Coast Salish Speaker: Althea Wilson

Althea Wilson is a documentary filmmaker from the Lummi nation. She will be screening her film “Revitalizing Cultural Knowledge and Honoring Sacred Waters,” which documents the oral history of the Lummi people who fished and lived at the mouth of the Nooksack River. The film focuses primarily on life in the Lummi fishing villages on the banks of the Nooksack River between 1925 and 1967, after the Relocation Act. The film’s intent is to contribute to the preservation of knowledge and to share the story of the Nooksack River, and its continued significance to the Lummi People, who still fish and hold sacred the land at the river mouth. Much attention has been paid to the significance of the Salish Sea to Coast Salish tribes, says Ms. Wilson, but less is known and acknowledged about what a spiritual, cultural, and life-sustaining resource the Nooksack River was. The video was initiated as Althea Wilson’s capstone project for her Bachelor of Science in Native Environmental Studies at the Northwest Indian College in 2017.