Salmon have been an integral part of the cultural and economic livelihoods of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest for millennia. The Nez Perce people’s relationship to the salmon is prescribed in their Creation Story, emphasizing salmon’s important place in their worldview and cementing their mutual duties to each other in this perpetual relationship. The annual first fish ceremony—celebrated by several tribes—welcomes and honors the first salmon caught in the season. Later in the year, the remains are returned to the water in an act of reciprocity and thanks, ensuring that more salmon will return to provide the tribe with all the fish they need. Cultural fishing practices are founded on sustainable attitudes towards the natural world, where species are viewed as relations instead of resources. The alliance of salmon and Northwest Native tribes has persisted to the present day, but it has changed. Colonization has brought new people, worldviews, and economies to the Pacific Northwest, and with them, new ideas of how the salmon and the land they call home should be treated.
The thunderous roar of water rushing through massive pipes, rapidly rotating turbines, and wires coils spinning to generate electricity. A single dam can supply enough electricity to power thousands of homes, a seemingly green and efficient alternative to burning fossil fuels. Hydroelectric dams do not come with the heavy carbon price tag and thus hardly contribute to the warming of the planet. Hydropower offers a renewable energy solution that harnesses the power of flowing water to serve our endless need of energy to power our world. Yet this solution leaves behind an important part of the community: the salmon.
Salmon migratory patterns are widespread within Pacific Northwest watersheds, driven by their needs throughout their life cycle. They are an anadromous species, meaning they spend several years in the ocean before traveling upriver to spawn. During their time in the ocean, salmon accumulate the muscle and fat needed to sustain their long journeys through freshwater rivers where they no longer feed. Due to the many factors that make this journey difficult, salmon mortality is high and thus they have historically developed biological strategies to maximize the number of juveniles that survive. Salmon require three fundamental habitat elements: a navigable waterway, a place to safely spawn, and a place to rear their young. Damming fundamentally alters the ecological landscape and nearly eliminates the possibility for salmon to migrate from the ocean to their spawning grounds upriver.
Salmon were considered a valuable resource by the federal and Washington State governments, but myopic views of the requirements for sustaining salmon populations led to infrastructural projects across the riverways of the Pacific Northwest in the late 19th century and early 20th century which made them incompatible with the needs of salmon.
Increasing urbanization has contributed to the progressive loss of salmon habitat, not only from the physical barrier imposed by dams, but through a range of effects caused by the systems the dams introduced. Dams slow the flow of rivers, causing the water to warm and stagnate. Deforestation of riparian zones due to damming also removes shade from waterways and destroys river edge habitats. Dams are often connected to irrigation systems for agriculture, bringing livestock that trample riparian zones and spawning beds and adding excess nutrient runoff into the waterways. With increasing area of land allocated to agriculture, more water was diverted for irrigation purposes, reducing the river inflow necessary for salmon. Riverine environments depend on a connection to adjacent groundwater in what is called the hyporheic zone for cooling, but damming disrupts this connection. Salmon are temperature sensitive with a maximum thermal tolerance of around 70°F for most species. Chemical pollutants released into the waterway from industry disrupt the salmons’ ability to find their way back to the rivers they spawned in by sense of smell. Urbanization and industrialization reshaped the ecological community, making it hostile to the salmon whose lives had depended on it for centuries.
Not only the salmon are neglected, but the tribal communities for which they make up an essential part of cultural and economic persistence are as well. The regional and national fishing industries value salmon as a resource, making the issue of habitat destruction introduced by damming a concern for all. Yet access to salmon fishing of Native tribes and state and federal obligations to protect their habitat has remained a historic fight.
In the 1850s, Pacific Northwest tribes signed treaties with the federal government that promised their right to fish their “usual and accustomed” fishing grounds in off-reservation locations. However, like many treaties, the government has not acted in good faith and upheld the rights stipulated by their agreement, neither in the past at the time of dam building nor in the present. The governments’ insistence on harvesting hydroelectric power through damming has remained at odds with the tribes’ argument for access and, at very least, accommodation of their fishing needs.
