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McKenzie Clark and Naomi Williams have been selected by Soroptimist International of La Conner (SILC) for the 2020 Dixie Otis Memorial Award: $2,000 grants to full time La Conner teachers who are concurrently pursuing their master’s degrees. The award was created with memorial donations honoring the life of Dixie Otis, who died in December 2018. Clark was hired as the band and choir director in 2016. He is working for a Master of Music in Music Education at Central Washington University. As a teacher who is also a student, he hopes to model l...
Last Wednesday the attendance record was broken at the sixth annual March Against Addiction at the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. Due to the pandemic, everyone had to be in a vehicle to participate. A staging area was set up on the SITC’s ball field. Participants drove up to a check in booth where they were given a T-shirt with the motto “This Has To Stop” on it. This year’s design was by Ricardo Lopez. A NARCAN booth was onsite as well, distributing revival kits. Some participants taped p...
On Wednesday, August 19, I drove through hell. The day started well enough. I woke up in a lovely pine forest near Mount Shasta. The night before, I had watched the sun set on the mountain and the stars come out. By breakfast, the mountain was enveloped in smoke. As I left the Siskiyou mountains, the smoke thickened, darkened and filled the wide Sacramento Valley. After Redding, I can usually see the Sierras about 25 miles on the west, to my left and the Coast Range about 20 miles to my right,...
Town Councilmember John Leaver, citizen Rick Dole are leading a group that gets an E for effort for their ad hoc rallying of merchants and residents to shop – and eat – locally and late Friday, Sept. 4. Let’s rally around our merchants to kick-off the Labor Day weekend. We can all take some of the monies we are not spending traveling and recreating and buy ourselves or families or friends a gift and treat ourselves to dinner out. Make it a weekend-long pleasure to walk First and Morris Streets and keep our local dollars local. L...
He is a musician, a chef, a craftsman and a painter. Now Camas Logue is carving out a new niche in his adopted hometown. The 36-year-old Portland native, who resides with his wife, Katherine, on North First Street, has spent much of August helping carve three ceremonial cedar totem poles that will be installed near the Swinomish Tribal Community’s signature cedar hat pavilions. Logue passed his first traditional carving test with flying colors – and not just those he applied to the stylish migrating salmon images that highlight the p...
Back-ups on town streets and roadways around La Conner last Wednesday were not the usual summer tourist traffic but especially troubling, as was its cause: a horrific double fatality head-on collision on the SR 20 Duane Berentson Bridge over the Swinomish Channel. The two vehicle, wrong way head-on collision killed Jill Powell, of Mount Vernon, and Raymond Koladycz, of Oak Harbor, who drove his Toyota Highlander westbound on the eastbound span. Circumstances of the two-vehicle collision were...
It was just over a half century ago that the Shelter Bay development, which some predicted would transform then sleepy La Conner into the Carmel of the Northwest, both literally and figuratively changed the local landscape. That is when Osberg Construction of Seattle was in the midst of dredging millions of yards from what had been known as Indian Bay to create the present harbor and moorage area that serves as a visual anchor for the 420-acre planned residential community. The population now...
It was a good weekend in the La Conner area both in terms of weather and on the coronavirus front. The Swinomish Public Health Team confirmed Monday there were no new cases of COVID-19 on the reservation from Aug. 7-9, though cautioning there are still test results pending. There had been one new case reported Friday morning from the prior 24-hour cycle. The Swinomish Medical Clinic has hosted a series of drive-thru testing sites, the most recent being yesterday (Tuesday) morning, making possible the regular and updated posting of coronavirus...
The Swinomish Medical Clinic is again hosting a drive-through COVID-19 testing site after tribal public health officials confirmed seven positive cases for the coronavirus in a public notice released Monday. “Several of the individuals are asymptomatic, meaning they do not have any symptoms of the illness,” the release stated. Testing ran last Wednesday-Friday and started Tuesday. An end date has not been set, staff on the site said Tuesday. The Swinomish Public Health Team is contact tra...
Coronavirus cases in Skagit County topped 800 – 826 – Monday. County deaths are at 21, a 40% increase in four weeks, from a total of 15 on July 7, a figure that had held steady since May 15. These are both high and increasing numbers. This is bad, and bad news, and not just for the infected people and their families, friends and employers. An early July outbreak at the Mira Vista elder care facility accounts for the deaths. The huge jump in cases – the count was 449 on June 5, the day the County moved into phase 2 of the...
It is summer and time to be more careful about outside burning. The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community issued a burn ban June 24, as has the Skagit County Fire Marshall. Environmental conditions are such that fires can spread out of control and impact air quality with smoke. Good air quality is especially important this year since COVID-19 affects the respiratory system, and we want to protect our lungs from any additional sources of irritation. SITC has the authority to call a burn ban independently of Skagit County, according to our own...
This year’s primary election has more candidates than can be covered in the Weekly News. Get past the 36 candidates for governor and drill down to the contested election contests close to home. You can send Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, back to Washington or you can send him packing. At the other end of the ballot are three candidates for Skagit County Superior Court Judge, Position 3. The basic information here is a start for researching contenders for local and regional offices not highlighted the last two weeks. Voting can be hard work. C...
