Cultural Erasure

6/5/25 letter to city and county:

Cultural erasure is the act of removing all traces of a people displaced by others. On the Semiahmoo Spit, aside from the Lummi totem next to the Whatcom County Parks shelter, the 4,500-year presence of Lummi people at their major village where the resort and old cannery buildings stand has been essentially erased.

There are no monuments to Lummi culture, which was a sustainable culture, living in harmony with an environment of abundance. No one was homeless, no one hungry, no one unloved. They invented reef-netting, an effective method of harvesting salmon without any environmental harm. Their works of art were (and are) astonishing.

Blaine celebrates the colonial settler culture, where the forests were denuded, and the harbor polluted, and the Lummi chased off by threats of violence. In contrast, Indigenous First Nations such as the Lummi people acquired local knowledge and understanding over thousands of years that they have generously shared. 

Returning that generosity by publicly acknowledging and respecting their gift can take the physical form of interpretive signs, monuments and events. First, though, Blaine needs an attitude change. Destroying Blaine's environment from the Critical Aquifer Recharge Area in East Blaine to the Semiahmoo Peninsula in the West impairs our lives as well as Lummi cultural and natural resources, such as salmon and shellfish in Drayton Harbor.

The Lummi burial ground on Semiahmoo Spit and the Lummi village site at Tongue Point are sacred sites, desecrated by the City of Blaine for sewer expansion and luxury housing for the new colonialists comprised of millionaires. As Blaine goes bankrupt from malfeasance and mismanagement, we need to address the core issue of restraining greed in order to restore our environment and to recover our souls.