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Hidden Meanings by Shiva Rajbhandari Lewiston Tribune, January 12, 2022

The media is all gossip these days. They love to make a love song something it isn't. They'll tell you Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" is about Jake Gyllenhaal. Really it's about Idaho's quickly dissipating wild salmon and steelhead.

The red scarf Taylor left at Jake's sister's house is an allusion to the red fish God planted in the Snake River basin all those years ago. The car getting lost upstate? That's the smolts losing their way to the ocean due to the cesspools created by the four lower Snake River dams.

All we ask is that our elected leaders save these iconic keystone species. But maybe we got lost in translation, maybe we asked for too much. Congressman Mike Simpson's plan was a masterpiece until Gov. Brad Little tore it all up.

Running scared -- the runs are depleted. Sacred prayer -- salmon are everything to tribal culture.

I was there -- we are all watching as these fish and everything they mean to Idaho are dammed to extinction.

Now Little calls us up again just to break a promise -- the promise our country made to Columbia Basin indigenous people in the century-old treaties to protect accustomed fishing spots. So casually cruel. Little is never honest.

Don't let our state lose the one thing we've ever known.

These salmon are rare. We'll remember them all too well.

I urge readers to call Little and ask him to free the Snake and save Idaho's wild salmon.