title: Ep 6: The Future
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2024-04-17T08:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/ep-6-the-future/audio.mp3
word_count: 4904
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. You did that on purpose? No, I did it! Why are you smiling then? This is Friday! It was summertime at Stanley Rock, July of 2022. The commercial shunook season had just kicked into high gear. Randy Settler, his nephew Sam George and Sam's daughter Ionna, stood under a canopy, cleaning Sam and alongside son of their cousins. The sun glistened off the water and the silvery scales of the fish, as they rinsed blood and guts into the stainless steel wash basins. Their aunt, Leadana Lopez Whitefoot, watched from the driver's seat of the red Honda element that she drove around camp instead of walking. You see enough to do it right. Howard Wapot, who'd fished with Randy for longer than anyone, grabbed an overheating hose and sprayed nine-year-old Ionna. Howard was one of her dad, Sam's best friends. He and Ionna teased each other constantly. Hey, Gloves! Daddy, love for the Gloves! You took them! I didn't take them! I can't even fit you, Gloves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's still... Whatever! Forever? I know! I said whatever! Days like this are a reminder of the role Sam and plays in the lives of this family. Their financial success depends on the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Their traditions are intertwined with Sam and... But the connections are fraying. Two years later, after another stroke, Leadana doesn't go to the river anymore. Howard died last year from cancer. He fished even after chemo, till his body wouldn't let him anymore. His death was hard on Randy and Sam. Their dynamic wasn't the same without him. They've fallen out and stopped fishing together. Family members like Leadana had hoped that Sam would someday inherit Randy's claims to fishing sites near Stanley Rock, the claims Randy inherited from his mom. Ionna, who has grown up fishing with her dad, is no longer sure whether she'll choose to devote as much of her life to it as he has. I'd like fishable water. I don't know. Now 11 years old, Ionna sat making beaded jewelry. She said long days on the water without a catch. Feel draining. Kind of frustrating. Why did I come on the boat? Well, I used to feel about it. I'd feel like I'd want to go fishing every day. But now thinking about it, I get too tired. That makes it look easy, but really it's not. Whether she fishes like her dad might not be her choice to make. There was still fish. I think she would do it. I'm going to teach her how to put hoops in so she can get some to eat, some to put away, some to give away. She's a very big giver, so I'm pretty sure she'll give fish away and that'll make her happy. But I hope there's fish though when she gets older to do this. Sam hasn't let Ionna see just how worried he is. They don't know how much longer we'll be able to fish because the run keeps getting less and less and the water's getting warmer and warmer. Columbia River tribes have been working to save the salmon since long before Ionna was born. After generations of promises made and broken by the US government, they're trying to restore salmon themselves. Right now the Northwest elected leaders, really all of us here in the Northwest, are grappling with the question of how much we should do to save the salmon. For Columbia River tribes, the answers clear. Whatever it takes. This is Sam and Wars. I'm Tony Shit. You ever been to Sam and Tony? For a while, whenever I talked with Randy or his family members, they would urge me to visit the Yakima Nations hatchery in Cleyllum, Washington. It opened in 1997 when Randy was on tribal council. Based on the history I've described in earlier episodes, you might think Columbia River tribes want nothing to do with hatcheries. But this is where things take an unexpected turn, because tribal people sought potential for healing in the tool that had caused them so much harm. In their many court battles, tribes secured funding and authority to co-manage hatcheries and start some of their own. They developed new techniques to restore wild fish in the areas upriver where government policies had killed most of them off. He didn't know it, but I had already taken an interest in tribal hatcheries. And Charlie Stromb, the manager of the hatchery in Cleyllum, had invited me up to look around. So I guess, uh, what do you want to see? You want to just see the over operation? Or do you got a... Yeah, you do. Okay. Charlie showed me around the ponds and raceways. Those are the long fish pens constantly fed with fresh running water. He explained they're trying not to raise the typical hatchery fish. This is a far cry from that. The Yakima hatcheries breed fish captured from the wild. They have feeders at the bottom of ponds, so fish don't get used to people. They've experimented with mimicking a natural stream and using earthen ponds to acclimate fish to the wild. This is a far cry from that. The Yakima hatcheries breed fish captured from the wild. They have feeders at the bottom of ponds, so fish don't get used to people. They've been using mimicking a natural stream and using earthen ponds to acclimate fish to their home streams. And they let fish grow and leave the hatchery on their own terms, like a wild fish would, instead of dumping them all downstream at once. The original idea was