Requiem for Semiahmoo

When the late Dr. Rudolph C. Rÿser invited me to join his “brain trust” at the Center for World Indigenous Studies twenty years ago, he said the priorities were: 1. security, 2. health, and 3. education—in that order. As my area of expertise is Communications in Conflict, security for Indigenous peoples—which includes studying psychological warfare—became my focus in CWIS articles and Fourth World Journal essays.

In September 2024, at the Feast of Remembrance for Dr. Rÿser (and his close colleagues Russell Jim and Joe Delacruz), I recalled the 1996 Politics of Land & Bigotry conference that Rudy, Russell, and Joe hosted at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle to discuss “portentous movements in America intent on promoting interracial discord and a growing politics of fear.” The researchers who attended then got to work.

At the Feast of Remembrance hosted by Dr. Rÿser’s family, I was seated at a table with Rudy’s colleagues from the past 50 years, where we held an impromptu seminar on monitoring and exposing organized, violent white supremacy in the United States. Of particular note, I recounted that as a result of our collaboration in 1996, we had prevented mass murder by Christian Patriot terrorists in the Seattle region. Our research was key.

I am currently working with the Blaine Water Coalition to prevent the destruction of the Lummi Nation’s cultural and natural resources in the Drayton Harbor estuary and on Semiahmoo Spit here in Blaine, WA. I wrote a letter and article titled “Blaine Toxic Coverup” that provides an overview of the current situation. That story prompted Cascadia Daily News and Whatcom Watch to launch in-depth investigations, which are currently underway.

Our spokesperson, Otto Pointer, is working in cooperation with Frank Lawrence at the Lummi Nation Department of Natural Resources. Otto, an international research expert, recently offered to give a presentation on treaty rights protection at Northwest Indian College. On March 4, 2025, the Blaine Water Coalition filed a Notice of Intent to Sue the City of Blaine under the Clean Water Act and the Civil Rights Act.

The Coalition’s analysis of a proposed 211-unit luxury condominium development—adjacent to the resort where an ancient Lummi village once stood—notes that the City of Blaine’s Community Development Services-supported proposal violates the state-required shoreline setback. Additionally, no legally required consultation with the Lummi Nation has taken place. Cultural artifacts are likely present, as this was a Lummi village for 4,500 years.

As Washington State Poet Laureate and enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation, Rena Priest wrote in “Reciprocity and the Age of Extinction”:

In 1880, John Waller and the Alaska Packers Association destroyed a Lummi fishing village that had been in use for millennia. They forced the fishers to leave using threats of violence…

The village was a source of social and cultural exchange, as well as a place to harvest sustenance in accordance with a contract of reciprocity with the natural world… Nets were woven with willow bark and people harvested in a manner that involved no bycatch or destruction to surrounding landscapes or waterways. The Alaska Packers Association saw an opportunity to partake in this bounty, and rather than honor the laws of reciprocity, they displaced the Indigenous fishers and usurped their village site to be used as the new location for a canning facility.

This was the beginning of Blaine.

Drayton Harbor Oyster Company leases state tidelands to produce oysters for its restaurant, and the Lummi Nation has treaty rights to harvest salmon and shellfish there as well. In 2017, the Lummi Nation accepted $3.5 million from the City of Blaine and title to two acres on the Semiahmoo Spit adjacent to Drayton Harbor—where, in 1999, the City of Blaine intentionally desecrated a Lummi burial ground, digging up over 100 human remains and offering tons of dirt filled with ancient cultural artifacts as “free fill.” Thirty percent of Lummi families have ancestors buried on the Semiahmoo Spit.

The Drayton Harbor estuary is home to juvenile endangered Chinook salmon, and I have seen river otters in the saltwater marsh below the Chevron station near the planned Cain Creek salmon restoration project on Peace Portal Drive, led by the Washington State Department of Transportation. Blaine City Council member Mike Hill—recently under investigation by the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department for accosting Blaine Water Coalition spokesperson Otto Pointer at the November 12, 2024, city council meeting (Case #24A39027)—has a vested interest in developing condominiums across Peace Portal Drive from his Chevron station downtown. In a November 28, 2023, Hazardous Materials Analysis Report presented by GeoEngineers to the City of Blaine, Hill’s Chevron station is listed as a “high-risk” Department of Ecology site (Cleanup Site ID #9280) due to confirmed releases of petroleum products—including benzene—on and off the property, contaminating groundwater that migrates from the Chevron station under Starbucks toward Cain Creek and Drayton Harbor.

On June 10, 2024, the Blaine Water Coalition filed a formal complaint against the City of Blaine with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of External Civil Rights Compliance in Washington, D.C.

One reason for requesting federal intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice in addressing official corruption at the City of Blaine is that the extent of criminal enterprise is so deeply embedded that Blaine citizens cannot make headway on desperately needed civic reform. After two years of pleading with the Washington Attorney General and the Whatcom County Prosecutor to no avail, Blaine citizens are fed up. The Coalition’s Notice of Intent to Sue may be the only thing that gets the attention of these law enforcement agencies, which have let us down for two years.

When Blaine City Manager Mike Harmon intentionally defamed Blaine Water Coalition spokesperson Otto Pointer at the May 12, 2025, city council meeting, it wasn’t the first time. This time, however, the defamation was in retaliation for a recent requirement—upheld by the Washington State Department of Ecology, based on a Coalition appeal—that the City of Blaine comply with the 2024 Department of Ecology Western Washington Stormwater Management Manual in its Downtown Revitalization Plan.

On May 14, 2025, I sent the following email to Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu:

The construction of an unlawfully approved mobile home park in the illegally rezoned Critical Aquifer Recharge Area in the City of Blaine is beginning, and Whatcom County must intervene immediately to protect public health and the viability of our community. Your neglect to uphold the law in Blaine between 2022 and 2025 forced Blaine Water Coalition members to devote thousands of hours doing your job.

We have submitted voluminous documentation of criminal misconduct by Blaine Community Development Services Director Alex Wenger and Blaine City Manager Mike Harmon in facilitating this residential development, undertaken without meeting the statutory requirements of the Growth Management Act, State Environmental Policy Act, or the Clean Water Act. Your ongoing failure to protect the citizens of Blaine makes Whatcom County culpable in violating our civil rights.

While “corrupt” and “criminal” accurately describe the routine conduct of the Blaine City Council and Community Development Services between 2022 and 2025, racketeering captures it best. Fraudulent SEPA determinations issued by CDS Director Alex Wenger—under the supervision of City Manager Mike Harmon and direction of Mayor Mary Lou Steward—were repeatedly used by the City of Blaine to obtain permit fees from developers who conspired with the city to violate the State Environmental Policy Act, Growth Management Act, and Clean Water Act in a series of unlawful Planned Unit Developments. This pattern of racketeering—whereby City Council members concealed numerous conflicts of interest and conspired with CDS and City Attorney Peter Ruffatto to suppress public participation and cover up financial conflicts from the public, the press, and law enforcement—falls under the jurisdiction of the United States Attorney.