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Few have as much to celebrate these days as Katherine Paul. The daughter of local residents Kevin and Pat Paul is an acclaimed vocalist whose music was featured in a recent National Public Radio (NPR) interview with correspondent Ailsa Chang. She’s also a newlywed. And hers were no ordinary nuptials. Katherine, 30, and Camas Logue, 31, both of Portland, were wed earlier this month on the banks of the Columbia River, each having arrived on tribal canoes, an 11-minute crossing in the p...
Both sides in the La Conner School district turmoil agree that the administration has, at the least, not done a good job in their job of managing the staff or communicating clearly to them or to the community. Superintendent Whitney Meissner has acknowledged that she has not brought unity to the district and community. The school board realizes it took too long to respond to staff at summer’s start. The administration side hopes to repair the damage by commitments to empathy and relationship building. The unions, teachers and support staff, f...
The Hunting & Gathering team captured another photo of a black bear on the Swinomish Reservation last week. Remember that most bears are inherently scared of people and will usually run from human encounters. We have no reason to think this bear will behave any differently. We have not had any reports of conflict (bear getting into garbage, etc.). Please review information from the Washington Department Fish and Wildlife website below on how to prevent conflict with black bears and help us keep this bear out of trouble. Primarily, manage garbag...
A single bald eagle circled overhead as the canoes began to land at Swinomish Monday. A good sign. It was originally estimated that upwards of 5,000 attendees and participants would converge upon the landing site, located at the three cedar hat pavilion. While there is no clear way to calculate a final number, by all accounts the estimation was not far off. Sunday, Tulalip hosted the journey with a reported 65 canoes landing on their beaches. Early Monday morning the canoe families re-entered...
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community will contribute $750,000 toward the construction of a new library, the La Conner Regional Library District announced Monday. The facility, located at 520 Morris Street, will be named the La Conner-Swinomish Library. The grant supports the building’s construction over the next two years. Projected opening date is in the fourth quarter of 2021. The library is designed to be a multi-cultural resource center for information and learning. It will double the size of the current building, be wired to provide h...
As told to Anne Basye Farmer, rockhound, horseshoe club founder, birder, hunter, carver, husband, dad and granddad, Fred Mesman will be 95 in August. The patriarch of the Mesman Dairy at Chilberg and Dodge Valley Roads came to LaConner in 1942 when Dutch farmers on Whidbey Island were displaced by Ault Field. The Mesmans were the only family that came to LaConner. We moved from a Dutch community into a Swede community, with Oles and Svens and so forth. I had never heard those names before. But...
Warm weather, warm memories. It was a perfect combination for those who gathered at La Conner area cemeteries on Memorial Day to honor deceased veterans and departed loved ones. A large sun-splashed crowd at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery was greeted by Rev. Don Robinson, who said the occasion was an opportunity to embrace both the past and future. “We look back with gratitude,” he said, “for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. We’ve inherited much and have much for which to be g...
Dixie Otis’ death last December was a shock and a huge loss to the greater La Conner community. A charter member of the La Conner Soroptimist Club, and its co-president, Otis was an even longer term teacher, both in and out of the classroom. The Club, and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, recognized Otis and her family last Wednesday at a dinner at the Swinomish Yacht Club. The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community honored Otis that evening by presenting $5,000 to the Club: “Dixie Louise Oti...
There was a time, not all that long ago, when dentistry on Swinomish Reservation was conducted in a single-wide trailer by young practitioners using outdated instruments. Tribal officials today like to think of those days as ancient history. That view was reinforced with the much-anticipated grand opening and blessing of the gleaming new expanded Swinomish Dental Clinic Thursday morning. An overflow crowd wedged into the facility, located in the shadow of the iconic Swinomish totem pole on...
Ryan Booth will soon have the rare opportunity to both study and make history at the same time. This after the La Conner High alum, now a doctoral candidate at Washington State University, was selected earlier this month for a prestigious J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award. Booth has been approved by the Fulbright Board to research comparisons between U.S. Native American soldiers and Indian auxiliaries of the British Raj from the mid-19th century to the onset of World War II. Booth,...
The three points raised in Bruce Elliott’s letter are incomplete to say the least. Please allow the La Conner School District (LCSD) and the Swinomish Tribe to jointly set the record straight. State funding does not fully support LCSD’s budgetary obligations With regard to the “McCleary Fix,” the state has made significant progress toward meeting its legal duty to fully fund basic education. Paying teachers a living wage is unquestionably a part of funding basic education. In addition, school districts are required to provide – and pay...
Laural Ballew studied history while a student at La Conner High. These days she’s making history. Ballew, an enrolled member of the Swinomish Tribal Community, created and chaired the Department of Tribal Governance and Business Management at Northwest Indian College. And now she’s blazing new trails. The 1974 La Conner High grad is Western Washington University’s first Executive Director of American Indian/Alaska Native and First Nations Relations and Tribal Liaison to the President. In that role, she represents the WWU president and board...
It is levy “season” again for some Skagit County public schools, including La Conner. Some unique circumstances affecting the La Conner school district need to be examined before the proposed levy deserves community endorsement: First, the “McCleary Fix” was supposed to reduce/eliminate local school tax levies by “fully funding basic education.” To pay for McCleary, the state’s share of local property taxes was increased. The LCSD committed the majority of new state monies to raise teacher salaries – the highest in the county, as I...
