As soon as the Island County Historical Society Museum was built in 1991, the basement started filling up with history.

The basement was immediately designated as storage space to collect artifacts and other historic remnants and it’s remained that way ever since.

Well, until now.

Museum workers have been busy clearing out the basement to make room for a new permanent Native American exhibit to shine light on Whidbey Island’s earliest inhabitants.

The 1,400-square foot area will feature a large collection of stored-away pieces that represent the tribes that lived along the beaches of Penn Cove for about 10,000 years.

Special focus will be on the Lower Skagit people now of the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and the Snohomish, now part of the Tulalip Tribes.

Castellano is hoping the new “Native Peoples” exhibit will be open to the public by early January.

“History never sleeps. It keeps building and building,” said Rick Castellano, director of the Coupeville museum.

“We have 10,000 years of history we’re talking about. Fourteen thousand square feet is not big enough.”

Castellano said a large permanent exhibit for Native Americans seemed long overdue, especially considering that white settlers’ history on Whidbey pales in comparison. White settlement dates back to the mid 19th century.

Castellano didn’t want to allow a photograph for publication to spoil the exhibit’s centerpiece. It is a restored Native American canoe built in the 1850s that rests in front of an enormous, lit panoramic of Penn Cove.

The merged photographs were taken by noted Coupeville photographer M. Denis Hill, who used editing tools to remove homes, giving the vantage point Native Americans would have seen hundreds of years ago before white settlers built houses in the area.

“This is our ‘wow factor,’” Castellano said proudly, turning on a sound system that provided soft splashes of water.

The 28-foot long Snakelum Family Canoe once belonged to Chief Snetlun of the Lower Skagits. When his grandson, Charlie Snakelum, passed away in 1934, the canoe came to Coupeville and was put on display in a canoe shed on the grounds of the present-day county museum.

The cedar canoe later sustained considerable damage after being bolted to the roof of the shed.

It took extensive restoration work by three different woodcarvers, Gordon Grant, Jim Short and Steven C. Brown, over three years to save the canoe. The Swinomish and Tulalip tribes and Coupeville Arts and Crafts Festival contributed to the restoration project.

“It was just about ready to fall apart,” Castellano said.

The restored canoe was loaned to the Swinomish and put on display in the lobby of the Swinomish Casino & Lodge for more than a month this summer.

The canoe originally was carved from a red cedar tree estimated to be 600 and 800 years old.

“They did a good job on the restoration,” said Theresa Trebon, historian and tribal archivist for the Swinomish. “It was in pretty bad shape. It was outside so long. I think it’s wonderful that they’re putting the exhibit in the basement. I think it’s an intregal part of Whidbey Island’s past.”

She said most people’s knowledge of Native Americans on Whidbey is isolated to the much-publicized murder of Col. Isaac Ebey by a raiding tribe from Southeast Alaska in 1857.

“What’s great about it (the exhibit) is it goes beyond the whole Isaac Ebey Indian thing,” Trebon said. “It gives the public a chance to learn a much more complex, interesting story, which is great.”