was ready access to fresh water, wood and supplemental food resources.  The greater part of the year, possibly seven or eight months, was spent in resource gathering activities, including travel throughout aboriginal areas to visit seasonal resource locations.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, white settlers began to arrive, claiming vast tracts of land for farms and homesteads.  Responding to growing pressures the state and federal government called a meeting of local tribal leaders in Mukilteo.  As a result of the meeting, the Treaty of Point Elliott was signed on January 22, 1855.  The Treaty established the Swinomish Reservation as a permanent homeland for the Swinomish, Kikiallus, Samish, and Lower Skagit Tribes.  These four Coast Salish speaking Tribes are now referred to as the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community or simply the Swinomish Tribe.  In return for vast aboriginal lands, which stretched across the San Juan Islands and parts of Whidbey and Camano Islands and throughout the Skagit River drainage, the Tribes were promised education, monetary payments, medical assistance, and a reservation with adequate lands for their needs.

At the end of the nineteenth century, reservation land was taken out of communal tribal ownership and transferred to individual ownership.  Today, the Swinomish Tribe owns approximately 4% of the reservation land base and approximately 2,900 acres of the tidelands around the perimeter of the reservation.  Individual tribal members own 50% of the land base, approximately 20 percent of which is leased to non-Indians. 

For thousands of years the Swidubsh ancestors lived in harmony with the earth, sea, and animals in the area now referred to as Skagit, San Juan, and Island Counties.  Each family group had permanent villages and usual and accustomed areas for harvesting seafood and shellfish, gathering berries, roots, cedar, minerals, and other materials necessary for everyday life.  Each group had individual and shared areas for spiritual activities.  Contemporary concepts of land ownership were not recognized, though areas habitually utilized by certain groups were respected by members of other groups.  Modern methods of agriculture were not used because they were not required; the food was cultivated, grew and only needed to be gathered and eaten fresh or preserved by drying.  Salmon, gathered by a variety of ingenious methods, was an important resource base.

Villages and seasonal encampments were located along the coast or at the mouths of rivers and streams, and at springs where there