title: Ep 4: The Salmon’s Struggle
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2024-04-03T08:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/ep-4-the-salmons-struggl-5a9295/audio.mp3
word_count: 3193
Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded, and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join as a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. On a cloudy spring day, Randy Settler and Sam George were headed back toward Stanley Rock when they spotted a police truck waiting for them on the shore. The inner tribal looks like now. Think so? Yeah. Sam recognized it as the inner tribal police, who patrol camps and enforce fishing rules. After last episode, full of arrests and fishing protests, you might be thinking Sam and Randy are in for some confrontation, but times have changed. Good morning. Good to see you, man. The scars of the fish wars are still there. But law enforcement has softened its approach, and tribal enforcement, in particular, exists to protect the tribal treaty rights. Remember, Randy's parents were involved in cases that cemented the tribe's rights to self-regulate. Randy greeted the officers at the docks, and they talked about his day on the water. Hey, Randy. Hey, how's it going? How are you doing? Yeah, we caught one all week. One all week, huh? Well, I talked to Andy so happy this week. He said he wasn't catching anything. They didn't catch anything. We got really good nets out. Yeah, so you think, but new to this. It's not the fact that they're talking, I'm interested in now. It's what they're talking about. Randy's sites are considered some of the best on the river. If there's fish to catch, he and his crew will catch them. We're talking about some survival study in the ocean, and they're predicting that within so many years that the ocean is going to warm so much that it's going to decrease the survivability of salmon by 90%. And so they're saying the Columbia River runs will be wiped out. Real that quickly, huh? Yeah, well, look what's going on right now. This is warm in every year. These men used to be on opposing sides. Now they're facing the same scary reality. This is Sam and Wars. I'm Tony Schick. As we've shown you over these first three episodes, Sam and are at the heart of indigenous life along the Columbia River. They're a key part of tribal diets, tribal economies, tribal ceremonies, and celebrations. Just because salmon used to be everywhere, a reasonable estimate of the historic Columbia River salmon population was somewhere in the 16 million range. Oral histories put it a lot higher. That sheer volume can be hard to wrap your head around. So here's one way to think about it. At 16 million, if you were to hear a note for every salmon swimming up the Columbia, it might sound something like this. By the late 1920s, when decades of overfishing left only a quarter of those fish in the river, it had sound more like this. The government responded to this decline by producing more baby fish in hatcheries. But the number of adult salmon in the river kept dropping. Because all those babies couldn't survive. Tribes have tried to solve that, and they seem to have gotten closer than anyone has before. We'll debt thought for a later episode because there's a lot more to the story of tribes in hatcheries. The result of these government hatcheries though was yet another broken promise. Because we told tribes we could make up for all the habitat, we poured concrete over, or dumped our wastewater into. And we didn't. When salmon first showed signs of decline in the Columbia, people weren't worried about species extinction, or treaties. They were worried about supply for the fishing industry. Not a long came a man named Spencer Beard. Picture a big, bushy beard, woolen suit, and a bow tie. If you collect trading cards of 19th century naturalists, Beards in the starter pack. He was the first curator of the Smithsonian. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant also made him the first person in charge of what's known today as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fissures. That's the massive federal agency responsible for endangered species protections for salmon. Beard had this idea that we humans could stop the decline of salmon if we hatched massive numbers of baby fish in pens and then stocked rivers with them. He got the first one of these hatcheries built in 1872 in California. He pitched it as the solution on the Columbia River just three years later. His promise to Northwest states was this. We can crank out so many salmon that will not only preserve the supply, will increase it. Oregon State Fishing Commissioners absolutely loved Beard's idea of making more fish instead of, you know, fishing more responsibly. This is what they said about it in my colleague Crystal Lagoury's voice, doing her best impression of how these old commissioners sound in my head. Plus care and labor are needed to raise fish than to raise other animals or even to raise vegetables. Guess what? They were wrong. Salmon are what's called a nadromus. They're born in the gravel beds of freshwater streams. They live for a year or so in freshwater before migrating to the ocean. And then eventually they return years later, navigating from the open ocean all the way back to their home stream, where they spawn the next generation to start the cycle again. Columbia River Tribe's culture and salmon management have always been in tune with this life cycle. The mass production, less care than vegetables approach, wasn't in tune with this. It didn't work. And the supply of salmon didn't increase. The mid-concerns about costs, the first era of hatcheries fizzled out before it began. Then at the end of the 30s came the era of dam building. And federal officials needed a way to sell the public on the idea that they could preserve salmon while damming up the rivers. Biologists with the federal government were not confident that hatcheries could actually make up for the impact of dams. But they thought