Chinook salmon swim up a creek in Washington state. (Getty Images)
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a series on salmon originally published by the Idaho Capital Sun.
We are the circle. That’s what life is all about. We take care of one another. So when we have someone in trouble, that’s when the rest of us have to step in.
– Elmer Crow, Nez Perce tribal elder
The Nez Perce Tribe first presented its extinction findings for Snake River salmon and steelhead in 2021 at a Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting. The opening slide featured this call by Nez Perce elder Elmer Crow for human solidarity with the salmon, fellow makers of the circle, who are in trouble and need our care.
Mr. Crow died in 2013 while rescuing a grandson in the Snake River at Buffalo Eddy. One obituary reported that in the 1970s, while between jobs, he, his wife Lynda and their first two boys, “lived off the land for four months throughout Nez Perce Country, from the Blue Mountains to the South Fork of the Salmon River.” The western parts of the Crow family’s traverse, from the Blue Mountains to the Snake River, are locales in this four-part story.
Jay’s work is featured in this story. And, with Elmer Crow, one of its inspirations: those who are stepping in.
The best way to observe Snake River salmon and steelhead extinction, to observe its dire motion, is by map. Salmon extinction is a geographic event, place by place in time. As will be salmon recovery, should it occur.
Anyone who has driven from anywhere to La Grande, Lewiston, Stanley or Salmon has been on this map. Many are on it often, by visit or residence. Distinct local populations of salmon and steelhead have ocean-provisioned its places and creatures for many thousands of years. When you cross through, or stop to linger, you intersect with one or more of these populations, bred by and to the same waters and lands that now draw you. And, you intersect with one or more active trajectories of population extirpation. The endpoint of population extirpations is species extinction.
My presumptuous wish is that each time you drive, walk, bike, or float on this map’s terrain, you think of the local salmon there with you, whose thousands of years’ provisioning to the land, water and life around you is being dismantled in a relative instant.
The map’s colors are the species’ seven major population groups, which track with watersheds. The names are the 43 geographic populations into which the species has been scientifically sorted by differences in behavior, life history and genetics. Endangered Species Act-listed, and non-listed Clearwater River populations, are both included; I focus here on those listed. These populations – at once local and connected, homebodies and explorers, mountaineers and mariners – are the species: Snake River spring and summer Chinook salmon, the highest-spawning salmon on earth.
Snake River steelhead trout are a different fish than salmon, with different relations to their habitats, so the population boundaries differ some. But on this same base map, there are 26 local populations of Snake River steelhead – the highest-spawning steelhead on earth.
With an active map, you could zoom in on headwater laboratories where differences within and between each population come into being. In a wider view, you could watch lights flicker and go out as populations disappear.
Over 30 populations of Snake River Chinook are already extirpated (locally extinct), by the actions of non-Indigenous homo sapiens. Extirpations have continued since Endangered Species Act listings 33 years ago, and more populations are on the way now.
How near are lower Middle Fork Salmon Chinook, and the seven other populations in the wild Middle Fork Salmon River? How near are B run steelhead, a creature found on earth only in the Clearwater River and lower parts of the Salmon River?
Each population in its geography tells stories, which by the nature of salmon weave fish, rivers, places, peoples, and time. In three parts and a coda, I will follow a salmon thread out from some rate-of-extinction science by the Nez Perce Tribe and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Geographically, I will begin in southeast Washington, then move to northeast Oregon watersheds that descend a wizardry of mountains, valleys and basalt canyons to the Snake River. I will do no justice at all to these waters and lands, or their histories of people and fish.
I will report and reflect on a few conversations, out of many that could be had, with a few local people about their past and present bonds with these fish, and what salmon extinction would mean.
“I am descended on my father’s side from Walla Walla and Yakama people, here since time immemorial,” Bobby Fossek tells me.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Most of their winter villages were on the mid-Columbia and lower Snake Rivers, from which they came up and over each year into the Grande Ronde and Wallowa valleys.“The Grande Ronde was our Garden of Eden. And not just ours; there was enough to share.”
