Ребекка Фельд преодолела водную границу и посетила остров Сатурна, выполняя обещание, данное Россом Ньюпортом

Borders fall away: Rebecca Feld’s journey to Saturna Island fulfills a promise made on the water Published 1:30 am Thursday, August 27, 2026 Rebecca Feld had never set foot on Saturna Island. Her ancestors had — traveling by canoe between the San Juan and Gulf islands long before an international border cut through waters that once simply belonged to family. Last month, Feld finally made that crossing herself, and she says the trip would never have happened without one man’s promise: Ross Newport’s. “I can say 100% mission accomplished,” Feld said, reflecting on the trip, “because I would have no other, I would have no idea how to make that trip happen for myself to go to Saturna on my own.” She credits her local community for its support, but it was Newport, she said, who carried the effort across the finish line. “Ross made it so effortless and his kindness was just so genuine.” The journey traces back to last year’s Hands Across the Water flotilla, when Newport committed himself to reconnecting Indigenous families separated by the U.S.-Canada border — a border he insists doesn’t truly divide the people who have always called these waters home. That commitment culminated this year in Feld’s trip to Saturna for the Indigenous Film Festival on Saturna Island, where she was welcomed with a reception that included CBC television coverage and an invitation to speak publicly, extended by Tiffany Joseph, leader of the XAXE TEṈEW̱ Sacred Land Society’s Indigenous land restoration and stewardship program, after an elder’s traditional right to speak first was honored. For Feld, the emotional heart of the trip happened high atop East Point on Saturna, looking down at the islands, where she was struck by how close everything really was — Orcas Island only about 7 miles distant, and Waldron closer still. What appears on a map as an “amazing, impossible feat” — island-hopping by canoe — turned out, she realized, to be exactly how her family had always stayed connected, guided by tides and currents rather than fences. “It didn’t look as impossible after all,” she said. On Saturna, she also connected with a Saturna Island woman she’d never met, Shirlann Johnson of Cowichan and other indigenous heritage, discovering through shared family names that the two were related by marriage — a conversation, Feld said, best continued “over a cup of chowder and a piece of fry bread.” “Ross just made it happen,” Feld said simply. “He did fulfill that mission.” That mission, for Feld, is inseparable from a lifetime of work connecting Indigenous families to the services and support they need — work she only recently set down. Feld spent 16 years with the Puyallup Tribal Health Authority and another decade in patient registration at the Nisqually Health Clinic, handling the financial gateway through which families accessed Indian Health Service care, private insurance, Medicare and Washington’s Medicaid program. When COVID-19 hit, she shifted into the Nisqually Indian Child Welfare program, work she calls the most rewarding of her career. Over six years there, Feld helped oversee the well-being of roughly 70 children and young adults, from newborns to age 21, making sure they stayed culturally connected while their families worked toward reunification. “Every one of them, [the] kids … they would all call me granny,” Feld said. “I really loved it. It just fills my heart to be their grandma, their granny.” She retired from that role on July 1. Retirement, though, has simply redirected her energy toward the San Juan Islands, where her family has long maintained a homestead property. Feld now works with PKOLS pq̕áls Preserving Knowledge of Land & Sea, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting Indigenous knowledge and correcting the historical record across the San Juan Islands and the Salish Sea — its name borrowed from a sacred mountain across the water. The organization recently received a gifted canoe along with 20 milled cedar planks, enough to carve up to 40 paddles, and Feld hopes eventually to see a story pole raised at the Friday Harbor ferry landing welcoming visitors to STOLȻEȽ. Through it all, Feld returns to a single idea: There was never really a border at all. “There was no border,” she said. “To me, there is no border.” For Feld, that belief — the same one that carried Ross Newport’s promise across the water and back — is less a policy position than a description of how her family has always lived. “Everything was falling into place,” she said of the trip, “and this was such a wonderful opportunity and adventure.” Grateful, she added, is the key to everything.