How two Lummi Nation activists are working to preserve the nature and spirit of Cherry Point

STORY BY MARIA MATSON | PHOTO BY JAKE TULL

In the distant background is the snow-covered peak of Mount Baker looking like a photograph beyond reach. Closer is a stretch of tree-covered land that is Canada, surrounded by the turquoise ocean of the Salish Sea.

The boat speeds north, away from the reservation and cutting through waters where the early sun reflects as a million sparkles.

The bright blue skies and calm air make a perfect day for crabbing, where the roar of the motor engine could never take away from the indisputable beauty of the San Juan Islands.

“This is actually very calm,” Jeremiah Julius says. He and the other fishermen would go out on the sea anyway, despite the cooperation of the weather. Rain, wind, storm — no matter. If Julius didn’t have other responsibilities, he’d be out on the ocean every day, fishing and crabbing while blasting country music. But he has other duties, such as serving as a councilman for the Lummi Indian Business Council.

As he works on land and on the water, Julius is constantly thinking about the Lummi Nation’s future and the lives of the Lummi people in the times of modern development. He travels around the islands and sees them as they once were and what he wishes they could still be. He knows what different locations looked like two hundred years ago, before the Lummi Native American people was forced to sign treaties — moving them from their villages across Washington’s coast to the Lummi Reservation.

Julius gave a TEDx talk on Orcas Island in 2015 called “Sacred America”, discussing how the past is deeply relevant to this area today. He said archeological studies document human development at Cherry Point up to 7,000 years ago, around 5,000 B.C.

“Being 100 percent Native American, growing up on a little Indian reservation of about 4,000 acres and growing up with individuals like my great-grandmother who lived here and was born in 1892 — it not easy to break free of these stories, of these realities that took place,” Julius says.

The boat speeds along at 25 mph, leaving behind Lummi Island but not the determined flock of seagulls who want a free meal. They cannot resist the large grey bins which hold salmon skins, squid cubes and fish heads — a bait smorgasbord worth chasing after to the squawking birds.

“You would have seen an 800-foot cedar longhouse here,” he says, pointing to a shore where seaside houses pepper the landscape.

Julius sharply spins the wheel on the boat he built himself, The Salish Soldier, causing water to rush rapidly in through the drainage holes. In some ways, Julius’s lifetime of work made him a Salish Soldier as well.

He’s spent his whole life boating on the ocean, as his father and each generation before him did as well.

He looks to the shore of Xwe’chi’eXen as it passes, which is known as Cherry Point today, located about 100 miles north of Seattle.

As the boat travels closer to Canada, he outlines the path that the barges would take from behind the islands on his right, where they’d travel up through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and eventually cut perpendicular through the route he is currently taking to check his crabbing pots. The barges would be sent to Cherry Point to stock up on coal and sail to Asia, if the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal is built. Nothing will be built before 2017, when the final environmental impact statements are finished, but time has passed steadily and surely since the modern terminal was proposed in 2011.

Nearly 500 visits a year of Panamax and Capesize vessels would, without any doubt, impact Cherry Point and the surrounding area, say the Lummi who speak out on the subject. Public documents from the Department of Ecology tell how each type of ship is named for its massive size. Panamax ships are the largest vessel able to fit through the Panama Canal, and Capesize ships are the largest dry cargo ships available.

But the barges that will come for the 54 million metric tons of coal and dry products at the proposed terminal would only have to take the two-week trip from Whatcom County, through the Pacific Ocean and arrive in Asia. By the time it is burned for energy, the coal will have traveled thousands of miles from the place where it originated, the Powder River Basin.

This land in Wyoming and Montana produces nearly half of the coal produced nationwide, transported by railroad trains across the United States to Whatcom County. The United States is losing its appetite for coal while slowly working toward cleaner forms of energy after the national discussions of the dangers of coal burning.

But Asia will still buy huge quantities of it, even as dozens of coal mining companies go bankrupt.

Julius has seen the effects of industrial pollution in his lifetime, recalling the times when native and local fishermen could get healthy catches in Bellingham Bay. But now, crab pots come up covered in black gunk and the shellfish are poisonous.

Even now, as he raises one of his 100 crab pots with the floating blue and white buoys, litter and discarded bottles occasionally come up in the cage along with the masses of squirming crab.

