Overcoming Barriers at the Ballard Locks

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For weeks, our requests were met with silence and delay. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expressed concern that the event might be a protest or parade, which complicated the permitting process. But this was neither. It was a ceremonial walk — a spiritual gathering grounded in prayer, Indigenous lifeways, and collective healing. And we weren’t walking alone.

As Indigenous people of Turtle Island (the so-called Americas), we walked 2.2 miles in prayer for our undocumented relatives — those facing ICE raids, detention, and family separation. But this pain is not new. It echoes the history of boarding schools, forced removals, and broken promises.

The Ballard Locks — built in the early 1900s — severed river-to-sea migration, devastating salmon runs that fed and sustained Coast Salish nations for millennia. Their disappearance is not just ecological — it is spiritual. And the orcas are suffering too. Only 73 Southern Resident orcas remain. Without Chinook salmon, they are starving, dying, and disappearing.

To scientists, orcas are often reduced to numbers or colonial names.
To us, they are sacred kin. Tokitae  (Lolita) and Hugo were Southern Resident orcas captured from Puget Sound in the 1970s and held in captivity at Miami Seaquarium, where Hugo died from self-inflicted trauma in 1980 and Lolita remained in isolation for over 50 years before dying in 2023 without ever returning home.

As we crossed the Locks, we carried the weight of colonial family separation — from orca calves stolen from their pods, to Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at residential schools, to undocumented children the U.S. government has lost track of in detention. These are not isolated events.
They are all rooted in systems designed to sever what is sacred: family, land, language, and spirit. Our walk was not a spectacle. It was ceremony.
A prayer to remember. To protect. To heal. And to say: we are still here — and we will not be separated from what is sacred.

Led by Willard Bill, beloved Muckleshoot member and cultural educator, our steps followed a sacred rhythm.

The Muckleshoot Nation, on whose land and waters we walked, stood with us in prayerful solidarity. Their rights — protected by the Treaties of 1854 and 1855, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act — include the right to gather, to pray, and to uphold spiritual practices on their ancestral land.

When the Army Corps recognized the truth of our purpose — and the leadership of Muckleshoot elders — they honored those rights and opened the Locks.

That crossing wasn’t just physical.
It was ancestral. It was ceremony. It was a breakthrough.