to kickstart salmon populations to be self-sustaining. They're eventually going to work themselves out of a job. We won't need to intervene, you know, that wild population will take off and sustain itself. But I don't see that happening with dam operations, how they're controlling the flow of the rivers during certain times of the year when flows needed for salmon and its warming up the river temperature. Our stroll past the ponds leads to a couple of white trailers parked on the hatchery grounds. They didn't look like much, the kind of white trailers you'd see at a construction site. I don't even remember them having windows. Do you want to see what they're doing here? Yeah, let's go. Inside, Powwow music thumped from a speaker overhead. Machinery hummed over the drumbeat. Workers sat elbow to elbow, hunched over tables next to buckets full of baby fish, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Hey, that's on it. Germain Hart was sitting next to the door when I walked in. He showed me how they were tagging salmon, each less than a year old, so they can keep track of them when they return several years later. They use special paints and a machine that implants a little wire tag no bigger than the tip of a sharpened pencil into the snout of the fish. They even let me tag one. All you got to do, hold them up, say down. All right, this one's just the tag, so once you get their snout on the bottom of this here, pushing, tagging. You can only if you mess up, you can get bare hug by will. I can picture Germain recovering this tag and wondering who botched it so badly. When you're monitoring adult returns, I mean, I think I made it. He said they do all this because salmon took care of their people for so long, and now it's the people's turn. We're just doing our best to try to help maintain and hopefully find this way to manage itself again. It's our pleasure to do this. It's our right. It's our duty. Here in these trailers, Germain is catching up with friends over salmon, the way people have always done. We're all brothers, we're all brothers and sisters in here, so. It was not easy to get to this point. By now, it won't surprise you to hear these tribal efforts face resistance from the federal government. Congress and federal officials used hatcheries to paper over all their damage on the river for decades. But then, right around the time tribes got involved, they started considering hatcheries part of the problem. They worried about domesticated hatchery fish, watering down the gene pool in the wild. Mark Sherwood is the director of the Native Fish Society. He explained the issue wild fish groups like his have with hatcheries. I mean, imagine condensing hundreds of thousands of years of genetic evolution into an industrial process that you can do for cheap at scale. That's kind of what they're chasing. And they have not been successful. They're kind of bringing the entire population down to this domesticated state. So federal fisheries managers adopted new limits on how many hatchery fish could be released and allowed to spawn in the wild. That did lead to some improvements at government hatcheries. But it also created a lot of resistance to the tribe's hatchery efforts. That's an ironic dynamic, given that the hatcheries were the government's own stopgap invention, that tribes have pioneered hatchery techniques specifically designed to help wild populations. Tribal hatcheries have raised fish that are still able to migrate downriver past eight dams, surviving the Pacific Ocean for years, then find their way home through those dams again. We know that because of the kind of tagging they were doing at the Clion hatchery. I argue with anybody. When they say a hatchery fish isn't fit. Here's Randy speaking at an event in the Columbia River Gorge. I argue if they went out into the environment since they were that big and they went out and survived everything that wanted to kill them. Whether it be man or any other predator and they came back, I argue they should be fit for survival. Habs generally don't like the idea of the government choosing which fish are allowed to spawn based on where they're born. As one person put it to us, whether you're born in a T.P. or a hospital isn't what determines if you're native. In 2000, Yakima Nation leaders were irate that a federal hatchery in northern Washington was clubbing to death its surplus of hatchery fish. Federal policy from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, said it was better to kill the fish than allow them to spawn in the same streams as wild salmon. So Randy protested. He told me the story during one of our many drives along the river. So you know what we did? We went up with those farmers and those ranchers and everybody and we got the federal entrance way. They were going to rest the sand federal agents there to rest it. Here's how he told it. He and a friend cut a flight up to the hatchery on the Metau River. When he got there, Randy jumped into the icy water. He and other protesters dragged him to make shifts screen across the water and blocked the entrance to the hatchery so the fish couldn't swim into the hatchery's ponds. They had no choice but to continue upriver to spawn. All the things that I've been able to do, I've been on panels, been in the White House with all the administrative people in administrations, talked about policy from all kinds of topics. People ask me what's the thing that you remember the most about