for waterways that served as transportation passages.

At the same time, Walz recalled how the history of Indian boarding schools was painfully personal for her family, as she recounted how it wasn’t until her parents had already been married for 50 years that her Chemakum father shared with her mother, who was descended from Welsh stock, that he’d been forced to attend Indian boarding school.

By subjecting Native American children to short haircuts, and forbidding them to speak the language of their forebears, Walz pointed out that the purpose of the Indian boarding schools was for those children to “learn to be less Indian, and to be less” just in general.

Nonetheless when her family went digging for clams, and her sister initially refused to eat the clams, Walz credited her father with both easing her sister’s anxieties and reflecting tribal traditions by having them thank the clams for being eaten.

Likewise, as the area’s tribes were being forcibly “persuaded” to sign treaties that would turn their territories over to white settlers, Walz took pride in the Chemakum people being among those most reluctant to take part in negotiations which would prove less than favorable for the region’s Native Americans as a whole.

“We come from a long line of stayers,” Walz said, citing the Chemakum people’s resilience in the face of colonization and massacres that left many of their women and children enslaved.

For attendees interested in broadening their cultural and historic horizons even further, Walz recommended the book “Twilight on the Thunderbird: A Memoir of Quileute Indian Life,” by Howard Hansen, which Port Townsend Public Library director Melody Sky Weaver confirmed her library has in stock.

Walz concluded by offering optimistic tidings about efforts to rebuild a Dabob longhouse, including conversations with the Jefferson Land Trust, as well as to recruit canoe carvers who could restore canoe culture to the tribes who currently don’t take part in the canoe journey.