CHINOOK SALMON:
An estimated 16 million salmon used to teem up the Columbia River annually, a vast river system the size of France. Logging, agriculture and overfishing in the basin began to take a toll on salmon by the late 1800s and ambitious dam building in the 20th century dealt the definitive blow. With eight dams between the mouth of the river in Oregon and the NEZ PERCE RESERVATION in Idaho, only 78 fall chinook were seen at the uppermost dam in 1990. Every salmon species in the region would be listed on the Endangered Species List shortly thereafter.
WHAT TRIBES ARE DOING:
Aaron Penney, manager of the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery, is a man who eats, breathes and dreams fish. Here he fishes for chinook with a traditional gaffe at Selway Falls, an ancestral Nez Perce fishing site.
Salmon, anadromous fish and eels historically made up 50% of American Indian diets in the Pacific Northwest and a vital part of indigenous cultural and religious practices. But NOAA (the federal entity tasked with protecting salmon) has been mired in litigation for the past 25 years, each of their recovery plans thrown out of federal court for being inadequate and in violation of the Endangered Species Act. Concerned that no federal agency had acted to prevent salmon's extinction, or later, to ensure their recovery, the Nez Perce took matters into their own hands, invoking treaty rights guaranteeing them access to fish and ancestral fishing grounds, and creating one of the largest, most impactful fisheries programs in the nation. Located in Idaho's richest chinook spawning grounds, the Nez Perce Reservation is restoring habitats and employing a large science staff that tracks fish and generates scientific data crucial to monitoring the success of federal conservation efforts. An important party to federal and state salmon cases, the Nez Perce have become active proponents of dam removal, particularly the less productive, aging dams of the Lower Snake River. Intent on restoring chinook salmon ecologically and genetically, the Nez Perce have also created a landmark tribal hatchery that departs from conventional hatcheries (for how, see below), which see upwards of 50% mortality and whose goals historically skewed more towards quantity than quality. The efforts are paying off. But even as they see success in the growing number of fish that return to the reservation, the Nez Perce are also seeing water temperatures in all the rivers that criss-cross Nez Perce lands rise to levels lethal to fish due to global warming.
Staff at the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery collect 'milt' from a male fall chinook salmon. The hatchery uses up to 30% wild fish in their brood stock and a complex breeding matrix to help restore the salmon to fitness and size they were known for before populations crashed. The hatchery also rears the salmon in environments that mimic nature, at low densities, with substrate, and cold water. The salmon are also put through a kind of boot camp/ exercise routine in pools with current. This differs from most conventional hatcheries where salmon grow densely packed in rectangular concrete tanks. The fall chinook salmon released from Nez Perce facilities are tracked far into the Bering Sea and beyond and are an important ocean fishery.