Qualla: Lummi Island

Lummi Island: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Off the west shore of Lummi Island, in Legoe Bay, a line of strange wooden rigs anchors in the water every summer. Each is a pair of boats holding a net slung between them over an artificial reef of lines, with a lookout perched on a tower watching for the shadow of a salmon school moving up the channel. This is reef netting, and it is not an adaptation of anything European. The Lummi call it sxwole. They developed it here, in these waters, and the small fleet in Legoe Bay now represents most of the reef net gears left on the planet.

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Lummi Island: Sxwole

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 traditio...

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Lummi Island: Four Names for One Island

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Lummi Island: Six Minutes and Twenty Cars

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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Lummi Island: The Pit That Became a Preserve

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 - be...

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Lummi Island: Eight Hundred People and a Chili Festival

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 o...

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