preserving the wild runs of salmon would be impossible with dams in place. So it was really the only idea they had. That didn't stop government officials from making bold promises that salmon would stay plentiful. Here's Don Sampson, former head of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. In an old clip where he recounts what federal dam builders told local tribal leaders before they completed the first dam in 1938. The head of the Corps of Engineers came down there and told Tommy Thompson and the leaders down there said, don't worry chief. You'll have more salmon than you ever had. Tommy Thompson was the chief of the village at Salilo, the hallowed fishing grounds. The government also immortalized its promise to him in films about early dams like Bonneville before the Dalles Dam destroyed Salilo Falls. Chief Tommy can go on spearing the Royal Chinook in the tumultuous role of Salilo Falls. The salmon are going through. Guess what? They were wrong again. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll hear about the consequences. Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded and your support is more important than ever. KMHD.org and join us a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. It is. Oh, that's a dead dog in the middle of the road. That's yikes. It is Sunday, April 3, 2022, 8.54 in the morning. And I am rolling up to the top niche of Longhouse. Partway through the first spring fishing season I spent with Randy, he invited me up to the Akama reservation in central Washington. He wanted me to see how salmon is used in ceremonies. There's a Ford truck in front of me that might be Randy. That's the man. Randy's one of the main fishermen for the Longhouse here in Topinish. He used to play basketball with the Longhouse leader, his old friend Lonnie Salam. We got there early because he had to drop off fish he'd caught for the ceremony. Which I do just drop him off here. Yeah, I couldn't let him know in the kitchen. Yeah, there's just a couple of fish. You heard correctly. Randy told his friend that he'd only brought two salmon in his cooler, two to serve a couple hundred people who'd be at the Longhouse that day. Randy told me it was a big deal that I'd been invited to attend the feast that day. The Topinish Longhouse is open to anyone. They wouldn't turn you away if you showed up. But this Longhouse doesn't exactly advertise. It's not every day that a non-native person attends this kind of ceremony. So he walked me through the main hall and into the kitchen to deliver the fish. Then he promptly left me there. I'm going to go find a place to creep out for a while. That cooler is my cooler. Can you grab it after they're done? You want me to just throw it in my rig? Yeah, just rinse it out. That way I know it won't walk away. If you go by my trailer, do you know which one is my trailer? You can just take the rope off and slide it inside it. So that left me not a tribal member alone in the kitchen of a Longhouse where I knew nobody. It's a white guy with a microphone surrounded by a dozen or so women, not entirely sure why I was standing there while they tried to prep the biggest feast of the year. Ladi Sam is one of the heads of the kitchen, splitting her time between cooking, wrangling the young girls into helping, and adjusting their tribal regalia. In between getting in everyone's way, I peppered Ladi with questions. And she indulged me while she cleaned and cut the salmon from Randy and some others pulled from the freezer. The ceremony is meant to honor the first returning salmon of the new year. They were cooking frozen salmon because otherwise they wouldn't have enough. I watched Ladi prep salmon like I'd never seen before. She sent the fillets outside to be smoked over Alderwood, then sliced the fish heads in half and laid them on the baking tray, next to fins and tails. The only thing we don't eat is the bones and the teeth, but everything else is, let's say, sucked clean. When your feast celebrates the gift of salmon, you don't waste any of it. Even if it's the eyeball. They prepare salmon not just for the big feast, but for every religious gathering. With 10,000, almost 11,000 tribal members, it's not guaranteed that all our people have salmon on their table every day. So the Sunday gives the opportunity for these foods to give us nourishment and blessing. Columbia River tribes used to eat about a pound of salmon per person every day. It was something like 60% of their diet. And they still had enough leftover to take a trade, drive and preserve salmon for other goods. Today, the goal is to make sure everybody who attends can at least get a taste of salmon. There's been a few times where we haven't had enough salmon to get us through those years. Drums and Bells signaled the start of the day's events, and Lottie still had work to do. It might keep you from doing it. Yeah. All of you. It's hard to overstate the disappearance of a people's primary food source. Research across the globe has connected the loss of traditional diets with spikes in health problems for indigenous populations. In one West Coast tribe, the Karook of Northern California, researchers found a direct link between families' loss of access to salmon and increased prevalence of diabetes and heart disease within those same families. And a study of native Alaskans showed a salmon-rich diet can actually prevent heart disease and diabetes. Contemporary science caught up to what tribes knew all along. Salmon is medicine. We need the salmon. This is our food. This is what we as Aboriginal people need to exist. And it's not changed from the time of the treaty until this day. And it's not a coincidence that when native people and salmon were forced away from each other, they both suffered. I think there's a very good correlation that when the tribes were getting put on reservations and, you know, at worth the United States that salmon were not doing well, we could evolve together. That's biologist Zach Penny. He's an Esperse. I talked to