‘Salmon Wars’ episode 6: The future

The “Salmon Wars” podcast series tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before — through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations.

Salmon hatcheries set up by the federal government prioritized ocean fishermen over river tribes and created genetically inferior fish. In this final episode, we visit a tribal hatchery to see how they’re doing things differently. And we’ll hear from 11-year-old Aiyana about how she thinks about carrying on her family’s legacy.

Our theme music is by Kele Goodwin and Sean Ogilvie.

Special thanks to Katie Campbell and Sarah Blustain at ProPublica.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Sam George: Oh, you did that on purpose?

Aiyana George: No, I didn’t! (giggles)

SG: Why you smiling then?

AG: ‘Cause it’s funny.

Tony Schick: It was summertime at Stanley Rock — July of 2022. The commercial Chinook season had just kicked into high gear. Randy Settler, his nephew Sam George and Sam’s daughter, Aiyana, stood under a canopy cleaning salmon alongside some 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, LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot, watched from the driver’s seat of the red Honda Element that she drove around camp instead of walking.

LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot: I’m seeing if they’re doin’ it right. (laughs)

TS: Howard Wahpat, who’d fished with Randy for longer than anyone, grabbed an overhanging hose and sprayed 9-year-old Aiyana.

AG: STOP!

Howard Wahpat: Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to do it. Good thing you got rain gear on, huh? Smarter, not harder.

Randy Settler: He already did it to me.

TS: Howard was one of her dad, Sam’s, best friends. He and Aiyana teased each other constantly.

AG: I need gloves.

HW: Gloves. Where’s your gloves?

AG: You took ‘em!

HW: I didn’t take ‘em! I can’t even fit your gloves!

AG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HW: Missed you.

AG: Whatever.

HW: Forever? I know!

AG: I said WHATEVER!

TS: Days like this are a reminder of the role salmon plays in the lives of this family. Their financial success depends on the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Their traditions are intertwined with salmon. But the connections are fraying. Two years later, after another stroke, LiaDonna doesn’t go to the river anymore. Howard died last year, from cancer. He fished even after chemo, til 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 LiaDonna had hoped that Sam would someday inherit Randy’s claims to fishing sites near Stanley Rock, the claims Randy inherited from his mom. Aiyana, 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.

AG: I might fish when I’m older. I don’t know.

TS: Now 11 years old, Aiyana sat making beaded jewelry. She said long days on the water without a catch feel draining.

AG: Kind of frustrating. Like, why did I come on the boat? What I used to feel about it, I’d feel like I’d want to go fishing every day. But now thinking about it, like, I get too tired. My dad makes it look easy, but really it’s not.

TS: Whether she fishes like her dad might not be her choice to make.

SG: If there was still fish, then I think she would do it. I’m gonna 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, that’ll make her happy. But I hope there’s fish, though, when she gets older, to do this.

TS: Sam hasn’t let Aiyana see just how worried he is.

SG: Like, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to fish, ‘cause the run keeps getting less and less and the water’s getting warmer and warmer.

TS: Columbia River tribes have been working to save the salmon since long before Aiyana was born. After generations of promises made and broken by the U.S. government, they’re trying to restore salmon themselves. Right now, the Northwest’s 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 answer is clear: whatever it takes. This is Salmon Wars. I’m Tony Schick.

(music)

Randy Settler: If you look at Cle Elum … have you ever been to Cle Elum, then, Tony?

TS: For a while, whenever I talked with Randy or his family members, they would urge me to visit the Yakama Nation’s hatchery in Cle Elum, 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 saw potential for healing in the tool that had caused them so much harm. In their many court battles, tribes secured funding and the 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. Randy didn’t know it, but I’d already taken an interest in tribal hatcheries, and Charlie Strom, the manager of the hatchery in Cle Elum, had invited me up to look around.

Charlie Strom: So, I guess, uh, what do, what do you want to see? You want to see the overall operation or...?

TS (on tape): Yeah.

TS: 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 — one that’s more suited to captivity than a wild river. Remember the government’s original plan for hatcheries:

Crystal Ligori voiceover: “Less care and labor are needed to raise fish than to raise other animals, or even to raise vegetables.”

TS: This is a far cry from that. The Yakama hatcheries breed fish captured from the wild. They have feeders at the bottom of the 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 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.

CS: They’re eventually gonna 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 flow is needed for salmon and it’s warming up the river temperature.

TS: 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.

CS: You want, you wanna see what they’re doing in here?

TS (on tape): Yeah, yeah let’s do it.

TS: 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.

CS: This is Tony.

Jermaine Hart: How ya doin, Tony?

TS (on tape): Hi, how ya doin?

TS: Jermaine 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 or the fish. They even let me tag one.

JH: All, you gotta do hold ‘em upside down, alright? This is a tag. So, once you get there snout on the bottom of this here, push in, tag him.

