<+>=<+>KOLA Newslist<+>=<+>
 

[forwarded by Pat Morris. Thanks...]

Fri, 28 Jan 2000
http://www.nwf.org/natlwild/2000/salmonfm.html

When a Fish Is More Than a Fish
By Vicki Monks

For the New Perce and other Native Americans of the Northwest,
saving endangered salmon means saving an ancient heritage

Sitting one day last spring in the shady yard of his small clapboard
home in Lewiston, Idaho, Horace Axtell unfolded a packet of
wind-dried salmon, sliced paper-thin and shimmering with traces
of the fish's rich oil. An elder and spiritual leader of the Native
American New Perce Tribe, Axtell had hoped enough chinook
salmon would return to the nearby Rapid River for the tribe to
hold its  traditional springtime blessing ceremonies there. But
as too often has been the case in recent years, the run was so
poor that only a token harvest was held. "This is about all we've got
left right now," he said, fingering the packet. "Right now, we have
nothing to bless."

For decades, salmon in the Columbia and Snake River
Basins--which carve through Oregon, Washington and
Idaho--have been in decline, and many populations of all five
salmonid species in the Northwest are now federally listed as
endangered or threatened. In the 1800s as many as 1.5 million
spring/summer chinook salmon alone returned annually to the
tributaries of just the Snake River. By the early part of this
century, wild salmon runs numbered in the hundreds of
thousands. But by the 1980s, all Snake River coho salmon
had disappeared, and by the 1990s, the annual average count
of Snake salmon was less than 10,000. As of last year, all the
remaining runs of the two surviving salmon species there--chinook
and sockeye--had been listed as threatened or endangered. So
had steelhead trout, also in the salmonid family. Only seven known
Snake River sockeyes returned to spawn last season.

"We thought salmon would always be here, since they were here
for thousands of years," says Alphonse Halfmoon, vice chair of the
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and former
chairman of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. As
he sees it, the tribes of the Columbia Basin have an extraordinary
stake in salmon recovery: For millenia, the fish have been of central
importance to their culture, economy, diet and religion.

Tribal leaders not only lament the loss of a way of life, they
believe they owe a spiritual debt to the fish, and they are determined
to see salmon restored to their rightful places in nature. To that end,
the region's Native Americans talk of further asserting their treaty fishing
rights--possibly in court--in order to restore salmon to the Snake River
and other waterways. The Columbia River Basin tribes, points out Nez
Perce Tribe attorney David Cummings, secured what he calls "sacred
promises" from the United States to take fish in perpetuity in exchange
for ceding vast territories of their homelands to the United States.

Those rights have already been upheld several times. In the late
1970s, vigilante groups tried to block Nez Perce from fishing in the
Rapid River, which once provided some of the best salmon spawning
habitat in the world and was a favorite Nez Perce fishing stream.
Idaho authorities called out the National Guard. Before the crisis was
over, a number of Nez Perce fishermen had served time in jail. But in
1982, an Idaho district judge dismissed all the charges, ruling that
Nez Perce treaties with the U.S. government gave tribal members the
right to fish in any streams their ancestors had customarily used.

At many locations where few salmon now return, including the Rapid
River, that victory has a hollow ring these days. Still, other court rulings
defining treaty rights also have guaranteed Columbia Basin tribes a
major role in fisheries management. Now, all the federal and state
agencies working on salmon restoration must include the tribes in
any decisions made.

The tribes also have become politically savvy, working to build
consensus for removing, or breaching, dams that block fish passage
and taking other measures to improve the salmon's chances. For
example, for more than a decade the tribes have been moving forward
with their own fisheries programs. The Nez Perce Tribe, for example,
now employs a staff of 250 in its fisheries department at the height
of the season, including biologists, technicians and engineers. Nez
Perce fisheries program director Silas Whitman sees the task as
something of a holy war. "We are trying to retain everything that is
sacred to us," he says. "A lot of people brush that aside and say,
'Ah, that's beads and feathers talk. You guys drive cars, turn your
lights on just like the rest of us.' Well, yeah, we like creature comforts,
but we are willing to live with restrictions ourselves in order to get
the fish back."