The Walla Walla, Nez Perce, Cayuse and Umatilla tribes long preceded the existence of Oregon in the Grande Ronde and Imnaha country. In the Cayuse/Nez Perce language, the Grande Ronde was Qapqa’pnim We’ele, “Cottonwood Stream.” Tribal bands moved in seasonal patterns of hunting, fishing, and gathering; assembly, trading and cultural practices; and wintering. The many-fingered Grande Ronde Valley was one of earth’s most bountiful salmon nurseries.
Then came conquest, death and dispossession by soldiers, settlers and state. Despite strong arguments by Cayuse and Nez Perce people, no reservation was established in the Grande Ronde or its tributaries, and salmon nurseries became irrigated croplands. (In 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order setting aside a portion of the Wallowa Valley as a reservation for the Nez Perce. Two years later, he rescinded it. The forced removal of Nez Perce people from Wallowa country that followed led into the Nez Perce War of 1877, an event that still resounds.)
From the Umatilla Reservation, Fossek’s family kept their Grande Ronde connection alive on fishing trips into the early 1960s. Those ended after The Dalles Dam, John Day Dam and the lower Snake dams were built. Too few salmon remained for the work, time and expense.
Mr. Fossek and his own family now live in Cove, on Catherine Creek in the upper Grande Ronde. They are among the tribal people re-establishing in the Grande Ronde.
“We do a lot of driving to the Umatilla Reservation and back,” he says wryly.
Fossek is a conscious restorer and adapter of native rivers, fish, culture, ways and skills at work in a landscape from which his family and many others were removed, and which the United States’ settlement has profoundly altered. Among his projects, he manages an 80-acre restoration on tributaries of Catherine Creek, on land owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon.
When his mother needed to move in 1979, and decided on Joseph, he returned to help her, and stayed. He worked as a fish technician for the Nez Perce Tribe, has a small cattle ranch in the Imnaha, and is a long-time leader to restore lands, waters, fish and tribal use in northeast Oregon while building native and non-native community.
Mr. McCormack capsuled some recent history in the Wallowa Valley.
“Taz Conner was Nez Perce and a navy veteran,” McCormack began. “He worked for the Forest Service here, back when logging and milling collapsed. Wallowa County was a natural resource community. Four or five mills were lost, leaving towns in shambles. It really hurt.
“The county and the Nez Perce Tribe created a salmon habitat recovery plan then, to address the Endangered Species Act listings. It was the first of its kind, by a tribe and a county, in the nation. Taz and some community members in the town of Wallowa started a Friendship Feast, which was first held in the high school, and now is on our own grounds.”
Mr. Conner helped create the Wallowa/Nez Perce Tribe Interpretive Center – now the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland – to build Nez Perce presence and seek reconciliation with non-tribal people.
“When Taz got sick, I took over for him, and over 20 years a group of us guided the Homeland into the community and region,” McCormack said.
The Homeland now owns 320 acres in Wallowa, with a mile and a half of Wallowa River frontage plus newly restored side-channels.
“We call it our home. It’s a center for the Chief Joseph Band descendants, whatever reservations they were scattered to,” McCormack said. “We hold a pow-wow, the Tamkaliks Celebration and Friendship Feast, on the third weekend of July. We focus on protecting and securing tribal resources, like salmon. We teach the youth what the elders would have taught them, the skills and resources, in the old days during the winters. Winter was the communal time, in the deep canyons along the rivers. That’s gone now.”
When Fossek and McCormack talk about their peoples’ past, it is present.
The Grande Ronde Valley was our Eden. Everything was there for the people. The Grande Ronde had everything. The camas root was in abundance. When the seasons came there, the people from here went over to the Grande Ronde Valley and dug the camas. Catherine Creek was a main source of salmon and steelhead. There were fishing sites all along Catherine Creek. The Grande Ronde River was one of the main sources from Hilgard to Perry. On down where Elgin is was a main crossroads for the people to travel from Walla Walla over into Wallowa country.
– Atway Tekips (Dan Motanic), from the book Cáw Pawá Láakni/They Are Not Forgotten: Sahaptian Place Names Atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla by Eugene S. Hunn, Thomas Morning Owl, Phillip E. Cash Cash, and Jennifer Karson Engum
Now to some extinction science, and the Tucannon River. Jay Hesse recalls conversations within Nez Perce Fisheries in 2020: “We knew that NOAA Fisheries [the federal agency with main jurisdiction over salmon] uses a metric in its planning called ‘quasi-extinction threshold.’ But management is our focus, actions to help fish that are not doing well. And we had grown very concerned about the Tucannon population.”
