Harvesting shellfish is an important cultural and economic activity for coastal Indigenous communities throughout the Salish Sea. However, for the Lhaq’temish People of Lummi Nation, upstream agricultural pollution has rendered this inherent right impossible for almost two decades. In an attempt to reopen the shellfish beds, Lummi Nation leaders developed the Portage Bay Partnership, which aims to address the upstream pollution problem through relationship building and shared connection to place. The partnership brings to light several key points: (1) efforts to integrate different community views of place to develop a relational approach to shared water governance, (2) the use of legal tools to incentivize relationship building, and (3) the continued challenges associated with competing governance frameworks and worldviews. This partnership opposes a system that has been set up to systemically exclude or disenfranchise Indigenous communities, replacing a governance model based on acquired rights with one that prioritizes relationships and responsibilities.

This article builds on regional environmental governance (REG) scholarship to explore alternatives to conventional transboundary agreements. Specifically, we use two narratives to tell the story of one river variously known as Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna, or Swah’netk’qhu, and, more recently, the Columbia River. We suggest that the state-led narrative of the signing and implementation of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty has obscured Indigenous narratives of the river—a trend replicated in most scholarship on transboundary environmental agreements more broadly. In exploring these narratives, we: situate the silencing of Indigeneity in the 1964 Columbia River Treaty; highlight the reproduction and amplification of that silence in the relevant literature in the context of strengthened Indigenous rights; and explore what a multilateral—as opposed to binational—approach to environmental agreements might offer practitioners and scholars of REG.