CS: Tony, if you mess up, you get bear hugged by Will. (laughter)

TS: I can picture Jermaine recovering this tag and wondering who botched it so badly.

TS (on tape): When you’re monitoring adult returns, let me know if that guy made it.

TS: He said they do all this because salmon took care of their people for so long. And now it’s the people’s turn.

JH: We’re just doing our best to try to help maintain and hopefully find its way to manage itself again. It’s our pleasure to do this, you know, it’s, it’s our right. You know, it’s, it’s our duty.

TS: Here in these trailers, Jermaine is catching up with friends over salmon, the way people have always done.

JH: You know, we’re all brothers. We’re all brothers and sisters in here, so.

TS: It was not easy to get to this point. By now, it won’t surprise you to hear these tribal efforts faced 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.

Mark Sherwood: Imagine condensing hundreds of thousands of years of genetic evolution into a, 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. You’re kind of bringing the entire population down to this domesticated state.

TS: 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 tribes’ hatchery efforts. That’s an ironic dynamic, given that the hatcheries were the government’s own stop-gap invention, and 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, survive in 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 Cle Elum hatchery.)

Randy Settler: I argue with anybody when they say a hatchery fish isn’t fit.

TS: Here’s Randy speaking at an event in the Columbia River Gorge.

RS: 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 ‘em — whether it be man or any other predator — and they came back, I argue they should be fit for survival.

TS: Tribes, 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 tepee or a hospital isn’t what determines if you’re Native. In 2000, Yakama 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.

RS: So, you know what we did? We went up with those farmers and those ranchers and everybody, and we blocked the federal entranceway. They were gonna arrest us. They had federal agents there to arrest us.

TS: Here’s how he told it: He and a friend caught a flight up to the hatchery on the Methow River. When he got there, Randy jumped into the icy water. He and other protesters dragged a makeshift 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.

RS: 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?” And I tell ‘em, “oh, that’s easy: When we went to the Methow River and we blocked that federal hatchery.”

TS: 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 Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla and Warm Springs tribes started hatchery programs like the one in Cle Elum 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 coho salmon went extinct by the 1980s? A couple of years ago, nearly 100,000 coho salmon returned to the Columbia. How? Tribal hatcheries.

Guy Norman: I gotta say, yes, the tribes did the heavy lifting.

TS: 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.

GN: I do recall the skepticism and the debate, lots of concern about moving fish upstream.

TS: Then there’s the species of Chinook salmon that return to the Snake River each fall. In 1990, the fall Chinook 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.

GN: All these programs have, have been successful beyond my wildest dreams. And certainly the tribes really need to be applauded.

TS: 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 Strom at the Cle Elum 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.

(music)

Brenda Mallory: It’s wonderful to be here and have the opportunity to celebrate with all of you.

TS: 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. Brenda Mallory chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Her office brokered the deal.

BM: Federal agencies are on all-hands-on-deck to support the efforts to restore wild salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin.

TS: 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 Nez Perce tribe.

Shannon Wheeler: Adversarial things that are in front of us like the climate change and global warming that are going to be affecting all of us.

TS: Washington Governor Jay Inslee:

Jay Inslee: We gotta defeat climate change if we’re going to save these fish in the Columbia River.

TS: And Rick Spinrad, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce who oversees NOAA:

Rick Spinrad: With the existential threat of climate change knocking at our doors, we need to stop expecting salmon to adapt to us.

TS: We’ve mentioned before that scientists are predicting ocean changes that are deadly for salmon. By one estimation, the number of salmon that survive 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.

Lisa Crozier: Yeah, actually, that was my biggest concern — that people will think the threat from climate change is so severe that it is not worth doing anything at this point to try and save salmon. And that is absolutely not the case.

TS: That’s Lisa Crozier 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.

LC: This is really a very high level of threat. And because it’s on top of them already being in depressed state, yeah, it, it just really could be overwhelming for people to feel like, this is, it’s 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.

TS: Look at what salmon have already survived. They’ve lasted millions of years, through ice ages.

LC: And they’ve recolonized and come back stronger than ever.

TS: 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.

LC: Absolutely. There is definitely still hope. And I mean, salmon are so resilient.

TS: The secret to the salmon’s resilience is the way they hedge their bets. Food or predators in the river and 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 help keep salmon populations healthy enough, they’ll give themselves a chance. For tribal members, this is both a practical and a moral imperative.

Corinne Sams: We are Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, the Salmon People. In our creation story, salmon gave up himself so we could have nourishment and, in return, we promised to speak on behalf of our resources.

TS: Corinne Sams was the final tribal representative to speak at the White House ceremony. She’s on the governing board for the Umatilla tribes, and chair of the Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission.

CS: Because it’s going to take all of us to implement and ensure we restore our salmon to healthy and abundant levels. Qayciyáw̓yaw. Thank you. (applause)

TS: 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. As 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.

Facilitator: Moving next to Randy Settler. Your time starts now.

