Muckleshoot Foods and Culture: Pre-20th Century Stkamish, Skopamish, Smulkamish, and Allied Longhouses

Food serves as a lens into the culture of a people. Traditional food systems reveal aspects about past, present, and future social, biocultural, and economic relations of a community. The peoples of Stkamish, Skopamish and Smulkamish longhouses whose descendants now make up the Muckleshoot Indian Nation have, for millennia, depended on a wide variety of food sources through reciprocal relationships between plants, animals, people, the land, and the cosmos. By honoring the cyclical nature of ecological systems and seasonal abundance, the Stkamish, Skopamish and Smulkamish developed food ways that were nourishing to humans and respectful of the environmental niche they inhabited. While researchers often place marine/mammal resources at the center of the Pacific North-west indigenous peoples’ diet and culture, less attention has been paid to the role that plants and wild game played. This historical food assessment, therefore, seeks to provide a more nuanced food narrative that describes the diversity that characterized the Stkamish, Skopamish and Smulkamish diet.