Welcome • Read this first
There is a boathouse on the Whatcom shore. We are not going to tell you exactly where, and that is the first thing this place can teach you.
It is an old net shed with a new roof, and it works the way waterfront buildings have always worked here. Canoes are built in it, repaired in it, and stored in it through the winter, hulls up, breathing cedar. A two-bar loom stands at the north window where the light is honest. A barrel by the door holds cedar roots soaking until they remember how to bend. Anyone who shows up willing to sand a hull gets handed sandpaper.
The families who keep this building are Coast Salish, and their relatives, and their neighbors, which on this coast has always been a long list. The boathouse sits on no reservation and belongs to no single nation. That is not evasion. It is the point. What happens here belongs to the water, and the water connects everyone.
This site is the boathouse’s own record. The logbook we keep, the noticeboard by the coffee pot, the shelf of readings we hand to anyone who wants to understand what they are sanding, and the library that sends you onward.
Three doors
The Logbook, if you want the life of the place. Entries, dated, unhurried.
The Reading Shelf, if you came to learn. Eight readings and eight guides on Coast Salish art and the life it comes from. Free, sourced, no login, no deadline.
The Library, if you want the real doors. The books, the scholars, the teachers, the museums, and the places this site’s knowledge actually comes from.
One honest thing before you go in. This boathouse is a story. The knowledge on these pages is not. The line between the two is drawn carefully, and About This Story shows you exactly where it sits.
[CO-AUTHOR: a welcome in a Coast Salish language, with the nation and speaker credited, if and as wanted.]