your service. I told them all that's easy. When we went to the Metau River and we blocked that federal hatchery. According to news articles from the time, NOAA Fisheries reversed its policy a year later. Today, the agency says it tries to avoid limits on hatcheries, when possible, for the sake of tribes. Flexing the rights as co-managers that they secured in court, the Yakima, Nez Perse, Yumatilla, and Warm Springs tribes started hatchery programs like the one in Clellum, across the Columbia River Basin. As a result, those tribes can claim credit for some of the biggest examples of salmon rebounding. Remember, I told you last episode that Columbia River co-host salmon went extinct by the 1980s? A couple of years ago, nearly 100,000 co-host salmon returned to the Columbia. How? Tribal hatcheries. I gotta say, yes, the tribes did the heavy lifting. This is Guy Norman, who managed fisheries for state governments in both Oregon and Washington for decades. A couple of years ago, during a meeting of the Regional Northwest Power and Conservation Council, he thanked tribes for working past so much resistance from his fellow government officials. I do recall the skepticism and the debate lots of concern about moving fish upstream. Then there's the species of Chinook salmon that returned to the snake river each fall. In 1990, the Falshinook population was down to 78 fish. About 25 years later, it had rebounded to well over 20,000. Again, this is largely the work of tribal hatcheries. All of these programs have been successful beyond my wildest dreams, and certainly the tribes really need to be applauded. Peer reviewed studies about various tribes' hatchery programs have found them successful in boosting salmon abundance without major detriment to the wild gene pool. But the studies also acknowledge what Charlie Stromb at the Clielum hatchery said about the work. For salmon numbers to be self-sustaining, you also have to fix what hurt them in the first place. Is the federal government about to finally do that? Let's find out after a short break. 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. It's wonderful to be here and have the opportunity to celebrate with all of you. In early 2024, representatives of Oregon, Washington State, and the four treaty tribes gathered in Washington, DC, they were celebrating a new agreement to prioritize Columbia River Salmon Recovery. It included $1 billion in government spending. And a Mallory chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Her office brokered the deal. Federal agencies are on all hands on deck to support the efforts to restore wild salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin. A current ran through all of the speeches at the ceremony. We can't waste time. It was mentioned by Shannon Wheeler, Chair of the Nesperse Tribe. We have adversarial things that are in front of us like the climate change and global warming that are going to be affecting all of us. Washington Governor Jay Inslee. We got to defeat climate change if we're going to save these fish in the Columbia River. And Rick Spinrad, the U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce, who oversees NOAA. With the existential threat of climate change knocking at our doors, we need to stop expecting salmon to adapt to us. We've mentioned before that scientists are predicting ocean changes that are deadly for salmon. By one estimation, the number of salmon that survived their time in the ocean to return home could decline by almost 90%. So is there even a point to these kind of restoration efforts if salmon are just doomed? Yes, there absolutely is if you ask the same scientists who've done that research. Yeah, actually, that was my biggest concern. But people will think the threat from climate change is so severe that it is not worth doing anything at this point to try to save salmon. And that is absolutely not the case. That's Lisa Krozier from NOAA. You heard from her in our first episode. She says the dire conditions in the ocean make the rest of the work all the more important. This is really a very high level of threat. And because it's on top of them already being in depressed state, yeah, it just really could be overwhelming for people to figure like this. This is just too much. We just can't do it. But we can. We can make a big difference because so many of these impacts we created. Look at what salmon have already survived. They've lasted millions of years through ice ages. And they've recolonized and come back stronger than ever. They figured out how to leap massive waterfalls or slip past hydroelectric turbines. We sometimes load them into tanks and truck them to the ocean. And they still find their way home. Absolutely. There is definitely still hope. And I mean, salmon are so resilient. The secret to the salmon's resilience is the way they hedge their bets. Food or predators in the river in ocean might be scarce one month or abundant the next. The water might be colder than usual or warmer. So salmon collectively lay tens of millions of eggs. And they're all hardwired a little differently. Some grow fast. Some slow. Some will start their ocean migration early. Some late. Some stay in the ocean for two years. Some five. Salmon play the odds that however the world changes, some of them will too. If we can keep salmon populations healthy enough, they'll give themselves a chance. For tribal members, this is both a practical and a moral imperative. We are, we'll punish