Northwest Fishers Unite to Save Cherry Point

Ellen Murphy is a practitioner and supporter of community efforts toward conscious nonviolence, social equity and environmental justice. She teaches conscious nonviolence in various writings and settings.

A second opportunity to witness Lummi Nation opposition to the proposed coal-shipping terminal at Cherry Point was offered on Un-Columbus Day (definitely my phrase, not theirs; in fact Columbus was not mentioned), October 8, 2012. Despite the need that was still remaining for precipitation in the Pacific Northwest, it was hard not to be thankful for the gloriously bright day, as a fleet of fishing vessels were welcomed in with applause and waves from the crowd. The boats were piloted by Lummi and non-native fishers alike to show solidarity in protection of Xwe’chi’eXen, or Cherry Point, the fishing grounds tribes have worked for thousands of years.

Would It Be Okay to Build at Gettysburg?

Kathy Stuart-Stevenson brought members of her Northwest Indian College English composition class to their ancestral hunting and fishing grounds so that they could experience the historical context of their readings on law and treaties, and “understand that Native activism is alive and well.” Kathy is teaching from Vine Deloria’s book “Custer Died for Your Sins,” and relating it to the fact that the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott protects traditional hunting and fishing areas. Cherry Point may not legally belong to the Lummi Nation, but it’s clear that the sand, every crab and sea urchin, the land and burial grounds at Cherry Point do belong to a heritage, and the heritage belongs to them. Standing next to an ancient stone anchor, Councilman Jeremiah Julius said, “Salish soldiers are buried here — died from disease we had no way to fight. We need to let them rest in peace. Would it be OK to build at Gettysburg?”

A Way of Life: Consumption or Schelangen

Out of the clear blue sky of my Salish Sea mind, came the cloud of something George H.W. Bush said at the 1992 Earth summit, “The American way of life is not negotiable.” Then a second cloud—his son’s speech on September 20, 2011 in reference to AlQaeda. I looked it up to get it right. “They kill to…disrupt and end a way of life…” “Terrorism is… a threat to our way of life.”

Regarding the check for an untold millions buy-out that was stamped non-negotiable and burned at the first Lummi protest at Cherry Point on September 21, 2012, I thought it reasonable to believe it meant not only that no amount of money or material offer could begin to equal the value of Xwe’chi’eXen, but also that the fishing grounds and marine life, the village and burial ground heritage, represent the Lummi way of life, their Schelangen, and that their way of life itself was non-negotiable.

Two antithetical ways of life, both non-negotiable: one based on unfettered consumptive capitalism which by its nature must exploit to the point of deliquescence, and one based on balance, honor, giving-back, and sharing (potlatch), to the point of sustainability.

Neither totally wrong/evil nor totally right/good, but one leaning toward decaying and death and one leaning toward renewing and life. One whose negotiations historically are treacherous anyway, one whose negotiations were historically coerced, and that now says, in the voice of one of Kathy’s students, Phillip Solomon: “I think we have given up enough,” and in the voice of Jewell James, speaking on the beach, joined by the crabbers and the crowd: “Hell no!”

Here I am yelling “Hell no!” with everyone else, this bright airy Columbus Day on the holy ground of that beach, but sensing death in the air, wanting to sob over what the founder of the Native American Movement in 1961, professor and author of “Columbus and Other Cannibals,” Jack D. Forbes said the wetiko psychosis, a cannibalistic soul-sickness, a consuming of another’s life, represented by the genocide started by Columbus and continuing on in materialism, war and the squandering of earth’s resources. And yet I sense more, a greater power than wetiko, the “mystery” that Forbes says European culture “… cannot tolerate, the glue that holds all of this together, that scientists may call attraction or affinity or magnetism or gravity as well as affection, symbiosis, kinship, community, family, compassion or whatever. But there is that circle, that mysterious circle, that makes life possible,” * and knowing that the circle is growing among people of many cultures, everywhere, and here, in the coal-threatened places from the Powder River Basin to Cherry Point, where it is called Schelangen.

SSA Marine Replies to Schelangen

Upon the burning-of-the-check event in September, a statement appeared on the SSA website that preached “… these are serious issues that should be approached in a serious way, and there is a rational regulatory process to do so.” You see, burning checks, blessing water, saying things are holy; and, I suppose, a bunch of united crabbers vowing to “protect and promote” their fishing grounds, unhappy that their crab pots are mangled by oil tankers; not to mention the eldest Lummi member, Mary Helen Cagey declaring that she doesn’t need energy, she gets her energy from protesting — well, these things are just not serious or rational, are they?

*Forbes, Jack, “Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism,” (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), p.183

Editor’s Note: treaty rights web site: www.treatyprotection.org.