Ballots went into the mail Tuesday to La Conner school district residents for replacing the school levy. The proposed rate for this educational and operational programs levy is $1.50 per thousand, a reduction of almost one dollar of assessed valuation. It is not a new tax. The two-year levy will provide $1,741,210, with $870,605 collected in each 2020 and 2021. The total school tax rate is $4.25 per thousand with the current bond. Funds are targeted for safety, extra-curricular activities, food services, highly capable program, special...
Really, Allan? “The Ghost of Sandy Stokes” as a subhead in your lengthy essay in last week’s paper? While lamenting the Swinomish government’s inability to tax more people you didn’t mention that the tribe’s government budget is around $50 million per year. The tribe already imposes taxes on the non-tribal members who are also paying to lease the reservation land under their homes. According to the 2016 annual report that Swinomish published, money allocated to the tribe’s government totaled $49,871,072 – millions of it funded by tax...
Fall roared out of the Salish Sea region with winds of up to 60 mph last Thursday, darkening all or parts of Island, Kitsap, Skagit and Whatcom counties served by Puget Sound Energy. In La Conner, the windstorm came without rain. About 1,600 greater La Conner residents were among the 120,000 people in Skagit County without electricity for up to 18 hours. La Conner lost power at 11:05 a.m. The lights returned in Town at 6:49 p.m. It was 2:22 a.m. before power was restored in Shelter Bay and south...
It’s true that there is a “tax problem” on the Swinomish Indian Reservation, but it is much larger than the Great Wolf Lodge tax case that everyone has been hearing or reading about lately. For decades, the Swinomish Tribe has faced at least four separate but related tax problems that went largely unnoticed in the Town of La Conner until the impact of the Great Wolf Lodge decision that invalidated a state tax on the permanent improvements of lessees on federal trust land was felt by property owners of fee lands both here in town and on the r...
The next chapter in Swinomish carver Kevin Paul’s often cutting-edge career will be written by himself. And it’s quite a story to tell. Paul, whose carving has been featured on the Discovery Channel and a wide range of publications, is among those artists invited to contribute to “The Barn Shows: In Their Own Words,” a much-anticipated book project being compiled by Dick and LaVonne Reim of Fir Island. After being the subject of numerous scripts and articles, Paul now has the opportu...
Many La Conner School District voters and most of its students live in homes on land that the district does not tax. We were told the so-called Great Wolf Lodge decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 2013 is why more than 930 homes, mostly in Shelter Bay, were removed from the county tax rolls in 2015. That decision applied to Confederated Tribes of Chehalis Reservation vs. Thurston County. In that case, the tribe is the majority owner of the Great Wolf Lodge buildings that sit on its land. In 2008 Chehalis sued Thurston...
Naval Air Station Whidbey came into existence during World War II, and in the seventy years since, local communities have partnered with the U.S. Navy to protect our national security. Naval personnel, active and retired, have always been welcomed here for their contributions to the region’s civic and economic life. The Navy’s role as a good neighbor has come to an end, however, as more and more people become, in military terms, “collateral damage.” Since the Navy’s introduction of the F-18 Growler, these jets roar overhead day and night, ma...
Without discussion, the La Conner School District Board of Directors unanimously approved placing a two-year levy totaling $1,749,210 before its voters at its monthly meeting Monday. The resolution states the funds will “pay part of the cost of educational programs and operations support of the District.” Draft language the Board discussed at its Nov. 5 study session stated monies are for “programs and operations which are not funded or not fully funded by the State:” Later in the meeting, when Channel Drive resident David Buchan asked an unre...
The recent article about the Swinomish totem poles was of great interest to me, as I was there when the original poles were dedicated in 1938. I was eight years old and with my parents and sisters had driven up from our home in California to visit my grandfather, Andrew “Carpenter” Johnson, at the family farm on Beaver Marsh Road. One Saturday during our visit the party line telephone in the kitchen rang, and the caller told us that Eleanor Roosevelt would be in La Conner that very afternoon. My mother dressed my little sisters and me in our...
Kevin Paul is helping history repeat itself a second time. Nearly 30 years ago, before he became a nationally renowned carver featured on the Discovery Channel, Paul joined family members in creating a replica of the famed Swinomish totem pole unveiled as part of a major Washington State Centennial celebration on the local reservation. These days Paul is serving as lead craftsman and mentor to two of his former La Conner High carving students charged with refurbishing the weathered pole, whose...
For the first time in almost forty years, the Swinomish Tribe lowered a well-known landmark on Friday: the 1989 Centennial Totem Pole. The carving, created with Washington State Centennial funds, replicated the original totem carved in 1938 by Swinomish Tribal member Charlie Edwards and assistants. The Tribe permanently lowered that first pole, which stood on the corner of Snee-oosh and Reservation roads for 45 years, in 1983 due to rot and insect damage to its base. They then removed the...
Last week art, ceremony and truth telling were ongoing in our little town. Significant voices spoke on both sides of the Swinomish Channel. On the Reservation Thursday the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community welcomed everyone to a luncheon feast and then their Canoe Family, elders and four chosen youth led the gathering down to the water for the Blessing of the Fleet and the First Salmon Ceremony. In Maple Hall, students and audiences gathered Thursday through Saturday as poets seeped into La Conner’s reality. Friday it was students in w...
