The sentence that ended a half-billion-dollar project was written in 1855. Article 5 of the Treaty of Point Elliott secures to the signatory nations "the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations." A hundred and sixty-one years later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers weighed that clause against a proposal to build one of the largest coal export terminals in North America at Cherry Point, on the Whatcom County shoreline of the Salish Sea, and found that the terminal would infringe on Lummi fishing rights. The permit was denied. Nothing was built. The gravel bench above the water is still a gravel bench above the water.
Cherry Point has another name, older than the county and the state: Xwe'chi'eXen. The Lummi Nation has an ancestral village site here, and the waters offshore have been fished by Lummi families for as long as there has been anyone to fish them. The site carries religious and cultural weight that does not translate neatly into the vocabulary of a permit application, and the Lummi were explicit that a coal spill could irrevocably damage it. "We have to say 'no' to the coal terminal project," said Lummi Nation Chairman Cliff Cultee. "It is our Xw' xalh Xechnging — sacred duty — to preserve and protect all of Xwe'chi'eXen." It is worth being precise about what the Lummi were doing here. They were not lobbying for a favour. They were asserting a right the United States had already agreed to, in writing, in exchange for most of a territory.
SSA Marine filed for state and federal permits on 28 February 2011, opening the environmental review of a $500 million project. The design called for a dock 2,980 feet long — well over half a mile of pier reaching into the Salish Sea — and capacity for as many as 487 vessels a year to berth and load. The cargo was coal, moved by rail from the Powder River Basin across Washington and out to buyers in Asia. On paper, the economics were straightforward: American coal, Asian demand, and a deepwater site with existing industrial neighbours. The word that kept surfacing in the review, though, was scale. A terminal that size does not sit quietly next to anything.
On 1 June 2011, more than 300 people turned out to a hearing hosted by Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike, and the concerns raised were as much about daily life as about the planet. Coal dust blowing off open rail cars and its effect on people's lungs. Diesel exhaust from ships and locomotives. Mile-long trains cutting through waterfront towns, with the noise and grit and grade-crossing delays that come with them. Property values. And, running underneath all of it, the knowledge that coal loaded here would be burned somewhere else and the carbon would come back to everyone. Opposition spread outward through municipal resolutions — Hood River in Oregon, then Camas, Washougal, and Marysville in Washington, and in May 2012 a unanimous resolution from the Seattle City Council against coal export ports in the region. In September 2012 the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, a congress of more than fifty tribes across seven states, demanded a comprehensive environmental review of every such terminal proposed in the Northwest.
In December 2014 the Washington State Department of Ecology put numbers to one specific risk. With the terminal operating, the median count of oil spills in the nearby waters was projected to climb 26 percent — from roughly ten a year to roughly thirteen by 2019 — with the volume spilled rising 28 percent, from about 656 gallons to about 857. Modest-sounding figures, until you remember they fall on the same fishing grounds the treaty names. On 5 January 2015 the Lummi Indian Business Council wrote formally to the Corps requesting denial, the letter signed by Chairman Tim Ballew II: the project, it argued, would substantially impair treaty rights across the Nation's usual and accustomed areas, where "the Lummi have harvested at this location since time immemorial and plan to continue into the future." That August they wrote again asking for an expedited decision, made clear they had no interest in a drawn-out negotiation with the developer, and retained Dentons — already one of the world's largest law firms — signalling they were prepared to litigate for as long as it took.
The Corps ruled in 2016 and the terminal died. Five years later Whatcom County went further and made the outcome structural, passing a zoning ordinance in July 2021 that prohibits new refineries, fossil fuel shipment facilities, coal plants, piers, and wharfs along this shoreline — closing the door rather than leaving it to be re-fought with the next proposal and the next developer. What remains at Cherry Point is a working industrial coastline with a stretch of it left alone, herring spawning grounds offshore, and a village site that is still a village site. The legal machinery that produced this result was federal and modern. The argument that drove it was made in 1855 by people negotiating under enormous pressure, who insisted on keeping one thing, and whose descendants held the United States to it.
Cherry Point sits at 48.863°N, 122.741°W on the Strait of Georgia shoreline of Whatcom County, Washington, in the northeastern corner of the Salish Sea. Fly it at 2,000 to 4,000 feet along the coast. The industrial signature is impossible to miss from the air: refinery tank farms and long piers stretch into the strait north and south of the site, while the undeveloped bench where the terminal would have gone reads as a gap of forest and bluff between them. Lummi Island and Bellingham Bay lie to the south, Birch Bay and the Canadian border to the north, the San Juan Islands scatter west across the water, and Mount Baker at 10,781 feet dominates the eastern horizon on any clear day. The BNSF main line runs parallel to the shore just inland — the route the coal trains would have taken. Bellingham International (KBLI) is about 12 nautical miles southeast; Friday Harbor (KFHR) and Orcas Island (KORS) lie west in the San Juans; Vancouver International (CYVR) is roughly 35 nautical miles northwest across the border. Watch for strong northeasterly outflow winds through the Fraser Valley in winter and marine haze from the refineries in stagnant summer conditions.