Because Cherry Point is an especially deep body of water in the Strait of Georgia, it is a uniquely valuable spot when it comes to supporting fish, mammals, birds, plants, the Lummi Nation’s fishing industry and now, the coal industry.

The Lummi Nations fight against SSA Marine’s Pacific International Terminals over the Cherry Point area has been fought for years, with Lummi Chairman Tim Ballew II, currently leading the council in its public defense. The Lummi’s legal defense references the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855, when many local tribes relinquished their lands and moved onto reservations, including the Tulalip, Swinomish and Lummi. In exchange for leaving their land, the Native American leaders at the time negotiated a guaranteed right to fish and hunt at their usual and accustomed grounds. The phrase is repeated today by the decedents of the signatories, who remember this history each January on Treaty Day.

“We gave up everything for a little bit of rights,” Julius says of the Point Elliot Treaty. “Now we have to ask permission to visit other islands — we have to ask permission.”

His voice hardens the longer he talks about it, especially when he talks about the way the Coast Salish people of the area lived before and after colonialism. He says they were living in the area for thousands of years, and then those from across the across the ocean began to destroy their way of life.

“These people were supposedly God-fearing,” he says, pointing out the hypocrisy of Columbus with his crosses and of the religion of the early settlers. Now, the Lummi face a modern, high-tech battles over the lands of San Juan that have led to legal warnings from companies who wish to develop Cherry Point.

Julius is not the only person who protests the development at Cherry Point.

For activist Jewell James, the work to protect Cherry Point is deeply spiritual. He works to spread the message: Cherry Point is sacred, it is historical and its health is necessary for the Lummi people in both culture and sustainability. James believes the GPT will not become reality and is optimistic about the outcome.

“It’s a battle over public opinion,” James says.

He is well versed in the history of Native American oppression and the present-day cultural and ancestral significance of Cherry Point. He has written about it in his collaborative 19-page report called “The Search for Integrity in the Conflict Over Cherry Point,” and given speeches on the subject. He helps with the politics, frequently traveling to the nation’s capital to work on the political aspects of protecting treaty rights.

“We have a law firm that monitors congressional actions. Other tribes have lobbyists too and they all communicate. We have national intertribal organizations that share information as well,” he says.

He stopped fishing in 1986 because there were too many fishermen and not enough fish, and has urged others to do the same, with admittedly limited success. He has two bachelor’s degrees and does not want to take the place of others who must fish to live.

He sees things in his dreams, which he says drive him to stay involved in protecting sites like Cherry Point and plays a role in his personal spirituality. He is also driven to speak out on behalf of those who have suffered from injustices of the past and those who face challenges today, living on a reservation.

“I was with a group in a national meeting to address the suffering our native children endured from 1868 to 1975,” he says. “The boarding schools run by churches and the government tortured and killed many and those who survived were damaged for life, and then damaged the families and children and grandchildren they had.”

No living Lummi person has grown up fluent in the language because of the way their culture was legally suppressed, he says. Their rights to use eagle feathers, peyote, to speak their language, practice their own religious customs and ceremonies were suppressed and banned before the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. He talks passionately about how the Lummi still have a living culture and how hard they’ve had to fight for their right to maintain it to this day.

The old artifact collections stored at Western, a small sampling of 150 boxes filled with tools and evidence of human activity thousands of years old, tell a technical story of how Cherry Point was once a site where people created net weights, hammered rocks, fished and hunted. Their decedents today speak about this site’s significance on different levels: spiritual, cultural, historical, economic, personal, sacred — they speak of something worth protecting.

As the boat rests, a feathered ornament in its doorway spins in the wind. There are Seahawks stickers on the walls, a cross above the door and a laminated sheet of The Seaman’s Prayer of Psalms 23 propped up on the counter.

“I’m looking to create empathy, not sympathy,” Julius says. It’s important to know the difference.

He believes that if you have a vision of the future, there’s no room for ambiguity when talking about it.

He believes in saying, “I will,” instead of, “I want to.”

The people who live on the Lummi Nation reservation tell each other about their past, stories about how they used to live and how they came to live at this place. Because if they don’t, they risk losing a part of what binds them together. They work to remember what was worth protecting in the past is worth protecting for the future.