The Lummi and the Bay They Named Safe Harbor
Near Bellingham, Washington
Before there was a city, there was a bay. Before the bay had an English name, the Lummi people called the place at Gooseberry Point Xwlalemes, meaning "L-shaped," and built their longhouses facing the water that fed them. The Lummi are a Central Coast Salish people, and the bay that George Vancouver would name for a British naval clerk in seventeen ninety-two had been the center of Lummi life for generations.
Epidemics reshaped the Lummi world before most settlers arrived. In the eighteenth century, smallpox swept through the San Juan Islands with devastating speed, wiping out or nearly wiping out several Lummi villages. The surviving Lummi moved from their island homes to the mainland, where they absorbed the remnant populations of neighboring groups and built fortified villages on the shore of Bellingham Bay.
By eighteen fifty-four, when American ethnologist George Gibbs documented the people of the region, he estimated the Lummi population at around four hundred and fifty, a fraction of what it had been before the epidemics. The Lummi and their neighbors the Nooksack relied on Bellingham Bay and its connected waterways for salmon, shellfish, and waterfowl. The bay was not merely a food source; it was a network, a seasonal calendar, a system of trails connecting different fishing stations to winter longhouses.
In January of eighteen fifty-five, fourteen Lummi leaders signed the Treaty of Point Elliott, ceding their territory to the United States in exchange for reserved fishing rights and reservation lands west of the city. The Lummi Nation continues to hold that reservation today, directly west across the bay. The Nooksack, whose territory extended east toward the slopes of Mount Baker, fished the Nooksack River and its tributaries.
They signed the same treaty. Both peoples, and the Samish and Nuwhaha who also occupied the surrounding region, understood Bellingham Bay as a shared and managed commons, one that European settlers would, within decades, begin to treat as open for the taking. What the settlers built on the shore of Bellingham Bay was real.
What was already here when they arrived was older, deeper, and more intricate than most of them ever tried to understand.