The tribe thinks restoring the fish and the health of the water may
be critical for continued human survival. "If we don't take care of the
water, if we don't take care of the salmon and other species, then
we will expire along with all of those species that we have destroyed,"
says Allen Pinkham, a former tribal chairman and coauthor of
Salmon and His People: Fish and Fishing in Nez Perce Culture. He
currently works as U.S. Forest Service tribal liaison, overseeing efforts
to restore logging-damaged spawning streams on reservation land.
"The water is the blood of the Earth," he said last spring while sitting
under shade trees along the Clearwater River, a tributary of the Snake
that runs through the Nez Perce reservation.

As he talked, a blast of pungent fumes swept in from a downstream
pulp mill. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, mills and
other industries in the Columbia Basin regularly discharge a toxic stew
of chemicals into the rivers and air--including formaldehyde, cyanide,
arsenic, chloroform and dioxin. Biologists have discovered that these
contaminants and others can accumulate in fish. There's evidence
such pollutants may interfere with reproduction, survivability and even
the ability of salmon to navigate to spawning streams. No one
yet knows if the toxics affect human health, but that question could
be of special concern to those who consume a lot of fish in their diets.

Even without the problems presented by degraded and contaminated
streams, the region's dams have made thousands of miles of spawning
habitat difficult to reach or inaccessible. A 1960s Oregon Historical
Society film shows thousands of chinooks stranded and suffocating in
shallow pools below the Oxbow Dam, then just completed, in Hell's
Canyon along the Oregon-Idaho border. The Oxbow is one of three
dams in the canyon that  cut off access for the fish to more than half
the spawning grounds in the Snake River drainage, which holds 24
dams altogether. Seventy-eight more dams cross the Columbia Basin.
Some, but not all, of the dams were constructed with fish ladders that
can help returning adult salmon migrate upstream. Efforts over the
past two decades to help juvenile salmon navigate downstream past
these obstacles to make their way back to the ocean have had only
limited success, however.

The Dalles Dam on the Columbia, completed in 1960, flooded what had
been the most important fishing and trading center for all the tribes of
the Columbia Basin, Celilo Falls. According to oral history, tribal
members had fished the site for thousands of years, tying themselves
to scaffolds built out over treacherous falls, using dip nets and gaff
poles more than 30 feet long to catch the salmon as they jumped the
rapids.

Alphonse Halfmoon began fishing at Celilo Falls in the 1930s. He
still remembers the day one of his friends warned him he had better
tie himself off with rope or the salmon could pull him in. That is no
exaggeration: A chinook, the biggest of the salmon, can be as long as
4 feet and weigh 40 pounds. Back then, they often weighed even more.
"This man told me he'd gotten dragged in and got sucked down into
the bubbly green water below the lower falls," he recalls. "He was
getting hit by so many big salmon it knocked the breath out of him.
He was getting hit in the head, the chest, everyplace." The friend
survived but was so bruised he could hardly walk.

The upper-basin salmon populations, already affected by upriver dams,
went into a precipitous decline after the construction of four dams on
the lower Snake River--Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose
and Lower Granite--built between 1962 and 1975. Harming salmon
runs, of course, was not the intent, and over the years the efforts to
save the fish, although they haven't brought back the dwindling runs,
have been extraordinary. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which
operates the Snake River dams, estimates the agency has spent
more than a billion dollars on salmon research, fish-passage facilities
and hatcheries.

Since the dams kill so many young salmon smolts headed downstream,
the Corps set up a juvenile fish transportation system, using barges
and trucks to speed the smolts downriver. The system is far from perfect,
however, and although most transported young salmon survive until
they are released in the lower Columbia River, researchers say they
don't know how many later perish from the delayed effects of stress.

Tribal leaders see the Corps' array of technological fixes as human
arrogance. Not only have these efforts failed to restore the fish, many
of the upriver salmon stocks are now facing extinction. "It's time for a
different approach," says Levi Holt, a Nez Perce Tribe member who
has worked for salmon and wolf restoration. "If contemporary
science is to succeed, it must include cultural and spiritual values,"
he says.