them, the salmon people. In our creation story, salmon gave up himself so we could have nourishment. And in return, we promise to speak on behalf of our resources. Corinne Samms was the final tribal representative to speak at the White House ceremony. She's on the governing board for the Umatilla tribes. The chair of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. Because it's going to take all of us to implement and ensure we restore our salmon to healthy and abundant levels. Katsyaayya, thank you. This agreement was decades in the making. Since 2001, environmental advocates, tribes, and the state of Oregon had been involved in a lawsuit challenging the operations of Columbia River dams. This president Joe Biden took office in 2021 and made promises to honor tribal rights. The debate was heating up over dam removal on the lower snake river. That's the largest tributary of the Columbia. It used to be a massive salmon producer. So the parties agreed to pause the lawsuit to try to negotiate a deal. Moving next to Randy Settler, your time starts now. Randy wasn't one of the negotiators, but Yakima leaders at one point asked him to testify in a White House listening session. He recounted his protest blocking of federal hatchery and said it taught him how salmon will repopulate a stream if given the chance. So I'm a dams were removed. I would hope that the fish would then reclaim that habitat that took tens of thousands of years that's been covered by dam construction. After two years of negotiations, the White House rolled out a series of promises. Half a billion dollars toward enhancing tribes' hatcheries and funding a plan to reintroduce fish above Grand Cooley dam where they've been blocked from hundreds of miles of pristine habitat for the better part of a century. A presidential memo directing federal agencies to make salmon recovery a top priority. And money for tribal energy projects that could someday replace the power generated at the dams, so that several dams could be removed. Not everyone loved the deal. The lobbying groups for electric utilities and other businesses that rely on the dams were furious because the deal thrust the region's future energy sources and costs into uncertainty. They're challenging the agreement in court. The federal government hasn't responded to the lawsuit yet. The deadline isn't until May of 2024. Kurt Miller, director of the Northwest Public Power Association, talked to OPP a few weeks after the agreement was announced. He said they were cut out and kept in the dark while negotiations chartered a course toward dam removal. We had a right to participate and that right was ignored. When I asked the White House about this, a spokesperson said it opened up multiple avenues for people to share input, including listening sessions and a docket for public comments. It also released a tentative agreement for people to comment on a couple of months before it was finalized. Miller also issued a public statement saying the agreement with tribes, quote, hands the keys to anti-hydroparties, whose stated objective is to dismantle the entire system. I might not trust government processes as much coming forward because this was just this really was not a fair process. The federal government leaving someone out of discussions about Columbia River dams. Does that sound familiar? The present salmon run must be sacrificed. There is a notable difference though in what's happening now compared to when the dams were built. The White House is calling for studies and processes to make sure it first replaces the electricity and other dam uses people rely on. Federal officials want to ensure no one's life is upended by decisions to come. They have made no promises about dam removal. This ambiguity is why some advocates tatted the agreement as a historic step, while others saw the government making salmon recovery wait on business interests yet again. I called Randy often as all this was playing out to see what he thought. Hey Tony, two snakes. He sometimes answers the phone this way. You know why they call people two snakes? I don't. I can't imagine it's good. It's worse than calling somebody Tony one snake. For all the talk from government leaders about how historic the agreement is, talking with Randy gave me a different perspective. He hasn't dwelled on it much at all. He's seen funding agreements before. He knows it might not be enough. And he'll believe Columbia River dam removal when he sees it happen. He was part of the Ackham's calls for dam removal 20 years ago. I mean, because they did ask me, you know, I get inquiries from people. What do you think about this? You know, I just said, you know, it's linked to the removal of the dams. I said, I don't know how that's going to really play out. Instead, Randy's been focused on a project of his own. Shad. Nine out of every 10 fish swimming up the Columbia are now shad. Even though the fish from the hearing family isn't native to the river. Shad numbers have exploded because of dams. They like warmer water than salmon. Shad weren't strong enough to jump to live a falls, but they can navigate the dam's fish ladders. Biologists say they know too little about the fish, but few of their massive numbers are harming salmon. Shad might be the greatest threat to recovering salmon. Randy's more worried about them than most. I caught up with him at a meeting in Portland. He helped pull together involving tribes, nonprofits, and several government