The Washington State Legislative District 10 is one of the few competitive districts in the state this election. The Position 1 seat has four Democrats and one Republican hoping to replace retiring longtime Rep. Norma Smith, R-Clinton. Dave Paul, D-Oak Harbor, holds the Position 2 seat, which he wrested from Rep. Dave Hayes by just over 700 votes in 2018. Sen. Barbara Bailey, R-Oak Harbor, retired last fall from the District’s Senate seat. Ron Muzzall, a farmer from Oak Harbor was appointed t...
In Skagit County, the Board of County Commissioners is the legislative authority and administrators of several County operations. They adopt the annual budget, levy taxes and set five department budgets: emergency services, health parks, planning and roads. They legislate ordinances “concerning the general welfare of the County.” They also have quasi-judicial duties. The Commissioners are partisan elected officials. Candidates are nominated in the primary election, by ballots cast only the...
Rich Stewart is no stranger to La Conner, having visited here several times during a long career in public schools marked by stops all over Washington state. He was hired last week to serve as interim superintendent of La Conner Schools, filling a role that has defined much of his more than four decades in public education. “Being an interim superintendent has been a good thing for me,” Stewart, who enjoys a statewide reputation, told the Weekly News on Thursday. “I hope I can help with La Conne...
The Honorable Patricia Paul has been reappointed as a tribal court appeals judge with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, in Grand Ronde, Oregon. This is her third appointment to the bench for Grand Ronde. She is a member of the Inupiaq Tribe. Paul was reappointed to the three-member panel along with Robert Miller. Paul received her law degree from Seattle University School of Law. She practices law in La Conner. Paul is a business and estate-planning lawyer specializing in land use law and federal Indian law. She lives on the Swinomish...
The tradition continues. A glorious, loud two-hour-plus July 4th firework show was sent up from perhaps a half dozen locations on the west bank of the Swinomish Channel, Reservation Road and further west, probably including Snee-oosh Beach Saturday, as Native firework vendors again shared the bounty of their leftover inventories. Clusters of people found places on the boardwalk, from Hellam’s Vineyard down to Calico Cupboard. As early as 8 p.m. families set up from the end of Caledonia Street an...
Saturday, June 27 8:22 p.m.: On the road again – Car club was parked at the boat ramp. They were asked to leave and cooperated. Boat Launch Rd., Swinomish Reservation.Saturday, June 27 8:22 p.m.: On the road again – Car club was parked at the boat ramp. They were asked to leave and cooperated. Boat Launch Rd., Swinomish Reservation....
La Conner’s High School seniors, every one of them, graduate with this distinct honor: Never has anyone, or any school class, been rocked and roiled by a spring like this one. Before March it was impossible to imagine finishing school without going to class. Every ritual and tradition vanished: their senior trip, prom and graduation ceremony are just the tip of the iceberg of their losses. The one lesson, perhaps learned, usually takes years to master: Life is not fair. La Conner’s seniors got a crash course and were force-fed that coarse mat...
Through the years Janie Beasley has been lauded locally for having shown an enduring spirit while working on the Swinomish Reservation, in Skagit County and at La Conner Schools. Now that enduring spirit is being recognized by the Seattle-based Native Action Network. Beasley, a former longtime La Conner School Board member, is among four recipients of the organization’s 2020 Enduring Spirit Award. Becky Bendixen (Unangax), Renee Swan-Waite (Lummi), and Sondra Segundo (Haida/Katzie) have also been selected for the honor. “The Enduring Spi...
Renae Paisley’s opinion piece in last week’s paper left me both angry and disheartened. She insists that the measures initiated to help control the Covid-19 pandemic – which to date has killed more than one hundred thousand people in the U.S – are simply an intolerable intrusion on her individual freedom. “Any ordinary and healthy individual should weather the storm” she writes. That is generally true, but it is also true that an asymptomatic carrier can pass the virus on to others. “I will not be wearing a mask in the stores, n...
Sally Wilbur kept secret until the last minute a birthday party parade for her 17-year-old son Danny “Dano” Rapada Sunday afternoon. But in that last minute the surprise was revealed to the guest of honor in a big way. A dozen local fire, police and emergency medical services vehicles with horns and sirens blaring, followed by a long serpentine of honking cars and trucks, twice circled past Rapada seated in a wheelchair at the front of his driveway on Swinomish Reservation to drop off a bev...
Names are sacred, some more than others. On both sides of Swinomish Channel, the name John K. Bob has been revered for more than seven decades. Bob, who had been a popular La Conner High student from Swinomish, was a U.S. Army Medic Tech Sergeant when killed in battle in Germany near the end of World War II. The Swinomish Tribal Community baseball complex, developed in 1938 through the Works Progress Administration, was named for Bob during special Memorial Day ceremonies eight years later....
In April 17, 2020, Lisa Marie Wilbur qualt-to-sah made her final journey. Lisa was a strong native woman with great faith and strong teachings from her elders. The legacy of her Wilbur and Charles families was embedded in her character and her spirit. Lisa was born on June 10, 1955 in Mt. Vernon WA to Claude Wilbur Sr. and Marie Charles. She was raised with her brothers and sisters on the Swinomish Reservation. She attended La Conner Schools. Lisa was always a Daddy’s girl. She was the one that...
Technology is helping bring people and ideas together even as social distancing has become the norm in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. The latest example was an hour-long remote panel discussion conducted on the Zoom video conferencing platform in La Conner Thursday afternoon. Town, school and civic leaders logged on to share ways in which they are moving forward in the midst of a pandemic that has ground the economy to a halt. One theme that emerged is those not laid off or furloughed at present are actually working harder outside the...
