04/15/2026
🌱🌱🌱This morning’s featured nonprofit is Kwiaht’s Coast Salish garden and meadow restoration project at Cattle Point, in partnership with PKOLS. 🌱🌱🌱
Cattle Point (Tl’ikweneng, “the place of peas [lupines]”) was a summer fishing, gardening and gathering place for thousands of Lekwungen-speaking peoples from villages from Lummi and Samish islands and the San Juan Islands to Vancouver Island. Its bluffs and meadows would have been blue with the flowers of rare wild lupines and cultivated camas gardens.
After construction of the first lighthouse, however, the landscape was taken over by sheep and Eurasian pasture grasses, then torn up by motorbikes and dune buggies in the 1950s, and left neglected until it became part of the San Juan Islands National Monument in 2013. Kwiaht began mapping and treating weeds under a federal cooperative agreement in 2024 with contributions by the Youth Conservation Corps.
At the suggestion of Monument staff, Kwiaht and PKOLS now propose restoring a portion of the degraded meadow along Cattle Point Road, as a unique, culturally-informed demonstration of what the landscape was 175 years ago—and still could become, with careful replanting and stewardship over 5-10 years. The restored area will be an opportunity for trailside signage and interpretive activity reaching thousands of visitors (more than 100,000 walk the trail each summer). It will also be a launching pad for present-day Coast Salish families to reclaim a visible role in rebuilding the local ecosystem with culturally-significant native plants, in cooperation with local homeowners and island youth. 🌱🌱🌱
Give TODAY online at https://sjicf.fcsuite.com/erp/donate/create/grant?grant_id=21663!
