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First Food: What the Fish Mean for Tribes by Matthew Weaver Capital Press, September 12, 2024

Salmon is always on the table in some form.
It's used in celebrations and ceremonies.

"We say, 'As salmon runs go, so go the Salmon People,'" said Joe Oatman, deputy program manager for the Nez Perce Tribe. "If salmon are suffering, we're suffering. If salmon have broken homes, we have broken homes."

Salmon used to be a core part of the Tribes' economy, he said.

"We suffer from higher rates of unemployment and poverty. We have the lowest per capita income. We suffer from higher rates of diabetes and inflammatory cardiovascular diseases. We have higher rates of alcoholism, drug use and suicide. Restoring fish and our fishing is a really necessary part of restoring balance back to the lives of our people.

"There's not a single Nez Perce that can make a living off of salmon," he said. "Not just putting those fish on the table to feed themselves, but also to earn some money to acquire all the basic things you need in life. ... We want to be able to have livelihoods, safe and healthy communities, being able to carry on all of those things that matter to us. That's what bringing fish back will do."

Austin Smith Jr., general manager of natural resources for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, points to creation stories in which salmon were the first fish to give themselves to humans as they settled the lands.

Salmon is always on the table in some form, he said. It's used in celebrations and ceremonies.

"We were given the creation story that water, fish, deer, elk, roots, berries and all the other first foods, if we were to take care of those foods, all the cycles would continue and everything would be in sync," he said.

Salmon also play a role in the nutrient cycle, Smith added.

"As resources leave a watershed, resources return with salmon," he said. "Life returns with salmon. ... If salmon disappeared in these areas, so would life, so would the balance, so would the cycles."

Wild harvest limits

The Tribes estimate about 6,000 wild fish will return to the Snake River and its tributaries this year, Oatman said. Of that, Tribes can target 183 from fisheries across the region under abundance-based harvest value scales, from May to August.

"We can take one wild fish in the Tucannon Sub-Basin, and if we have a single tribal member go there and take that one fish, that fishery closes, and that's really the only fishing opportunity we have," he said. The Tucannon River empties into the Snake River between the Little Goose and Lower Monumental dams.

In northeastern Oregon sub-basins, the Tribe might be able to harvest up to 55 wild fish.

In the Salmon River Sub-Basin and its four tributaries, the Tribe can harvest 65 wild fish. Half of the entire wild fish harvest comes from one river system, Oatman said.

There might not be enough hatchery fish for a hatchery run on the South Fork Salmon River, which is "a pretty odd circumstance," he said. "Right now we're trying to figure out how to go after 42 wild fish and keep our impacts to hatchery fish as low as we can."

For nine populations in the Middle Fork Salmon River, Tribes can only harvest a range of zero to one or two wild fish, up to 37 wild fish all together. For some populations, once one fish is caught, it shuts down the fishery for the year.

"It's a difficult management conundrum to operate," Oatman said.

The Nez Perce Tribe targets 9,000 fish, and had harvested 5,500 in late June. By season's end, they hoped to have 8,700 hatchery and 200 wild salmon, including unlisted natural runs to the Clearwater River. About 90% or more of the harvest will be hatchery fish.

The Tribe's Jay Hesse pointed to the 2022 National Marine Fisheries Service report assessing rebuilding salmon and steelhead to abundant levels. No one particular action could be taken to rebuild things, but a suite of actions would be needed, Hesse said.

Multi-year study

Hesse pointed to a "multi-year process" to study replacing the services of the four Snake River dams and expand the energy sector in the Pacific Northwest to meet state and Tribes' decarbonization goals.

"It is our expectation that those products will inform and allow Congress to think about authorizing taking those dams out," he said.

The region is already in an energy crisis, he said, with unprecedented load growth occurring now that was not modeled even two years ago by the energy sector.

"Without huge increases in clean energy generation in the basin, the lights are going to go out," he said. "What we're simply asking for is, make a small modification in that transformation that has to occur anyway, and do it in a way that works for salmon. That doesn't seem like a huge ask for Congress, once you put it in the context of what people on the whole landscape need for day-to-day lives."

'Changes the fish deserve'

Hesse believes dam advocates "like to point fingers to some other impact and say that's the problem."

Improvements are needed in all sectors, he said.

"But we can't get there if we don't address the hydrosystem," he said. "We've got 50 years-plus of having the Snake River dams here, and tried a whole bunch of things to improve fish survival during that 50 years. Yet we're still on the brink of extinction. I think we've given it a good go of trying everything but hydro. The time is now, and we're running out of time to actually make changes the fish deserve."

That includes addressing dams, predators, agricultural runoff, developments, and working with irrigators, cities and the Environmental Protection Agency, while allowing the tribes to be "part of that voice," Smith said.

"We're going to keep being resilient like the fish," Smith said. "We're going to hold the federal government, any agencies involved in the water systems ... we think about those seven generations ahead of us. We can't stop, because I want my grandkids to have fish to fish on, salmon available."

Related Pages:
NOAA: Breaching Snake River Dams 'Essential' to Save Salmon by Jennifer Yachnin, Greenwire, 7/12/22