Reef netting is a method of extraordinary precision: the gear is placed where salmon naturally travel, the false reef guides the fish upward into the net, and because the catch is lifted alive, anything unwanted can be released. The Lummi fished this way for centuries at traditional sites, and continued after signing the Point Elliott Treaty in 1855 - until around 1894, when industrial fish traps run by non-Native operators simply out-competed them off the water. The dispossession was thorough. When Judge George Boldt issued his landmark ruling on treaty fishing rights in 1974, he noted forty-three reef nets working off Lummi Island; not one belonged to a tribal fisherman. In recent years the Lummi Nation has been deliberately reclaiming the practice, commissioning new wooden canoes built for reef netting and teaching younger members how the gear works. A technique nearly taken away is being handed back down.

The island answered to Sa nam a o - High Mountain - and to Skallaham before anyone else arrived. Spanish explorers labelled it Isla de Pacheco in 1792, British colonists later called it McLoughlin Island, and in 1853 the U.S. survey charted it as Lummi, after the people who lived in the area; the name stuck with everyone. An older local name survives in fragments: Beach, which still attaches to Beach Elementary School and the Beach Store Cafe and which the federal names database still lists as an unincorporated place, even though the mail comes addressed to Lummi Island. The Lummi Indian Reservation occupies the peninsula just east across the water and does not include the island itself.

Getting here takes almost no time and is nonetheless the central fact of island life. The Whatcom Chief, run by Whatcom County Public Works, carries twenty vehicles and a hundred passengers across from Gooseberry Point in six minutes - a crossing short enough to see both shores at once and long enough to organize everything. Beach Elementary serves kindergarten through fifth grade under the Ferndale School District; older students ride the boat to the mainland and back every day. In the 1950s the county proposed replacing the ferry with a bridge, and the state went so far as to authorize a future Washington State Ferries run between Lummi and Orcas once the bridge was built. Neither happened. The island's population was 822 at the 2000 census, and it nearly doubles each summer as second-home owners arrive from both sides of the border.

For decades the island shipped out its own rock. A quarry operated intermittently before major work began in 1964, and by 1990 the pit covered three acres. Ownership passed through a chain of families and companies - the Brides of Everett, Dick Christopherson, David Grainger - becoming Ace Rock, then Valley View Sand and Gravel, and finally Aggregates West, which ran the quarry until 2013. By 2007 only about ten percent of the output was used on the island; the rest went out by barge to Bellingham, Anacortes, Everett, and Seattle. Aggregates West defaulted in 2012 on $3.5 million in loans and entered Chapter 11. What happened next is the good part: the Lummi Island Heritage Trust bought the 105-acre property in 2015 for $1.08 million, backed by Whatcom County, a Puget Sound marine and nearshore grant program, and the Rose Foundation, with restoration in mind. In 2019 the trust named it the Aiston Preserve, after a family that homesteaded the land in the 1940s. It includes forest and four thousand feet of shoreline.

Life here runs on a short list of institutions: a general store, a couple of restaurants, several bed and breakfasts, a small library, a post office, a fire station, a church with a quiet wooded cemetery, a Salvation Army camp, and an elementary school dating to 1919. A cannery once stood at Sunrise Cove - the Nooksack Fish Packing Company had one going by 1919 - and the fishing economy that built the island still shapes it. The Willows Inn, open since 1910, was remade as a fine-dining destination in 2010 and drew international attention before being fined by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2017 over its internship program; it closed in late 2022. What endures is smaller and steadier: a spring and summer farmers' market, a chili festival in mid-July, a Christmas party for island children, artists who open their studios three weekends a year, narrow winding roads that cyclists love, and the Lummi Mountain trail climbing through the Baker Preserve to a view of the San Juans and the Gulf Islands laid out together.