"Indian pilgrimage" reaches beach in triumph and tiredness

It's not easy doing things the Indian way.

This dawned on me about 20 minutes into paddling a 26-foot homemade cedar canoe across Puget Sound. It was 7 a.m., and already I'd done the hardest, fastest paddling of my life.

Then the skipper, a Quileute Indian named Liz Ward, inquired sweetly if the crew might be warmed up yet and ready to actually start pulling hard.

Ten hours later, our canoe the Tatakwit, minus two of its crew who succumbed to severe muscle cramps, beached wearily at Sand Point on Lake Washington with about 60 other Native canoes from around the Northwest and Canada.

Some had traveled for three weeks along hundreds of miles of watery "ancient highways." They had been beset by blisters and boredom, high waves and even death, as one person drowned when a Canadian canoe capsized in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

"It wouldn't be Indians if it wasn't hard," said Rob Satiacum, a 46-year-old Puyallup who invited me to paddle along for Monday's final stretch.

"What do they call it when they go to Mecca every year? That's what this is — the Indian pilgrimage," said Guy Capoeman, a Quinault Indian who had paddled 300 miles to reach Seattle, some of it in the open Pacific Ocean.

It's called Tribal Journey. From its beginnings in 1989, it has mushroomed into an annual event for coastal tribes. It's part endurance sport and outdoor adventure, for which some tribes now train year-round. It's also the year's biggest community gathering of coastal Indians.

On Monday, the canoes sprinted from Suquamish near Bainbridge Island across the Sound, through the Ballard Locks and into Lake Washington.

At least it felt like a sprint to me. This was no recreational boat trip. Crewing an Indian canoe is not all that different from a day in Marine boot camp.

"People are always saying 'Oh, look at the Indians, with their dugout canoes, they're trying to save themselves and their culture from going extinct,' " he said. "I don't like all that victim talk. Now you tell me, does this feel to you like we're on the brink of extinction?"

At that moment, we were standing amid several hundred shouting, chanting Native Americans as they hoisted hand-carved canoes, some 50-feet long, onto their shoulders to carry them into the water.

Earlier we'd been treated to a free breakfast, courtesy of the booming Suquamish Tribe's casino. All this week the canoeists and their support families will be hosted at Auburn's Muckleshoot Tribe, which is flush enough from its casino to hire event planners and throw a weeklong festival.

There's an almost giddy feeling among many Native Americans now. All those decades of being desperately poor are mostly over. When we passed through the Ballard Locks, with dozens of canoes bunched up together, the shouting, singing and banging of paddles seemed like it was about being proud, strong and happy, not a cry to reclaim something lost.

That said, some of the paddlers in my canoe said there's no better place than the open water to work on inner demons. None of what is going on is about you — it's all about working together to move the canoe — and so strangely it leaves you freer than ever to think about yourself.

Ted Franzen, an Ojibwe from North Dakota who lives in Tacoma, said he came on the trip because a heroin addiction had separated him from his people and he wanted to try to get them back, one stroke at a time.

"This is the medicine when a hard time comes," skipper Liz Ward said as we powered the canoe across the shipping channel in the middle of Puget Sound. "You can remember what it was like out here — how beautiful it was with the clouds and the water — and also how hard you worked to make it across.

"It will make each day a little easier because you did this."

Danny Westneat's column appears Sunday and Thursday. Reach him

at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.