Wild Woods

“Camas and cow potatoes, we still use them in our Winter ceremonies,” Ken Hansen said. Lewis and Clark learned that the coastal tribes balanced their fish with roots. “Here he treated us with a root, round in shape, and about the size of a small Irish potato, which they call wappatoo,” Clark wrote. The other root staple was the camas bulb, which Samish women dug with “digging sticks,” from beds they replanted by breaking off the tops of the plants and rooting them in the earth. Camas is a starchy, sweet-tasting bulb and the Samish used “all sorts of sweet bushes to infect it” with further sweetness, plants such as kelp blades, sword ferns, and alder bark to make it red.