The Suquamish use it, Don’t You?

Tribal Canoe Journey

Each summer the native tribes in the Pacific Northwest (USA) paddle their canoes to a village that is hosting a traditional potlatch. It’s a way to carry on traditions that would otherwise be lost to the modern world. We use MapInfo to make the journey safer, from the first planning phase to final day of canoe pulling.

Up and down the northwest coast, canoes were used much as we use automobiles today. They were traditionally carved from a very large red-cedar tree that was felled, split, hollowed then steamed and spread. The traditional knowledge of how to do that was nearly lost when, in 1989, a challenge was raised in the tribal communities that there would be a canoe trip to Seattle. It was
hugely emotional for everyone involved, and began the summer journeys.

Canoes are important to the coastal people of the Pacific Northwest, not only for their functional value, but because it was a key to the culture. These days, it’s a way for young people to reconnect with their traditions, and a reason to ask their elders why certain protocols are done in certain ways in the canoe. It’s a way and a reason to get healthy, to learn the spoken language, and meet other young people from other villages during the potlatches. Canoes have become a way to pass on traditional ways that make sense to young people, so they actually seek out that traditional wisdom and integrate it into their lives.

We at Suquamish have been involved with the canoe journeys since 1989, and we paddled a cedar dugout canoe 600 miles north into Canada in 1993 to the week-long potlatch at Bella Bella, British Columbia. We stopped at native villages along the way, following traditional protocol - it took us a month to get there. Since then, we’ve had at least one canoe on every summer pull, and now have seven tribal and family canoes.

We use MapInfo with digital nautical charts to plan canoe routes and stops, and provide geographic coordination for all the tribes. We have made daily guidemaps with MapInfo that indicate that day’s proposed route with distance, any possible hazards, lunch stops, emergency access points and an aerial photo of the destination so pullers have a sense of where they’re going. We bundle these together for the entire trip, print them on a color laser printer so the ink won’t run, and put them in a large ziplock bag for each canoe.

Several years ago we had a particularly challenging pull out the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific Ocean, then south along a rough and dangerous shoreline to the potlatch hosted by the Quinault people. All went well until the last day of the two-week pull, when a fogbank rolled over the canoes and created a very dangerous situation. In the sailboat we were using as a support boat, we pulled out the laptop and tried to run our usual PC navigation program. For some reason, it would not initialize. We put four canoes and their canoes under tow, and really needed to know where we (and the rocks) were. So we started MapInfo Professional, connected the GPS and ran the Blue Marble GeoTracker utility. That showed us where we were, right on the nautical chart. This allowed us to navigate safely along a truly perilous shoreline to the relative protection of Point Grenville, where we put the canoes ashore. We have a PowerPoint of that entire trip, which is really what we’re submitting for the award.

Check out more of the Unique and Unusual ways people are using MapInfo technology www.meridianawards.com and if you are even more interested in what people are saying about MapInfo and MapWorld check out www.mapinfo.com/openmic.