The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have seen lower fish returns this year. According to Jerimiah Bonifer, the program manager for the tribe’s fisheries program, there are a number of factors that could be influencing this, including ocean conditions and drought.
At the same time, the tribe has recently completed the Coonskin Creek Fish Passage Project, making it easier for fish to pass through. Bonifer joins us to discuss the low fish yields and more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller in Hermiston. Jerimiah Bonifer grew up on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. He was taught to hunt and to fish and to celebrate and recognize what it meant to live by the seasons. He started working for the tribe’s fisheries program in 2009. Three years ago, he became its manager. Jerimiah Bonifer joins me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Jerimiah Bonifer: Hi, thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with part of your personal story. As I mentioned, you were raised primarily in the Confederate Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, spending tons of time on the land that you now manage. What are some of your earliest memories of that land?
Bonifer: Oh gosh, thankfully grew up in a family that went out and spent a lot of time on the landscape, so I’ve had the privilege of developing that relationship with the rivers, the mountains, born and raised in the area that I still live, lots of friends and family, that connection is really important to all of us. We can talk about a lot of these things in the abstract, but having that ability to grow up and actually experience those, have the relationship with the foods that provide for us, keep that promise to the landscape that was made to us by those animals and by the Creator, it’s a really fantastic way to live.
Miller: How did you end up doing the work that you do?
Bonifer: I can really say that I’m really lucky in the fact that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Growing up on the river, fishing, I’ve got deep roots in our family, long traditions of fishing not only on Nch’i-Wána, The Big River, but also on the tributaries like Meacham Creek, Umatilla, where I grew up. I’ve always wanted to do it and luckily I had a lot of family support, I got the educational support to pursue those dreams, and here I am.
Miller: So let’s turn to the work itself. What have fish returns been like over the last few years?
Bonifer: Well, fish returns are always variable. We have our good years and we have our bad years. This year in particular, we’ve seen lower returns than we’d like to see. We want to see healthy and abundant harvestable levels while we’d still have the ability to go out and harvest fish. Some of the tributary returns were at a lower return rate than we would have liked to see. And so that really impacts our ability to have healthy, harvestable levels there. And so you see missed opportunities in those types of scenarios.
Miller: When you say you still had harvests, enough for what? I mean, enough for ceremonial purposes, for subsistence, for more?
Bonifer: Both. Luckily we prioritize the ability to go out and get our ceremonial fish. So we make sure that the longhouse has the fish available to support ceremonies, whether that be Sunday services, memorials, celebrations, feasts, things like that. We also prioritize on The Big River, on the Columbia, the ability for subsistence fisheries to remain open. So we call those our hook and line or platform fisheries.
And then on the tributaries, we really try to maximize our coordination with other tribes, states, to ensure that when we go out and we see these returns that we’re getting our 50% share of that harvest. In Northeastern Oregon, for instance, Northeastern Oregon, Southeast Washington, we had 11 tributary fisheries open.
Miller: What are the biggest challenges right now for the fish populations that you’re managing?
Bonifer: Gosh, I would say right now, especially in a year like this, when you look at the example we see in 2026, is drought years are really tough on all life histories of the fish. So juveniles are, they’ve got us over summer and rear in these rivers. You see low water conditions, high river temperatures. That makes it really hard on those fish as fish are returning, and you have low flows and high temperatures that can impact migration of adults. And then of course, when we see things like there’s discussions around potential for a pretty severe El Niño out in the ocean. Those ocean conditions have impacts on both the juvenile life stage and the adult life stage.
Miller: Well, since you brought up, so this, this super El Niño, which has been in the news a lot in the last couple of weeks, meteorologists say it could be a historically warm winter, maybe historically dry, although I’ve seen conflicting reports about what it could mean for the Northwest. We won’t know obviously until it happens, but there are historical data that we can look at. Is there anything that you can do to prepare for what might be coming?
Bonifer: There’s only so many dials we can turn when it comes to that, especially when it comes to ocean conditions. There’s not a lot we can do out there. But what we can do in these tributaries and other areas, even the main stem Columbia, is we can try to prepare and have these habitats, these flood plain restoration projects that provide the best available habitat for them in their freshwater life cycle.
