In 18, Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens negotiated treaties with the native inhabitants of Puget Sound. This network of family ties gave Muckleshoot ancestors access to fishing, hunting, and gathering sites throughout a broad area, extending from the west side of Puget Sound across the Cascade Crest. While downriver people intermarried with the Suquamish and other groups along the Sound, people on the upper reaches of the drainages also intermarried with groups east of the Cascade Mountains. This network of kinship ties in addition to tying together ancestral Muckleshoot villages within the Duwamish watershed, extended across watersheds and east of the Cascade Crest. Village groups were linked by ties of marriage, joint feasting, ceremonies, commerce, and use of common territory. In the summer they dispersed and moved to summer camps and resource gathering areas, where they joined with families from other winter villages in fishing, clamming, hunting, gathering, and other pursuits. In the winter when travel was difficult they lived in villages along the region’s watercourses relying upon stored foods and local resources. Like all native people of Western Washington, Muckleshoot ancestors depended on fish, animal, and plant resources and traveled widely to harvest these resources. Today, the United States recognizes the Muckleshoot Tribe as a tribal successor to the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup bands from which the Tribe’s membership descends.

Following the Reservation’s establishment in 1857, the Tribe and its members came to be known as Muckleshoot, rather than by the historic tribal names of their Duwamish and Upper Puyallup ancestors. The Tribe’s name is derived from the native name for the prairie on which the Muckleshoot Reservation was established. The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe is a federally recognized Indian tribe whose membership is composed of descendants of the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup people who inhabited Central Puget Sound for thousands of years before non-Indian settlement.

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