The 60-mile long Tucannon River slides from the south into the reservoir behind Lower Monumental Dam on the lower Snake River. (The Palouse River enters from the north some six miles further downstream. This three-river area will be active tribally, ecologically and popularly if the lower Snake River is restored to free flow.)
They face six dams and reservoirs when they go to sea, and six when they return. All other Snake River salmon and steelhead, in Oregon and Idaho, face eight dams and 320 miles of continuous reservoir when they go out to and come back from the Pacific Ocean. (The journey outbound kills far more of both fish than the return trip, but that is not well understood, perhaps because the out-bound young are largely invisible, and the big inbound adults unforgettably the opposite.)
In 2019 just eight wild-origin Chinook spawned in the Tucannon; in 2020, seventeen; and, from 2017 forward, fewer than 50 each year.
Thus the Tucannon population has dropped below what NOAA Fisheries calls a “quasi-extinction threshold” for Snake River Chinook: fewer than 50 adult fish in a population returning from the ocean for four consecutive years.
Below that floor, the population’s continued existence can no longer be scientifically assumed or predicted. It is a critical condition signal, flashing red and near black, a population emergency. I will return to this threshold in Part Two.
On the Tucannon River, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife are responding with a translocation project.
Starting this year and likely for years to come, marked Tucannon-origin, hatchery-born young salmon are being trucked downstream, past all the big dams, to Kalama Falls Hatchery, south of Longview, Washington, for next-spring release toward the Pacific Ocean from there.
Any Tucannon-origin adults that then return to Kalama in after years will be captured, to maintain and build this rescue effort and, it is hoped, eventually return Chinook salmon to the Tucannon River. Any few salmon that might return to the Tucannon itself will also be collected into the project.
“The plan is to create an interim living gene bank that is not associated with natural habitat,” Hesse says. “We are taking every Tucannon Chinook out of the river, their natural environment. A fish is at great risk when it can’t use its river. And this kind of action also badly strains tribal cultural and harvest connections to the river. But with so few fish, every action we could take now, including doing nothing, has large risks.”
“Until the transforming action all Snake River salmon need” – he means restoring the lower Snake River’s 140 miles of reservoir to free flowing river again, by removing the earthen sections of four dams – “our collaborative analysis tells us this translocation, with a few other interim actions, will get us more Tucannon adults back” than the sporadic dribble of natural production left. “Our purpose is to keep the behaviors, patterns, and genetics of Tucannon spring Chinook in existence until more permanent remedies are enacted, which must occur soon.”
Hesse calls the approach a “safety net offsite strategy,” whose high-risk choices tribal and state fish agencies now face as Snake River populations drop toward and to double digits.
Some possible actions, tailored to the situation, include translocation, cryo-preservation, captive-rearing assist in part of the life-cycle, perhaps coupled with targeted predator control and replacement of marine-derived nutrients that salmon once provided at no cost every year. The approach is expressly experimental, population-specific, and interim.
Dave Johnson, who just retired as head of Nez Perce Fisheries, puts the situation plainly: “Tucannon spring Chinook are the canary in the coal mine [for Snake River Chinook], and the canary is dying.”
The three collaborators will try to hold on to Washington’s last Snake River salmon population, knowing the risk is high they will fail. Whatever the outcome, the more Washington people keep watch on this last-gasp, high-risk effort – so that its governor, senators, and Congresspeople are led to keep watch too – the better.
The emergency Tucannon effort also presages the near future for salmon and salmon people in northeast Oregon and central Idaho.
Thirty years ago, the fine Northwest-based writer Tim Egan memorably described his home region: “The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to.”
Mr. Egan is not being literal, but he is being truthful to history, experience, and feeling. By his measure, a large chunk of southeast Washington, the Tucannon River watershed, is, for now, no longer in the Northwest.
Let us pray it is temporary, but let’s not look away.
Idaho Capital Sun originally published this article. Like the Alaska Beacon, the Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.
