(soft music) [Presenter] Spirit of the Sxwo'le was our economy, our way of life.

- [Presenter] The belief is that the reefnet is like a womb and the salmon swimming in provide the spark of life to carry the people into a new season.

(water splashing) - [Presenter] It was really designed for this area and it was such an abundance of wealth.

- And so they capitalized on it.

- The State passed a law that said you couldn't have any fishing gear within a thousand yards of a fish trap.

- [Presenter] So Lummi brought the Alaska Packers Association to court.

- The case was decided against them.

(camera click) (urgent music) - The State of Washington infringed on our Sovereignty.

- The fish traps went away in the thirties, - [Presenter] The State got some money from the federal government to buy back licenses because there was too much production.

- Currently, we have the only tribal reefnet.

(camera click) - How are we gonna fix those historical events without any truth in reconciliation?

(soft music) (water splashing) - When I started studying anthropology, I really started learning from like a western lens.

You're going into other cultures and you're writing everything down, but studying at Western Washington University has taught me the values of anthropology and the progress it's taken since then.

Even here at Western Washington University in the seventies, archeologists and anthropologists were taking students out and digging up our grave sites as lessons, and so I just started working as a research assistant at Children of the Setting Sun Productions and seeing where I can make a difference.

- [Presenter] We identified this area as unique and one of the unique elements is this technology of reef net fishing.

- After graduation, I was looking for a project and outta nowhere we get this contact from Cameron Suttles, son of researcher anthropologist, Wayne Suttles.

(camera click) (soft music) He was decades ahead of his time.

- There was this kind of unhelpful trope about all those natives have assimilated so much, it's not worth- - Right.

- Doing anthropological research.

And Wayne comes through and he says, "That's not true."

(camera click) His research into how communities utilize natural resources collaboratively (camera click) and how that structured the inter-tribal relationships, the interpersonal relationships, (camera click) the inter-family relationships, was really critical to the points he was trying to make about a society (camera click) that was highly connected.

Now, what's interesting about Wayne's work is that he continues to bring that into the modern times and show the continuity of those cultural traditions into the present.

- And that's exactly what this research embraces.

It's not this static culture that was fading, but that it's very much alive and strong and growing.

(soft music) - It's kind of an amazing evolution.

That's what is highlighted in the way that this could be addressed and how informative this could be for readers.

- [Presenter] In 1951, Suttles finished his thesis statement, Reef Netters of The Salish Sea.

- If you read some of the beginning chapters and how he actually went around, knocked on doors and how he's a little scared (laughs), to talk to these old Indians and he took a pencil rather than a pen because if he fell in a creek, the ink might run and, you know, just the kind of like, how it was.

Reef Netters of the Salish Sea is my father's unpublished work that I've been working to help bring to publication.

(soft music) My dad came here to the San Juan Islands back in 1946.

By the time I was three or four years old, I was tagging along with him as well as my older brothers.

He would go and visit different villages and talk with some of the older people and interview them with his reel-to-reel tape recorder.

He wanted to understand how people lived in this area that participated in reefnetting as a common culture.

(camera click) After my father passed away, I was very motivated to help get his book to publication.

- There's a growing interest in indigenizing ethnographic research from the past.

- You know, Suttles' approach, Michael's approach and my approach are being integrated into this.

- What I see as a core opportunity for this potential publication is that we have the ability to tell a story about ethnography from the position of those who are often the subject of ethnographies.

- After going through the first wave of boarding school survivors, second wave of boarding school survivors, (camera click) Suttles expresses how excited they were to share this culture, that it will survive.

- Patrick George mentions when he knocked on the door that, "I'm glad you came.

"I've been expecting you, I'm the last one left."

- I just hope that everybody knows the consequences of not sharing your culture is not only do you risk losing it forever, but you risk other people claiming it forever.

(soft bright music) Through this collaboration, we can tell our story, who are the reef netters the Salish Sea?

This is who we are.

- The point I'm trying to make is that how this actually felt so right, you know, that I wasn't really sure where this was going.

And it wasn't until I went home and I looked at my father's manuscript again and I realized the very first sources that my dad talked to were Lummi.

(water splashing) There couldn't be anything more perfect than for his work to be published by a Lummi-owned production company, for them to be the organization that brings it to publication.

It's so beautiful that it comes full circle.

- People have Creator or people have God, ours is called the Changer.

(machinery rumbling) We call him Haus.

(fish splattering) He comes through and he changes what needs to be changed.

That, in a way, is very hopeful for me because it can be changed into something better.

Maybe not back, but into a state of health again, the way that it was before.

(soft music)