agencies. The numbers of juvenile Shad are competing for the very food source that the baby salmon need. They're taking up to habitat that the baby salmon need. They're feeding all the predators. Now with the abundance of Shad juveniles, the predator populations are just growing and growing. Randy initiated that meeting to try and generate momentum for a new fish processing plant on the Columbia River. He hopes to turn Shad into fertilizer or supply them to food assistance programs. In theory, that would open up a new market for Randy and other Columbia River fishermen. He would also be a way to help the river and the salmon by doing what he does best. Fishing. At the start of this podcast, I mentioned that much of it would be about history that I wish I had known growing up in the Northwest. The history you don't get from an Army Corps guided tour of the dams. I have two kids now, a three-year-old and a kindergartener. What they learn in history class, it might be different. A few years ago, Oregon adopted a new requirement that schools teach Native American history, and that it be, quote, historically accurate and culturally embedded. One public school in Portland, the sunny side environmental school, has a whole segment where fourth graders have to argue the various cases for whether to build the dam and destroy saliva falls. The first year they did it, I'm told kids were bawling when they found out the falls were gone. Ion is attending a new school in the Columbia River Gorge, where about half of the kids are native. It's more better because I was like the only native at my old school. The school has days dedicated to celebrating tribal culture. Her dad supplies the fish. When Randy went to school in the Gorge, he told me he and other Native kids used to get red check marks next to their name for showing up too dirty because they had been fishing. But now, Randy has started getting invitations to visit schools and share his story with classes as young as third grade. Hey, good morning. You guys feeling good today? Yeah, yeah. Hey, good. Well, today I brought some friends with me. I tagged along on one of his trips to a school in White Sam and Washington. He went with his good friend Lonnie, who leads the Longhouse in Topanish. And our guest up are here today is Lonnie's slam and Randy Sutler. Hi. They watched a couple of videos about Sam and, including one produced by OPB in ProPublica. Then it was time for questions. It took the kids a while to get to the big picture. The first class was right before lunch. You could tell. What's your favorite thing to put on top of a, um, like seasonings or something on top of a salmon? Lemons. Oh, that's so good. I love lemons. I love lemons. But eventually, the students really got into it. So it confuses their brain. Why would a salmon make it so there's less than less fish every time? You? Yeah, cool. You don't know what kind of species of salmon are still here. Since the dam's reveal has been easier for the salmon to get back to the spot where they were born? No. Yeah, go ahead. If they didn't build the dam, would the Columbia be flooded? Or do people know if the salmon are going to go extinct? And if they do, do they know how they estimated when? And Randy, of course, didn't hold back. OK, when you look at the original history of the construction of the dams, their plan was to kill all the salmon off. He told them about the days of giant salmon weighing as much as their teacher and how those populations were wiped out. He broke down the way the rivers changed and the problem that poses for salmon as the planet heats up. Think about the dams as part of a bathtub. It holds all that water behind it still and it's getting hotter and hotter and hotter. So if the temperature keeps rising and rising and rising, salmon can't live. So does that depend on type of salmon or just all salmon? All salmon species. In the span of one-class period, Randy seemed to have these third grade kids grasping the material I've taken years together and six meandering podcast episodes to try to convey. Before class let out, Randy made sure the kids knew why he told his story and why he felt they needed to hear it. Because it's telling you about the problems that are happening with the ecology of the Columbia River and the climate change that we're all faced with and all be long gone. Lonnie and I will be passed on. We'll be in another world but you have to live in this world. Salmon Wars is brought to you by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Thanks to all the members who make podcasts possible at OPB. I'm your host, Tony Schick. I produce this podcast along with Julie Sabatier, 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 Oglevie. Thanks to Charles Hudson for reviewing our episodes prior to publication with an eye toward cultural context. And thanks to Sarah Blustin, Lilian Carebake, and Sage Van Weng for their input. This still lagori was the voice of the official government documents you heard in this episode. Visit our website OPB.org for more in depth reporting on salmon, dams, and Pacific Northwest tribes. And if you like this podcast, please follow us on your favorite podcast app. You'll also find the Timber Wars series in the same podcast feed. It's all about the history and consequences of a fight in the Northwest over trees, owls, and the meaning of the natural world. I highly recommend it if you haven't heard it already. Thanks for your support.