Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center and the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe are pleased to announce a partnership built on our shared goals and values around caring for the land and for community. We seek to spread awareness of how people across our region can respect, restore, and protect Snoqualmie Ancestral Lands and the earth we all depend on. And we seek to share the knowledge and resources we draw from the land—with each other, with Tribal Members, and, where appropriate, with the public.

Caring for Native Plants

This partnership builds on nearly a decade of growing collaboration and exchange between the Tribe and Oxbow. In 2018, as Oxbow was growing 70,000 native plants for the meadow outside the new Burke Museum, Snoqualmie Tribal leadership joined the Museum’s Native American Advisory Board at Oxbow’s Native Plant Nursery for an intertribal blessing. This visit led to conversation between Nursery staff and the Tribe’s Environmental and Natural Resources team, and eventually to our current collaboration on growing plants for restoration work as well as best practices in ecologically responsible and culturally respectful seed collection, propagation, and plant care.

Nourishing Communities

Since 2019, Oxbow has graciously served the Snoqualmie Canoe Family as a rest stop while travelling their traditional waterways during the intertribal Canoe Journeys. The hospitality of hosting a shared meal has been appreciated during those long hard pulls while the Canoe Family travels the Snoqualmie River from Fall City out to open water, practicing the ways of their Ancestors.

Sharing Food

From 2021-2023, as part of a grant-funded farm-to-school purchasing program, the Snoqualmie Child Development Center collaborated with Oxbow’s agriculture team to bring fresh, organic produce to the youngest members of our community through weekly deliveries of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables. In 2025, as Oxbow began donating all of the produce it grows, that connection led to a conversation with the Tribe’s Elders Program and the start of monthly produce distributions at Elders Luncheons, now ongoing. Beyond conventional produce, in the years ahead, Oxbow seeks to cultivate fields of camas (c̓abid) and wapato (spəqʷulc) with the Tribe so that Tribal Members can eventually harvest these culturally significant traditional foods.

Sharing Knowledge

As we look forward together, Oxbow is eager to deepen opportunities with the Snoqualmie Tribe for collaboration on educational projects. The Tribe’s Lushootseed native plant guide will inform upcoming updates to Oxbow’s native plant resources.

Educating our broader community is an important way we can express our shared values. We seek to collaborate on programming and resources that help people learn more about the ecosystems, plants, and animals around us in a way that centers the interrelationships of all species rather than simply centering humankind. In this way, we can advance our shared goals of reducing human impact on the land and waters, coexisting with wildlife and plant life, and honoring our relationship with the Snoqualmie River and its influence on all the living things around it.

If you’d like to learn more about supporting ecological resilience through habitat restoration and native plants, we hope you’ll join the Snoqualmie Tribe and Oxbow at two upcoming free events: the Tribe’s Earth Day event with the Mt. Si Green Team  on Saturday, April 25, and Oxbow’s Spring Native Plant Festival on Saturday, May 2, 2026.