Before Seattle was Seattle, before the ships came, a band of Coast Salish people lived on the shores of a small bay at the edge of Puget Sound. They called themselves the Shilshoe.
Quiet Jay tends the clam garden. He counts, he measures, he records his observations on cedar bark in a system no one else can read. His best friend, Black Fox, has bigger ambitions — trade alliances, political maneuvering, a future that extends far beyond their muddy bay. When Black Fox's secret negotiations with a neighboring band set off a power struggle with the Shilshoe's authoritarian leader, Quiet Jay is drawn into a conspiracy that reaches from the exile camps of the banished to the longhouses of distant peoples — a conspiracy whose architect may be someone none of them suspected.
The Tea Ceremony is a story about power, loyalty, and the question of what a small community owes itself. Set in the pre-contact Pacific Northwest, it imagines the political and emotional lives of the people who lived on this land for thousands of years before it was given other names.