Penny a couple of years ago when he used to work for Columbia River Treaty tribes. He's now an advisor for NOAA Fisheries. Yeah, the agency that grew out of Spencer Bear's work back in the 19th century. We talked about how, on behalf of white people like me, the US government forced both the native people and the salmon away from their river home into an existence on the government's terms. Salmon can find a hatcheries. People can find their reservations. You know, just like a hatchery, it's like, oh, we're going to remove their habitat. We'll put them there. Salmon didn't survive too well when they were mass produced in concrete pens. Reservations were devastating for tribal people's health. Penny read me some of his work from graduate school, where he first drew the connection between reservations and hatcheries. Indian reservations like hatcheries can have negative effects on their residents. We have got to loss the connectivity. So poverty came with the reservations. We were forced to live away from our sound and other resources. Diabetes tribes have some of the highest surveillance of diabetes in the world. My dad is diabetes. Heart disease, alcohol, lismidrug abuse. You know, these are things that were put onto a lot of the Indian people. He said tribes don't want salmon produced for them like it's government cheese. They want to be able to live their customs and culture. Tribes have gone to great lengths to put fish back in the rivers. And they're not the only ones who suffer when the fish disappear. A while back, Randy got a little frustrated with me when he heard me on a radio news segment. I'd said something about how tribes wanted to recover salmon because they need fish to exercise their treaty rights. No, Randy told me. It's not just about them. That's too short-sighted. But that's not the issue. The issue here is all these trees, all these living creatures. They're only here because the salmon brought the nutrients in from the ocean. And all these living creatures, the bears, the raccoons, the birds, they spread these important minerals that came from the salmon from the ocean that enabled all these trees to grow for this land to be what it is today. And how's it going to continue? This reminds me of some eagles that nest near Randy's house. When I was over, we'd often see them outside the sliding glass door that overlooks the river. That's one right there, that's a big bird. Where do you see it? Oh, I don't see it anymore, but it just spread it. Oh yeah, right there, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely an eagle. They see something. They nested in some trees Randy's mother planted. She used fish guts as fertilizer. Now Randy watches the birds eat from the river. One day I was sitting here like this and I was drinking coffee and it was in the morning. And these eagles were coming around like that. And one of them stopped like that and he went, and he dove right into the water. And went under the water. And he came out and he had a large steel head about that big. And he brought the fish up on the rocks and the fish was still quivering. And he held the head part of the fish down like that and he went, and he cut the fish in half with one stroke with his talent. And he was eating, eating, eating, eating on that for about five minutes. He took off. And he flew across the river and he glided from all the way over there without even flapping. And he landed right on the rock. He grabbed the other section of the fish and he made his journey back. It was quite a sight to see. I've seen it many times. It's all living creatures that are dependent upon the salmon for the quality of life that's out in this river that affects all those species, whether it's orcas, whether it's the hake, whether it's sea lions, whether it's seals, whether it's eagles. At some point in time, it's going to affect all those living creatures just like it's going to affect the human population. Salmon aren't leaving restaurant menus anytime soon. Hatcheries still put plenty of salmon into the ocean, even if they don't make it back to the rivers. Sea food companies also farm salmon. These are essentially factory farms in the water where the fish spend their whole life in a cage. Heck, scientists can even grow pretty convincing salmon filet from cells in a laboratory. But the fight for salmon isn't about making sure we have cheap filets of pink fish. It's about restoring the cycle from the stream to the ocean and back that's made this place into what we know. Remember that exercise at the start of this episode when we played a note for every salmon in the Columbia River? Back before white people began messing with the river, it sounded like this. Today, it sounds like this. The salmon didn't disappear on their own. It didn't just happen. So who killed all the fish? That's next time. On salmon wars. Salmon wars is brought to you by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Thanks to all the members who make podcasts possible at OPP. I'm your host, Tony Schick. I produce this podcast along with Julie Sabatia, Katie Campbell at ProPublica contributed to the reporting. Our editor for this project is Anna Griffin. Our sound engineers are Nelline Silva and Stephen Craig. Original music for salmon wars was created by Keeley Goodwin and Sean O'Hoolvey. Thanks to Charles Hudson for reviewing our episodes prior to publication with an eye toward cultural context. And thanks to Sarah Blustain, Lilian Carebake and Sage Van Weng for their input. Crystal Lagoury was the voice of the official government documents you heard in this episode. Audio of Don Samson came from the film Echo of Water Against Rocks by Ian McCluskey. Visit our website opb.org for more in-depth reporting on salmon, dams and Pacific Northwest tribes. If you like this podcast, please follow us on your favorite podcast app. There will be more seasons about controversial environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest for you to listen to in the future. Thanks for your support.