We can also make improvements in passage, in different areas, whether that be the main stem or the Columbia, so that when these adults come back or these juveniles are moving out, they have the most unrestricted volitional passage they have through these systems. Get them out of the system quickly and get them into the system quickly.
Miller: What’s it like to have this job where you’re managing these fisheries and you have this important cultural and scientific job, but some of the biggest factors that influence the work you’re doing are completely out of your control?
Bonifer: Well, we don’t do it alone. We collaborate with other tribes. We collaborate with our federal partners and our state agencies, so we’re not in this alone. We’re working in collaboration because it’s a big area. These fish, these species don’t know political boundaries. So a lot of the work that we do here in, say, Northeastern Oregon, Southeastern Washington, these are supporting fisheries resources all up and down the Pacific Northwest, whether that be in the main stem Columbia, on the coastal fisheries, the lower Columbia River fisheries up in Western Washington and even Alaska.
Miller: Let’s turn to some specific work that you’ve been doing recently. What is the Coonskin Creek Fish Passage Project?
Bonifer: So this one’s actually a pretty exciting one for us, and it’s a relatively small project, but big impacts for us locally. Coonskin Creek is a small tributary that runs on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, runs into the Umatilla River. And it did not meet fish passage criteria in the culvert that ran under, it’s one of our main roads. And so, in looking at opportunities to increase not only access to habitat for mid-Columbia steelhead, that’s primarily the species that this project will be affecting, we also wanted to take an opportunity to improve conditions close to home.
And so what this was is it’s a full replacement of the old culvert, to a culvert that’s got a natural stream bottom. There was also old infrastructure including an old water supply line that ran to the city of Pendleton. That water source is no longer used. We removed that infrastructure. We re-graded the stream below it. We improved not only the fish passage infrastructure, but the infrastructure that supported the road. In that removal, we found out that that had been degraded pretty severely and we were seeing impacts under the road, some washout and degradation of the material under the road.
Miller: Meaning that in doing this work for fish, you discovered that it maybe was unsafe for people?
Bonifer: Yeah, yeah, and that’s one of the big things that we see a lot in these projects is not only the benefits to the fisheries resources themselves, but that infrastructure we upgraded that culvert. Now it’s going to meet the criteria to support not only safe passage of fish underneath it, safe passage for people over it, but it’s going to handle those 100 year flood flows, so where the other one didn’t. The great thing about this small project also is it’s opening up four miles of suitable habitat that already exists above it. So opportunities to provide access to those fish to habitat that already exists that they didn’t have already.
Miller: After a project, and that work is done.
Bonifer: Yep, so the replacement of the culvert is done. We’re still doing some work on the stream below it to get that, to make sure that when those high flows come, it doesn’t impact any of the infrastructure that we just put in.
Miller: How long will it be before you can know if fish are actually making the trip up there? I mean you say it opens up four miles upstream there. When will you know if fish are there?
Bonifer: So this is an ephemeral tributary, so it only has water in it during certain points of the year. But what we found in these Northeastern and Southeastern Washington streams is that we can get a lot of production out of these ephemeral streams. So just because there’s no water in it in the summer doesn’t mean we’re not getting steelhead in there in the spring when it’s got water.
And so we’ll start doing spawning ground surveys and investigating that when we start getting fish back. Mid-Columbia steelhead in the Umatilla Basin are typically spawning anywhere between January to all the way to June. So a pretty wide window. As soon as we start seeing fish and we get water in there, we’ll start looking.
Miller: It’s interesting because a couple of times you talked about this as a small project. I mean, maybe small compared to breaching a gigantic dam or four gigantic dams, say, but how many more projects of that scale could you embark on if you had the money?
Bonifer: Well, that’s a great question. They do take a lot of time and when I say a small project, it doesn’t mean that they’re not inexpensive. There’s multiple tributaries, for instance, we’ll continue to use the Umatilla Indian Reservation, for example. There’s multiple small tributaries that have the same impacts that Coonskin has. So, what we’re doing is we’re trying to work our way through there. This was the first and most complicated of them. We’re gonna start looking at opportunities. There’s one just downstream called Moonshine Creek. There’s also Mission Creek. We have documented steelhead reds in there, but the passage still isn’t quite what we want to see. And so we’ll start taking those on too. If I had a magic wand to get all the money I wanted and all the capacity to do the work, we’d go after them all.
