I come from the Lhaq'temish—the Lummi—the Salmon People, the People of the Sea. When I get to speak with our youth at the school on the Lummi Nation, outside Bellingham, Washington, I like to point out that where we sit right now is a reservation. We were put here, right? So, it's home, but not really home.
We come from the San Juan Islands. And that's important, because the youth need to know that the islands are the place we need to protect, where our people have come from since time immemorial. I have never counted how many islands there are in the Salish Sea, but every single one is so different from the one next to it. They're all so unique and they're beautiful. You've got the salmon there and you've got the orca and the eagles.
When I'm out on my boat with my sons, Luke and Kyle, it feels like home. There's nothing better. You can finally breathe. We pull out of the Bellingham harbor and head out toward the islands [to fish], and I'm at peace. Even though you're about to do something totally stressful and busy, you can breathe. I wish everybody in the tribe still got the chance to feel that feeling.
Our people harvest clams, oysters, sea urchin, and geoduck, but we are primarily salmon fishermen. I've heard it said that salmon is culture, and our culture is salmon—it's really our foundation. They used to say that during the time of the treaty signing [in 1855], you could walk across a river on the backs of salmon. They were that abundant.
“They used to say that during the time of the treaty signing [in 1855], you could walk across a river on the backs of salmon. They were that abundant.â€
The Lummi fishing fleet used to have 30-plus purse seiners. I think we're down to nine of us now actively fishing. But we're still the largest tribal fishing fleet overall. And we still have quite a few gill netters and skiff fishers who fish the Nooksack River and the Salish Sea, but we rely on the bigger seiners to bring in enough fish for the whole tribe. The tribe takes those fish and freezes them so that we can access them for all our events, funerals most importantly. There's nothing better than being able to bring fish in for the tribe.
It all comes back to Lhaq'temish—the People of the Sea. We have a saying, “When the tide is out, the table is set.†I love that phrase. And I love the fact that in our language we don't have a word for “starvationâ€â€”because we never, ever starved. The sea was always there.
Fish Hungry
In the 70s and 80s, there were so many fish. Then the salmon runs got to a point where they weren't really sustaining us anymore. I can remember when we used to fish six weeks out of the summer, and now we're lucky to get two or three days.
Many years, we don't even get to fish. We'll spend the money getting the boat ready to go, and then not enough salmon return on their spawning runs for us to harvest. They say that today we only have 5 percent of the salmon we had at the time of the treaty signing. But we still have plenty of Dungeness crab, shrimp, and halibut to harvest.
It used to be that everyone always had freezers full of salmon. But when you can only fish sockeye once every four years, and pinks are every other year, and the number of fishermen has dwindled, then families don't necessarily have enough fish to fill their freezers anymore.
I see how fish-hungry the community is. Because of the bad years we've had, I've seen the damage that is done by not being able to fish. That's the scary part. You only have to drive around our reservation to see that sense of loss.
I believe it's also because people don't know what they are missing. People don't know why they feel empty inside, because they don't get to hop on a boat and get out there and realize, “This is what I need to fill myself back up.â€
A Lifetime on the Water
My dad was born here in the Lummi Nation, and he was a fisherman. Fishing took him from Togiak, Alaska, all the way down to San Francisco Bay to fish the herring runs. My dad was also Air Force, a jet-engine mechanic.
When he got out of the Air Force we went to Seattle, where he worked for Boeing, and then he became an ironworker. He built a skiff in our garage in Seattle and would fish weekends on Bellingham Bay. After I finished fifth grade, we moved from Seattle back to Lummi. My dad built our seiner, too, which he called the Eleanor S., after me.
When I was 22, Peter Pan Seafoods hired me to work at the canneries in King Cove, Alaska. I was a bull cook, which meant that we went in and made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms. It was an all-day job. The next year, I worked in the laundry room, which was from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, seven days a week. And Dad was like, “You know, if you want to work this hard, I think you could probably make that amount of money working for me.â€
Before me, my dad never had a girl work for him. It was sort of a change in gender roles. The men would go off and fish the sea and the women would fish the river. But a few skippers [the men] started bringing their daughters onboard. Fishing with my dad was awesome—it was the best of times. He just loved what he did, and it was wonderful just to be together.
When I was growing up, my Auntie Dora Lee Solomon was always a fisherman and always had her own skiff. She would take that little river skiff out into the Salish Sea all the way to San Juan Island. It takes four and a half hours to get there in our big boat, and I can't even imagine how long it took in a skiff like that.
“Fishing with my dad was awesome; it was the best of times. He just loved what he did, and it was wonderful just to be together.â€
Once we came up to her in my dad's boat and you could see there were so many fish hitting her net—and they were leading out and going around it. So, we set our net behind her and the fish all funneled into our seine. It was too big of a bag to bring over the back end of the boat. We ended up “brailingâ€â€”meaning we had to scoop them out. I remember my auntie jokingly saying, “Those were my fish.†My dad sent her to Hawaii that winter, so she got a trip out of it.
She was also a certified diver and she scuba dived for our aquaculture [the Lummi Shellfish Hatchery.] She was the first woman to serve on the Lummi Natural Resource and Fish Commission, so I followed in her footsteps, and I've been on the commission for 12 years now. She was the aunt that took us everywhere to show us where we harvested everything. She also spoke the [Lummi] language, so she was always using the language and teaching us that.
In 1993, I married Larry Kinley, and he too was a fisherman. But I didn't start fishing with Larry until after my dad passed away, in 1999. I wanted to stay fishing with my dad.
I got to do things when fishing with Larry that I didn't do fishing with my dad. I'd throw my weight around, joking, “Well, I'm a [half] owner of this boat.†There would be things that Larry would want done, and I'd be like, “Well, that's not how my dad would do it.â€
My husband, who was the Lummi tribal chairman for 12 years, was a very thoughtful, calm person when it came to politics. But you put him on the deck of a boat, and he was a whole different man. There was a lot of yelling, and everything had to be done fast. Had to be done his way.
But he had the reputation of being a very good fisherman. Larry was a risk taker, and that is what fishing is. Every time you put your net in the water, you don't know if you're going to get it back, never mind catch fish. And then you get the net back, and you're like, “Okay, let's go to the next spot, and let's try that again.â€
Larry passed away from cancer in 2018. When his father died, my son Luke had to take over, and he's been skippering for nearly 8 years. Both my boys are fishing. Kyle has his own boat, and Luke has two, and then I have the seiner. When we're on the seiner, Luke runs the boat, and Kyle and I work on deck.
Life doesn't get better than that. Because we're doing what all our ancestors have always done—we're harvesting from the Salish Sea.
Low Prices, High Costs
I love salmon fishing. I tolerate crabbing. I'm only crabbing to pay the bills. There's a big difference. We fish for salmon even though we don't make money all the time.
It's funny. I will come across a file—I've found files of Larry's fish tickets from 1976—and we're basically still being paid the same amount as what we were making back then. And that's because in many years you've got Alaska producing so many salmon that it keeps everyone's prices low.
But the cost of diesel fuel is no longer 80-something cents a gallon. Insurance is sky high. Groceries are now one of our biggest bills, up there with fuel. When we take our seiner out, we all sleep on it, and I cook. You need to feed the crew and you have to feed them well, and you have to feed them three times a day.
