Earlier this month, nearly 50 teachers and administrators from at least eight school districts were on hand at Chief Kitsap Academy to review a Suquamish Tribe-focused social studies course middle and high school students.
The curriculum, decades in the making, traces the original names and locations of Suquamish villages around Puget Sound. It also covers the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott and the obligations it created for the U.S. government, present-day tribal governance, and how the tribe responds to environmental pressures. It’s lessons, centered in the Suquamish point of view rather than outside interpretations of tribal history, connect kids with names and places erased or altered by colonization and frame the treaty as a case study in U.S. foreign policy.
Approved by the Suquamish Tribal Council in March, the curriculum was developed for schools across the Tribe’s traditional territory.
According to a report from KUOW, Seattle Public Schools plans to start using the material with students after the return from winter break. The Suguamish Since Time Immemorial curriculum website shows that, along with Seattle schools, the tribe will begin using the curriculum in the 2026-27 school year. Bainbridge, Bremerton, Central Kitsap, Edmonds, Everett, Mercer Island, Mukilteo, North Kitsap, Penninsula, Shoreline, South Kitsap, and South Whidbey school districts.Â
“About time! I wish we could spread this kind of teaching more broadly,” Erik Nyquist commented on a curriculum annoucement by Native Peoples Network. “I’m old enough to remember when all we learned in school was that Columbus ‘discovered’ America and then white people came in and settled an ’empty’ frontier. They gloss over just why that frontier was empty.” The announcement received more than 500 positive comments.
The new curriculum is the result of a 2015 law which turned the statewide “Since Time Immemorial” curriculum into a requirement, pushing districts to partner with local tribes to offer local tribal versions. The state Board of Education’s 2026 compliance report found 85 of Washington’s 325 districts, or 26%, still haven’t met the requirement statewide.
Funding has been a persistent obstacle: the team worked primarily off a single $30,000 OSPI grant, and Lawrence is now asking districts on Suquamish territory to contribute $5,000 each to sustain the work. Middle and high school units for the curriculum are finished and in use; elementary-level material doesn’t exist yet and will need more funding and time to develop. Read more on about the curriculum.
