Lummi Indians

(Abbreviated from Nuglummi, about equivalent to “people”, the name used by themselves).

The Lummi Indians are the principal one of more than twenty small Salishan tribes originally holding the lower shores, islands, and eastern hinterland of Puget Sound, Washington; by the Treaty of Point Elliott (1855), gathered upon five reservations within the same territory under the jurisdiction of Tulalip Agency. The Lummi occupied several villages about the mouth of Lummi river, Whatcom County. Their language is the same as that spoken, with dialectic variations, by the Samish and Klalam to the south, the Semiamu on the north, in British Columbia, and the Songish, Sanetch, and Sooke of Vancouver Island, B.C. Together with the other tribes of the Tulalip Agency, they have been entirely Christianized through the labours of the Rev. Casimir Chirouse and later Oblates beginning about 1850. In 1909 the Indians upon the Lummi reservation, including several smaller bands, numbered altogether 435 souls, a decrease of one-half in forty years.