Since Time Immemorial is a recurring series featuring community members whose families have been here since time immemorial. The ancestral knowledge carried by Lhaq’temish (Lummi), Nooksack, and other Coast Salish peoples is knowledge about how to live in our shared home in a good, life-sustaining way. We live in a time when we need to restore our relationship with Mother Earth and with one another. We are grateful for these stories, told in the words of each featured individual.
Xw’tot lhem Sequoyah Julius is part of the family-owned, tremendously popular Friday Harbor Seafoods. The market is open only during the summer, and is located on the pier, not far from the ferry dock in Friday Harbor. The son of Jay and Heidi Julius, and the grandson of Doreen and Michael Julius, he is an enrolled member of Lummi Nation. I came away from this conversation convinced that he had sunshine running through his veins, as he was genuine and cheerful in a way that seems both rare and necessary.
Sequoyah, thanks so much for taking a break from your day. I know summer is a busy time for you.
I’m so happy to be here and talk to you today. And yeah, man, I’m consumed these days by the water and the seafood market and fishing. That’s all I do. I golf a little bit, but it’s very rare. I’m six to seven days a week at the seafood market right now, whether it’s fileting fish, vacuum sealing, prepping. Cooking crab, we also sell them live.
I ate the best crab salad ever at your market.
Yeah? Thanks. My sister and I fish together and catch all the Dungeness crab. We focus on local, when we can. Spot prawns, oysters, clams, mussels. Shrimp, halibut, tuna, black cod. Two different types of smoked salmon, my dad’s a really good smoker. I pretty much do all the fileting. We get the whole fish, and then I just cut it up. Because we’re right on the pier, all the fish scraps go back into the water, and they’re just nutrients feeding the sea. But the seals are getting really familiar with our seafood market, and they’re really, really friendly, and they’re really cool.
The market is seasonal, open only during summer. You fish the rest of the year?
I love that I get to. I get to fish where my people have fished forever, since time immemorial. I think about it a lot. I’m doing exactly what my dad did, what my grandpa did, what his dad did. Great, great, great grandfathers all the way back, I don’t even know how long. I can’t tell you the feeling, the satisfaction, and how wholesome it is to me to be doing this in exactly the place where my ancestors did.
You grow up different when you hunt and you fish. I fish, I crab all winter long throughout the islands. No one spot stays hot all the time, so I’m always moving. I have places like Westcott, Garrison, Roche, Open Bay, Aleleng where I feel a deep connect. Hunting and fishing, you get to know a place in a different way, and you’re connected to the whole circle of life. It’s amazing. Three hundred years ago, everyone in our tribe touched the water; they were fishing, they were in canoes. I really encourage everybody to find a connection back to the water. My dad has done so much fighting for this place, and our people, and the creatures of this place. So that is really, really important to me. Protecting these waters, this place.
Did you always know you’d be a fisherman?
You know, I almost stopped commercial fishing in 2019. Obviously, when you’re fishing, when you’re crabbing, you take an animal’s life. But you care for the animal. I have feelings for the creatures. I just didn’t get the point of taking all those lives. Back before our market, there was one buyer; they’d take all the crab and they sell it away. It really bugged me. But now with this seafood market, we catch the crab and then people come back and tell me how good the crab was, or how good the salmon was, the smoked salmon. Every single day! It means the world to me being able to do this because it reminds me of how we used to live life here. The sea provided for us, and we were providers for ourselves and for others. Now I take pride in my work, and I really love it.
So the seafood market, feeding the people with the fish you’ve caught, completes the circle for you.
Yeah, and my sister and I, and my dad, we want to elevate our seafood market and take it to another level. We really want to get into shipping and into doing our own smoking, canning. Just make it flourish, watch it bloom. And help connect people to the water, to the creatures, and the place. Like right now, my dad’s doing Indigenous cultural tours throughout the islands, taking people out on his new boat and informing them of why these places are significant. He is very, very knowledgeable. He knows so much, and I inherit that a little bit just from hearing him and studying with him. But I love fishing, so my goal is to kind of do the same thing, but I want to figure out how to charter and take people out fishing, that’s my goal.
Connect people to the water to the fish.
Yeah. This place is so special, it provides everything, everything for us that we need.
Hy’shqe, Sequoyah!
Photograph by Sequoyah Julius