By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that salmon were less abundant, leading the state governments of Oregon and Washington to impose new regulations on fishing, including requirements that dams include fishways, opening hatcheries, and imposing fishing seasons. These regulations were a burden to tribes whose fishing practices were determined on their own terms, at their preferred time and place, according to their understandings of the ecological community that had sustained their ancestors for centuries. The treaty superficially intended that tribes would retain their right to fish according to their traditional, sustainable practices, yet these regulations held them to the same state regulations that applied to all fishers. These restrictions had inequitable consequences: by the 1960s and 70s, only 2-5% of the total salmon removed were caught by Native fishers. Meanwhile, commercial fishers were permitted to continue exploiting struggling salmon populations. Hatcheries were largely responsible for enabling the fishing industry to continue at its rapid pace of consumption, even with pre-existing habitat damage and disruption of salmon lifeways, which populations had not recovered from. The model of hatcheries was based on agricultural systems which sought to maximize output and economic gain through methods of artificial propagation, epitomizing the success of human innovation in manipulating nature. Instead of addressing the damage to the ecological community and marginalization of Native fishers, the fishing industry was narrowly focused on exploiting the resource of salmon. Tribal relationships to salmon and practices of reciprocity and thanks were a far cry from this reality.
But Pacific Northwest tribes stood fast in their right to self-determination, pressing the state to address the issue of salmon habitat destruction, let alone their right to fish. A series of widely publicized “fish-ins” and protests, which drew celebrities such as Marlon Brando, took place over several years. By their uncompromising insistence on their right to cultural livelihood, tribal communities created a movement that brought treaty fishing rights to public awareness. By 1970, fourteen tribes in Washington State had convinced the federal government to go to federal court on their behalf against Washington State in what became known as the infamous Boldt decision after Judge George Boldt. The tribes made several demands: that they were given their share of the harvest including hatchery fish, and that habitat destruction be addressed. Acknowledging the discrimination of Washington State fishing regulations against Native tribes, Judge Boldt reaffirmed their treaty rights, ultimately deciding that tribal fishers were entitled to 50% of the salmon that returned to their traditional off-reservation fishing grounds. Tribes were granted co-management of the salmon population. However, he deferred the demands of hatchery fish and habitat conservation, undermining the strength of the tribes’ fishing rights. The decision changed very little when natural salmon populations were already at risk. Nonetheless, commercial and sport fishers vehemently opposed the decision, worsening relations between white fishing communities and Native tribes.
In an effort to make the most of their co-management rights, the tribes that participated in the U.S. v. Washington case created the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC) in 1976. Community organizing had been the foundation of their power throughout their fight for agency. They would use their organizing power to seek out habitat protection for the salmon populations. Boldt II was finally picked up in 1980. Aiming to resolve the outstanding issue of limited salmon yields, Judge William Orrick decided that hatchery fish would be included in the tribes’ share of salmon and that treaties implied habitat protection, which must be upheld by the state and federal governments. The decision explicitly addressed the role of damming in altering the watershed and making it inhospitable to salmon, appearing to mark progress in the fight for tribal salmon fishing rights.
However, the State of Washington opposed this decision, insisting that the fish habitat was already protected by state and federal law. Judge Orrick’s 1980 decision was overruled in 1985, on the basis that specific cases of environmental damage were needed to prove causation of salmon population endangerment. For nearly the next two decades, tribes, who had maintained their rights to co-management from the initial Boldt decision in 1974, organized to make a case against salmon habitat destruction. Their task was to pinpoint a specific case where many elements of habitat destruction converged—damming, logging, agriculture, et cetera—but without involving too many parties. After all, they aimed to sue the Washington State government with the federal government on their side. With their limited economic and administrative resources, this was an exhausting process for the tribal communities.
The tribes’ success lay in using the words of the state against them. Washington State had estimated that if the culverts in dams were repaired, salmon stocks would increase by 200,000. Culverts are conduits placed within dams that allow water to flow through; though they allow water to pass, they prevent the passage of fish. Even where riverine habitats were semi-functional for salmon, improperly installed culverts imposed habitat fragmentation, limiting their life cycle needs. Washington State is responsible for maintaining these culverts. Thus, the tribes had a significant reason for the decline of salmon as a result of habitat destruction, where Washington State was directly and singularly liable. The case was filed in 2001 but it was not until 2013 that U.S. District Court Judge officially ordered that the culverts be repaired. The culvert case, at the culmination of decades of tribal organization and litigation, marked a success in affirming the tribes’ treaty rights to salmon and salmon habitat restoration, but implementation has remained slow. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) implements 14-20 culvert repair projects per year with nearly 845 outstanding culvert repairs and more to be assessed. The state is only fixing culverts at half the rate necessary to be completed by 2045 as per the settlement’s orders.
The Pacific Northwest tribes’ fight for their treaty rights to salmon does not end with the culvert case, but through their organizing they have made progressive steps toward self-determination and ecological health in their local ecosystems. Their economic and cultural persistence relies on the salmon, driven by the lasting bond of their mutual duties with salmon which has sustained for millennia despite disruptions imposed by development. The infrastructure built to sustain our modern energy and water needs should not come at the cost of ecological and cultural survival. Rather, it is vital to build a future in which no one is left behind, including the salmon and the community that relies on them.