And so the region's tribes have decided to try approaches of their
own. Not only are they joining with environmental groups in lawsuits
and lobbying for the breaching of the four lower Snake River dams,
they are working on their own to restore salmon populations. Under the
umbrella of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, the
Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama Tribes have put
together a restoration plan called Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit, or
Spirit of the Salmon. Says Allen Pinkham, "We're saying, 'You've kind
of screwed up the earth here a little bit, so let us try it now.'"

The goal of most salmon hatcheries has been to provide fish for ocean
harvest or river sportfishing, and they usually rear young fish under
controlled conditions. But the tribes have now begun several controversial,
experimental projects that seek to restore wild runs, using hatchery
stock to supplement naturally spawning populations of chinook and
coho salmon, as well as steelhead trout.

Many biologists worry that endangered wild salmon will be further
harmed if hatchery fish are allowed to intermingle and breed naturally
in streams. For one thing, says National Marine Fisheries Service
biologist Rob Jones, the area coordinator for salmon recovery, some
hatchery stocks have degenerated into homogenized, genetic
mishmashes. Jones fears that releasing them into streams with
endangered stocks could compromise the genetic diversity and
survivability of the wild fish. "If the stock is down to only a few fish,
that's a very big gamble," he says. "Mixing things up like that biologically
doesn't make sense. I think supplementation has promise, but only
in places where it will not jeopardize the remaining stocks of wild
fish."

Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission executive director Don
Sampson points out that the tribal projects use only salmon with
carefully selected genetic qualities. For example, only offspring from
strong, long-distance fish are placed in upper Snake River tributaries.
After that, Sampson says, it's a matter of letting natural selection take
its course. "Those fish came from the wild. If we allow them to go
back to the wild to spawn and cull themselves out, eventually the
strongest will survive, and they will rejoin with the wild salmon
populations and make  themselves stronger," he explains. So far,
the Nez Perce projects have restocked fish only in streams where wild
salmon no longer exist.

On the Clearwater, the Nez Perce are in the final design stages of a
project to reestablish coho salmon and supplement chinook. This
past summer the tribe used helicopters to plant hatchery-raised fry
in pristine creeks flowing through roadless areas. The idea is to let
the finger-sized fish acclimate to river water for a winter before
they head downstream. The tribe is also in the process of building a
natural rearing-enhancement system that, it's hoped, will help young
fish adapt more quickly to the wild. Rather than keep the fish in long
concrete raceways as most hatcheries do, the new rearing facility
will provide habitat designed as much as possible to be like a natural
stream.

Even if all these plans succeed, there's one big catch. "These
programs won't make one whit of difference if we don't do something
about main-stem passage," says Nez Perce fisheries biologist David
Johnson. "None of us are fooling ourselves. If we don't do something
drastic to improve return rates, nothing we do up here will matter."
And that means addressing the effects of dams: The federal listing of
many populations of salmonid species means that recovery plans
could call for dam breaching--as well as for strengthened regulations
on activities such as industrial processing, logging and grazing that
pollute the water or damage habitat.

The Corps of Engineers is studying several alternatives for the dams,
including one plan to breach the four lower structures on the Snake
River. The Nez Perce Tribe went on record last year supporting that
option. Others too have concluded that breaching those dams is the
surest way to restore endangered salmon-- including the National
Marine Fisheries Service; the Idaho Fish and Game Commission; the
National Wildlife Federation and other nonprofit conservation groups;
and the western division of the American Fisheries Society, an
organization of professional biologists. "The science has pinpointed
these four dams as specifically problematic to Snake River
salmon," says Nicole Cordan, regional organizer at the National
Wildlife Federation's Western Natural Resource Center in Portland,
Oregon.

The White House and Congress will make the decision on dam
breaching, though, and the choice could affect barge transportation,
irrigation and hydropower. Just how much impact breaching would
have depends on who's making the prediction. In the visitor center
at the base of Little Goose Dam, the Corps of Engineers offers an
interactive video that features a cityscape twinkling with lights. If
a visitor selects an option to "remove dams" in order to save salmon,
the lights suddenly go dark.

