Lhaq'temish

The Lhaq'temish, better known as the Lummi and called 'people of the sea', are a Coast Salish people of the straits and islands south of the Fraser delta in present-day Washington State, speaking a North Straits Salish dialect closely related to those of Vancouver Island.

Their seasonal villages and reef-net fishing stations stood on the San Juan, Orcas, Lummi and Fidalgo islands, and they traded camas bulbs and dried berries along the coast; their population around 1780 has been estimated at roughly one thousand.

From the 1770s smallpox and raids by musket-armed northern tribes drove them from the islands to the lower Nooksack River on the mainland, where they built stockaded villages and absorbed the local Hulwhaluq and Skalakhan groups. The long cycle of coastal raiding ended in 1821, an event later remembered in Lummi canoe gatherings.