Commentary: Lessons in history

How many sx̌wəbabš lived on Vashon Island before European colonization?

Answering this question is a story itself, revealing the ways historians interpret facts, make estimates and improve their craft. It’s also a story about an island that has been called home for a long time — and by many different people.

History is often a conversation about meanings and interpretations, and those conversations lead to new understandings of history. Sometimes, these conversations are with ourselves. This was the case with my [Bruce Haulman’s] own writing about the number of Native People living on Vashon before European contact and American settlement changed the world of the sx̌wəbabš, or Swift Water People, forever.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, as I began researching the history of Vashon-Maury Island and contemplating writing a history of this place where I live, I looked for information about the sx̌wəbabš. I spoke with with Brandon Reynon, then the Puyallup Tribe’s newly-hired anthropologist. Those conversations with Reynon and islanders Rayna Holtz and Laurie Tucker blossomed into a long and respectful relationship that led to the 2016 “Native People of Vashon Island” exhibit at the Vashon Heritage Museum.

That relationship helped develop the reimagining of the Museum’s permanent exhibit in 2024, and the current exhibit “An Island Revered: Honor and Friendship, the sx̌wəbabš and Sherman Family Collection” on display this summer at the Museum.

For over a century, the accepted belief by Euro-American settlers on Vashon Island was that there were no Native People living full-time on Vashon.

The Native People, known as the “Shomamish” in the Chinook jargon of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854, were reviled by Vashon’s first American settler historian Oliver Van Olinda, who wrote: “The first residents of the island were, of course, Indians, but they cannot be called “settlers’ because they did not settle. They wandered about from place to place, living where the living was easiest, on the game fish, clams and wild berries and roots. They did no farming and tended no flocks. They did nothing to materially better their own condition. The Puget Sound Indian, in fact, is classed, even by other Indian tribes, as about the lowest form of human existence.”

This self-serving and blatantly racist account supported early settler’s beliefs that they were claiming unoccupied land. The sx̌wəbabš were removed in 1854 and very few returned to live full time on the island. American settlers convinced themselves that the island was land where no one lived, and that the land was available for the taking.

Island historian Roland Carey edited out that statement from Olinda in his 1985 annotated “Van Olinda’s History of Vashon-Maury Island,” but did not add any significant information about the Shomamish.

When I started researching island history in the 1990s, working toward the publication of a “Brief History of Vashon Island” in 2016, I wrote that “The pre-contact Native population of Vashon is unknown, but I estimate it to have been about 650.”

This estimate developed from what I knew at the time, based on the Hudson Bay Company and Indian Agent censuses in 1838, 1853, and 1854; projections based on village size from Lucy Gerand’s testimony in 1928; and Richard White’s estimation technique based on the number of longhouses reported.

But this estimate was off — very off. In the intervening twenty-plus years since I made those initial estimates, I have learned much from Brandon Reynon, from continued research into the number of epidemics that swept through the Salish Sea in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and from the work of Rayna Holtz and Laurie Tucker in developing the 2016 exhibit.

The current estimate of the number of sx̌wəbabš or Swift Water People who inhabited Vashon-Maury Island before European contact is now about 12,000. This estimate, nearly 20 times my initial evaluation, comes from two sources.

First, the Puyallup Tribe — using traditional Indigenous knowledge based on oral histories, traditional ways of knowing, and accounts held in the memory of the puyaləpabš (Puyallup Tribe) — suggest that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 Native inhabitants.

Second is a Western way of thinking. Historians and demographers use data points accepted by other historians and demographers to try and estimate past populations by reverse estimation techniques, which “back into” an estimate by working from a commonly-accepted starting point back through known events to reach a reasonable estimate.

There are three data points available from the written record. First: a Hudson’s Bay census in 1838 that counted the population of the “Shone-mah-mish” at 315 total —100 males, 89 females, 56 boys, 69 girls and 1 slave, with ten guns and twenty-eight canoes.

Second: E.A. Staling, the Indian agent for Puget Sound, estimated in his 1852 Annual Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that the population on Vashon’s Island stood at 40. The third comes from when the sx̌wəbabš were removed from the island and imprisoned on Fox Island by the Territorial Government; George Gibbs, the Indian Agent in 1854, estimated the population then at 33.

These data provide our starting points, and show how repeated disease waves diminished the Native population after the 1750-1760 era — just before the introduction of European diseases. The population decline from 1838 to 1854 is consistent with epidemics of influenza in 1838, fever/ague in 1839, measles in 1848, and smallpox in 1853. Most historians estimate the death rate in each epidemic was between 30% and 50% of the population, with some estimates as high as 60%. Ned Blackhawk’s seminal history “The Rediscovery of America (2023)” documents the devastating toll disease exacted on Native American populations across North America.

If we use this same estimation technique and work backwards from the 1838 census figure of 315 sx̌wəbabš, through each wave of disease, we arrive at a 1750-1760 estimate of between 6,591 and 20,160 sx̌wəbabš before contact with European diseases — with a mid-point estimate of 11,529 sx̌wəbabš.

This mid-point estimated population figure is remarkably close to the Puyallup Tribe’s estimate of 12,500 sx̌wəbabš (between 10,000 and 15,000 sx̌wəbabš).

Reynon, now the Puyallup Tribe’s Director of Historic Preservation, called the similarity between my and the Tribe’s conclusions fascinating. Western science often discounts traditional ways of knowing as being “unscientific” or “not reliable” or “non-empirical” and thus inferior. What we are learning is that traditional Indigenous knowledge is a different but an equally valid way of knowing.

The 2020 census counted 11,055 residents on Vashon-Maury Island. It is instructive to think about what the island would have looked like before the first waves of European diseases swept the island from the 1770s to the 1850s and decimated the population of the sx̌wəbabš, killing more than 99% of the island’s inhabitants in less than 80 years. It is also instructive to consider that once American settlement of the island began in the 1860s, it took nearly 160 years before the population reached the level it had prior to contact.

What can we do with the knowledge that the same number of people could live on the island 250 years ago, with a reduced ecological footprint? What lessons are there in how the sx̌wəbabš were able to concentrate around Quartermaster Harbor while we now spread over the entire island, concentrating businesses and shops near the center? And how we can learn from this past and ensure the decimation of an entire population does not occur again?

Bruce Haulman is an island historian. Terry Donnelly is an island photographer.