Yet the Nez Perce and environmental groups point out that the four
dams on the lower Snake provide less than 5 percent of the
hydropower for the region and in many years don't operate at full
capacity because of weak demand for electricity. Irrigation water
from lakes behind those dams benefits only 13 farmers.

Whether dam breaching would help or hinder economic development in
the long run remains an open question. Many local residents protest
that their livelihoods will be ruined by breaching the four dams. But
economic analyses suggest that may not be the case. According to
a draft of a recent federal analysis, the region might actually benefit
from bypassing the dams--or at least suffer no economic harm.
Another analysis, published by The Idaho Statesman newspaper,
found that taxpayers are spending $98 million a year to subsidize
barge transportation on the Snake River. The Statesman's analysis
and another evaluation done for the Idaho Fish and Game Commission
both conclude that the economic benefits of breaching the dams far
outweigh the costs. Taxpayers, electric ratepayers and consumers
would save $183 million a year, the Statesman concludes.

And those analyses don't include the financial toll on the region's
Native Americans. Commission director Sampson points out, "The
tribes that once relied upon salmon as the basis of their economies
lost that wealth when the salmon were taken from the streams and
natural resources were taken from the land."

For now, the Nez Perce are at least still holding onto the cultural
wealth they derive from salmon. When Horace Axtell's daughter Nellie
was young, she learned the ancient methods for wind-drying salmon
and preparing it for blessing ceremonies. The tribe's elders taught
her how to sing the blessing songs and how to show respect for all of
creation.

"We're still holding to that way of life," says Nellie now. "We believe
that we can't remain healthy unless the ceremonies are done to
honor and bless the food. The old ladies taught me that we have a
responsibility to keep the salmon. Because if the salmon goes, we
go. If the salmon disappears, we disappear."

New Mexico writer Vicki Monks is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe,
which historically fished in the Mississippi until the tribe was relocated
to Oklahoma by the federal government. Monks visited the Nez Perce
to report and photograph this article.
 

Life on the Run

A salmon's life starts in a freshwater nest that can be hundreds of
miles away from the ocean. Yet that's where the fish must head after
maturing to the smolt stage. Pacific salmon spend between one and
eight years at sea before returning to their spawning grounds to start
the cycle again.

The fish face daunting natural and man-made challenges in both their
downstream and upstream journeys--including degraded habitat,
altered water temperatures and dams, such as Brownlee Dam on
the Snake River, that can block passage or restrict water flow.

Seasonal Pacific salmon runs once filled rivers and streams all the
way from California to Alaska. Today the only U.S. waterways that still
teem with migrating Pacific salmon are in Alaska.
 

NWF Priority: Giving Salmon a Helping Hand

If four dams on the Snake River are breached, four key barriers to
young salmon going downstream and adult salmon returning to their
spawning grounds upstream will be eliminated. That's one key
message from a collaborative effort among conservation groups
including the National Wildlife Federation, Native Americans and
other fishing constituencies.

The Federation also is working to save river habitat for salmon in
the Pacific Northwest's temperate rain forests.  And in the grasslands
of central Oregon, the Federation is joining forces with Native
Americans to ensure that management plans for federal lands
include restoration of degraded streamside habitat. Also, the Nez
Perce Tribe and the Federation are partners in a lawsuit against the
Army Corps of Engineers for violating water-quality standards in the
Snake River. If you would like to be kept informed about these issues,
write the NWF Western Natural Resource Center, 2031 SE Belmont
Street, Portland, Oregon 97215, e-mail cordan@nwf.org or call
503-230-0421.

---
Copyright 2000 National Wildlife Federation.

<+>=<+>
KOLA Information: http://users.skynet.be/kola/index.htm
KOLA Petitions: http://kola-hq.hypermart.net
KOLA Greeting Cards: http://users.skynet.be/kola/cards.htm
<+>=<+>
if you want to be removed from the KOLA
Email Newslist, just send us a message with
"unsub" in the subject or text body
<+>=<+>