Mondo's NAT #298

Native American Tribe series.

Lummi

The Lummi (/'l?mi/ LUM-ee; Lummi: Xwlemi [??l?'mi]; also known as Lhaq'temish), governed by the Lummi Nation, are a Native American tribe of the Coast Salish ethnolinguistic group in western Washington state in the United States. The Tribe primarily resides on and around the Lummi Indian Reservation, to the west of Bellingham and 20 miles south of the Canadian border, in western Whatcom County. The Lummi refer to themselves as the Lhaq’temish, or People of the Sea. For centuries, their culture and survival have depended on the annual migrations of salmon.

The Lummi were forcibly moved to reservation lands after the signing of the Point Elliott Treaty in 1855. The reservation has a land area of 21 sq mi that includes the Lummi Peninsula, and uninhabited Portage Island. In pre-colonial times, the tribe migrated seasonally between many sites including Point Roberts, Washington, Lummi Peninsula, Portage Island, as well as sites in the San Juan Islands, including Sucia Island.

Many tribal members were Christianized in the late nineteenth century by the Catholic Oblate order. The traditional lifestyle of the Lummi, like many Northwest Coast tribes, consisted of the collecting of shellfish, gathering of plants such as Camas and different species of berries, and most importantly involved the fishing of salmon. The Lummi developed a fishing technique known as "reef netting". Reef netting was used for taking large quantities of fish in salt water. Lummi had reef net sets on Orcas Island, San Juan Island, Lummi Island and Fidalgo Island, Portage Island and near Point Roberts and Sandy Point.

From July 30 to August 4, 2007, the Lummi hosted their first potlatch since the 1930s, the Paddle to Lummi. 68 canoeing families paddled hand-made canoes to the Lummi Reservation from parts of Washington and British Columbia.