Miller: There is a bigger project that you’re in the early stages on right now as well, for the Mckay Dam. Can you describe this project?
Bonifer: Yeah, this is one we’re really excited about. We’ve been working on for a long time and actually just got some great news this year with a million dollars appropriations, with the help of Senators Wyden and Merkley. This funding is going to go through the BOR contracted to ODFW where we’re gonna collaborate on this project. What we’ve been working towards is Mckay Dam is a reservoir dam that’s built about seven miles south of Pendleton, Oregon.
It was built in 1927, but it has absolutely zero fish passage. What exists above the reservoir is roughly 24% of the suitable habitat in the entire Umatilla Basin for mid-Columbia steelhead. The great thing about that suitable habitat up there also is that it’s in pretty great condition. So just getting the fish up there would tremendously help our ability to try to delist the stock in the Umatilla Walla Walla populations.
Miller: And this is a 160-foot or so dam?
Bonifer: Yeah, it’s 165 feet tall, built in 1927. There’s about six miles of stream below that that we’ve also worked with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. There was an adult weir down at the mouth of that that restricted adults from getting in there, primarily spring chinook, but we wanted to use that available habitat too. And so we’ve worked together with our partners to get that weir out and we’re seeing spawning mid-Columbia summer steelhead, coho, and fall chinook.
Miller: How effective can fish passage systems be compared to getting rid of a dam?
Bonifer: It depends, right? That’s a loaded question because it depends on what that dam looks like itself, what the infrastructure is, what the engineered solutions might be. And that affects cost feasibility, and that’s one of the big things that we’re excited about, this million dollars appropriation, is that’s gonna help us look at the feasibility and start looking at some of those engineered solutions that might help us get fish over that dam. Getting adults over that reservoir is gonna be relatively easy. I say that very lightly, compared to getting juveniles out. Juvenile passage is a big issue. We want to make sure that those fish are surviving.
Miller: That’s a little bit counterintuitive to me. I would have thought that it’d be easier for tiny fish to go downstream, just down some ladders, than for adult hungry, dying fish looking to spawn and die to go up, but I guess I’m wrong.
Bonifer: Yeah, in the example of Mckay Reservoir, it’s a bottom release dam, and typically when smolts are out migrating, they’re at the surface. And so it’s a variable pool level. It can have a 100 foot up and down throughout the season. And so for them to try to find that bottom release, that’s kind of the challenge that we’re running into. And that’s where this funding is really going to help us try to look for those engineered solutions.
Miller: Have there been success stories in your department in recent years that give you hope?
Bonifer: Oh, absolutely. We’ll just continue with Mckay. So in preparation for this passage proposal in this study, we released radio tag summer steelhead up into the reservoir for a three-year period just to see what they would do up there. Would they use the available habitat? Could they navigate the reservoir that they’ve never been in?
And in that, what we did is the very first year we released six steelhead, which isn’t very many for a study. We observed the first steelhead reds in Upper Mckay Creek in over 94 years at that point. All six of those fish made it up into the upper system. We found three reds out of six fish, which is a huge return on that, that’s a huge success. It’s telling us that that habitat’s ready for them. We just got to do our part and get them up there.
Miller: Just briefly, how do you explain that they go where they had been decades before?
Bonifer: Yeah, it’s just that natural drive to get up there. It’s in the fisheries realm, we kind of say steelhead do what steelhead do. They’re really plastic in how they express their life histories. They’re able to navigate small tributaries, big rivers, get into places that people just don’t think they’re going to go.
The other thing about up there is we’ve got a residual population of rainbow trout that have an effluvial life history. So they spawn in the upper basin in the tributary, but they go down and rear in the reservoir, which is very similar to an anadromous life history. And so there’s a lot of genetic memory there as well, and we’re hoping if we can get passage there, we can kickstart that again.
Miller: Jerimiah, thanks very much.
Bonifer: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Jerimiah Bonifer is the fisheries program manager for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
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