TS: Randy wasn’t one of the negotiators. But Yakama leaders at one point asked him to testify in a White House listening session. He recounted his protest blocking a federal hatchery, and said it taught him how salmon will repopulate a stream if given the chance.

RS: So, I’m, I’m sure that if the Snake River 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.

TS: 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 Coulee 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 OPB a few weeks after the agreement was announced. He said they were cut out and kept in the dark while negotiations charted a course toward dam removal.

Kurt Miller: We had a right to participate and that right was ignored.

TS: 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 “hands the keys to anti-hydro parties whose stated objective is to dismantle the entire system.”

KM: I might not trust government processes as much going forward because this was just, this really was not a fair process.

TS: The federal government … leaving someone out of discussions about Columbia River dams? Does that sound familiar?

Crystal Ligori voiceover: “The present salmon run must be sacrificed.”

TS: 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 touted the agreement as a historic step, while others saw the government making salmon recovery wait on business interests yet again.

(phone ringing)

TS: I called Randy often, as this was all playing out, to see what he thought.

RS: Hey, Tony Two-Snakes! (laughs)

TS: He sometimes answers the phone this way.

RS: You know why they call people two-snakes?

TS (on tape): I don’t. I can’t imagine it’s good…

RS: It’s worse than calling somebody Tony One-Snake!

(Randy laughs)

TS: 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 Yakama’s calls for dam removal 20 years ago.

RS: I mean, because, they did ask me. You know, I get inquiries from people — what do you think about this? I just said, if it’s linked to the removal of the dams, I said, I don’t know, you know, how that’s gonna really play out.

TS: Instead, Randy’s been focused on a project of his own: shad. Nine out of every 10 fish swimming up the Columbia now are shad, even though the fish from the herring 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 Celilo Falls, but they can navigate the dam’s fish ladders. Biologists say they know too little about the fish, but fear their massive numbers are harming salmon.

RS: Shad might be the greatest threat to recovering salmon.

TS: 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.

RS: The numbers of juvenile shad are competing for the very food source that the baby salmon need. They’re taking up the 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.

TS: 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. It would also be a way to help the river, and the salmon, by doing what he does best: fishing.

(music)

TS: At the start of this podcast, I mentioned that much of it would be about history that I wish I’d known growing up in the Northwest, a history you don’t get from an Army Corps guided tour of the dams. I have two kids now, a 3-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 “historically accurate and culturally embedded.” One public school in Portland, the Sunnyside Environmental School, has a whole segment where fourth graders have to argue the various cases for whether to build The Dalles Dam and destroy Celilo Falls. The first year they did it, I’m told kids were bawling when they found out the falls were gone. Aiyana’s attending a new school in the Columbia River Gorge, where about half of the kids are Native.

Aiyana George: It’s more better, because I was like the only Native at my old school.

TS: 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’d been fishing. But now, Randy has started getting invitations to visit schools and share his story with classes as young as third grade.

Rose George: Ok. Good morning. You guys feeling good today? Yeah. Okay, good. Well, today I brought some friends with me.

TS: I tagged along on one of his trips to a school in White Salmon, Washington. He went with his good friend Lonnie, who leads the longhouse in Toppenish.

RG: And our guests that are here today is Lonnie Salam and Randy Settler.

Randy Settler: Hi.

Students: Hello, hi.

TS: They watched a couple of videos about salmon, including one produced by OPB and 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.

Student 1: What’s your favorite thing to put on top of a, like seasonings or something, on top of a salmon?

RS: Lemons.

Students: Ooohh, that sounds so good.

RS: I love lemons.

TS: But, eventually, the students really got into it.

Student 2: So, it confuses their brain?

Student 3: Why would putting a dam in make it so there’s less and less fish every time?

RS: You. Yeah, go.

Student 4: How many eggs does a female salmon lay per lifetime?

Student 5: Do you know what kind of species of salmon are still here?

Student 6: Since the dams were built, has it been easier for the salmon to get back to the spot where they were born?

RS: No. Yeah, go ahead.

Student 7: If they didn’t build the dam, would the Columbia be flooded or...?

Student 8: Do people know if the salmon are going to go extinct? And if they do, do they know, have they estimated when?

TS: And Randy, of course, didn’t hold back.

RS: OK well, when you look at the original history of the construction of the dams, their plan was to kill all the salmon off.

(gasps from students)

TS: 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 river’s changed, and the problem that poses for salmon as the planet heats up.

RS: 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.

Student 9: So, so, that means...

Student 10: So, does that depend on the type of salmon or just all salmon?

RS: All salmon species.

TS: In the span of one class period, Randy seemed to have these third grade kids grasping the material I’ve taken years to gather 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.

RS: 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 I’ll be long gone. Lonnie and I will be passed on, we’ll be in another world, but you have to live in this world.

View all episodes of the “Salmon Wars” podcast here.