Editor,

Thanks to all who contributed to another sensational Penn Cove Water Festival. The water festival provides a unique opportunity to get to know an ancient, rich culture hidden in our very midst of which there is often much confusion.

As I explain to folks new to canoe racing, for the Coast Salish people it is their equivalent of our baseball. It ties the culture together and is a way to teach important values: discipline, teamwork and sportsmanship.

Like baseball, participants are mostly young people and it is an important social event featuring salmon instead of hot dogs. But, for some of us, this event is more then an opportunity for fun, it’s a chance to be enlightened and entertained.

It is an opportunity to make some small reparation, to try to heal wounds that go back generations.

To soothe scars inflicted by the hubris and ignorance which attempted real and cultural genocide.

If you study history, you learn that Europeans viewed non-Christians as soulless animals. “Indians” were “wild” animals and negroes domesticated ones.

That lens allows us a clearer view of our own history and insight into some of our persistent problems.

Thomas Jefferson acknowledged this when he said, “I fear for my country when I think that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

And so in recognition of that reality we state publically before the races, that the land we are on is the traditional territory of the Lower Skagit people whose spirits still imbue the bays, forest and prairies here where they dwelt for millennia harmoniously with their environment.

It is a goal of the Penn Cove Water Festival to nurture our relationship with the original people of this land and commit, like them, to the stewardship of this sacred place.

Gary Piazzon,

Canoe Race Chairman

Coupeville