WA Tribes Crucial to Salmon Recovery, Conservation Throughout Decades of Work with State

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By Genevieve Belmaker, Tacoma News Tribune

January 12, 2025

If you want to find a turning point in Washington state’s modern history of environmental protection and advocacy, just go back a few decades to the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a time period marked by an upsurge in commitment to enact meaningful legislation, create new agency initiatives, and emphasize partnerships with tribes. 

This story was originally published by McClatchy in collaboration with the Solutions Journalism Network and is republished with permission.

But in the 30-plus years since, the planet has warmed, keystone species like salmon have declined, and Indigenous stakeholders have had to continually fight to improve basic living conditions like access to clean water. Tribes have been compelled to use litigation to assert everything from their treaty-guaranteed water rights to holding fossil fuel companies accountable for environmental destruction.

But the work done over those last few decades has helped foster a widespread consensus that conservation of wildlife, water, shorelines, and forests need to be prioritized. This is especially true in an environmentally progressive and natural-resource rich place like Washington. 

But the Pacific Northwest state also has a massive advantage in fighting climate change. It’s home to 29 federally recognized tribes, plus several more like the Chinook still working for recognition. Despite having to overcome deep-rooted, institutionalized roadblocks and racism, countless Indigenous-led and involved conservation efforts shine.

That’s particularly true of dam removal efforts. Dams have pushed salmon populations to the brink over the last century and destroyed traditional fishing areas like Cilelo Falls in eastern Washington. A rich fishing area that was the center of economic and cultural life for Indigenous people in the region going back over 10,000 years, it was destroyed in 1957 when the floodgates of the Dalles Dam were closed.

There has been a slow but steady reversal on dams. Across the U.S., 1,700 dams have been removed since the 1900s, according to academic journal Water Alternatives. In Washington, the Elwha River west of Port Angeles has seen restoration of its salmon runs, and the recovery of riparian forests and plant and wildlife following the removal of the Elhwa and Glines Canyon dams that spanned from 2011 to 2014.

There have been myriad other successes, too. They don’t always make headlines, but they bear significant results. Sometimes these results are reciprocal.

Salmon spawning in the Deschutes River in September 2024. (Photo: Genevieve Belmaker)

In 2005, the Puyallup tribe built a Chinook salmon hatchery, of which they have several, with help from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife by providing eggs. According to Blake Smith, Fisheries Enhancement Chief with the Puyallup Tribe, two decades later that came back to benefit WDFW’s efforts elsewhere.

Fast-forward to 2024, when Voights Creek hatchery near Orting was seeing warming waters, a death sentence for salmon that thrive at temperatures between 50-62 degrees Fahrenheit, according to experts. The Puyallup Tribe was able to help by building a cold water well and providing WDFW with about 200,000 salmon eggs.

“I think everyone has a voice,” Smith said in a recent interview. “We have our direction, and people see that vision.”

The tribe is also actively seeking out solutions that are a little more outside of the box.

For example, in the Hylebos wetlands where a new project to build SR 167 between Puyallup and Fife is underway, by creating viable salmon habitat. The tribe has been busy finding pockets of cold-water safety for salmon.

“We’ve been mapping cold water refuges where the water is 52 degrees throughout the watershed,” Smith said. He says there have been levee setbacks in the upper watershed that reconnect side channel habitats, providing rearing and spawning habitat for salmonids.

Their work has yielded results.

“We’re seeing salmon utilizing those areas, it’s good,” Smith said of a recent visit.

Smith is quick to point out, though, that the tribe has continued to add to their knowledge of salmon and what they need. They release between 10,000-20,000 juvenile salmon in Hylebos Creek every year, and over time he says they’ve learned a lot about the genetics of salmon, and how each species has different needs.

“Each species has different life requirements,” he said.

The tribe has also refrained from fishing steelhead salmon for 20 years, and has actively engaged with partners like conservation organization Wildlands on an estuarine restoration project near Commencement Bay. 

The crux of these successes has been the widespread involvement of numerous relevant government bodies at the tribal, city, state and federal level. But within that, the key has been the deep, innate, longstanding wisdom and patience of the tribes. Some might say their insistence, as well. 

“The problems are incredibly complicated, the population has increased,” Smith said. “The tribes are an integral part. They’re 100% supportive, but they can’t do it alone.”

The focus of Washington tribes on long-term recovery and conservation has helped bring their leaders to the table again and again, particularly in the fight for the future of salmon.

Sometimes it has led to conflict, like during the salmon wars of the 1960s and 1970s. But through repeatedly asserting their treaty rights to fish, often through lawsuits and concrete action like protesting by fishing, Washington state tribes have kept salmon, considered sacred, at the center. 

Making salmon a priority in WA 

The decades of improving working partnerships and refocusing priorities on salmon were kicked off in part by the leadership at the highest level in the state.

In 1989, Gov. Booth Gardner signed the seminal Centennial Accord alongside 26 tribal governments to ensure co-management of the state’s fisheries. This, along with the Boldt decision of 1974 that protected the rights of tribes to fish in their accustomed areas, set the stage for a new era. A decade later, in 1999, the state adopted its Salmon Recovery Plan, which is still in force today. 

But the work is far from done. 

Rebecca George, executive director of the Washington Indian Gaming Association, said in a recent interview that gaming profits are the foundation of tribal tax bases, and play a crucial role in funding conservation work.

George, who is Port Gamble S’Klallam, says that much of what might look like a forward-leaning conservation focus on the part of the tribes is actually part of the never-ending work of asserting treaty-guaranteed tribal rights.

These rights include things like access to traditional lands and food sources, such as salmon. Guarantees and protections for access were set in motion nearly two centuries ago when the state’s earliest tribal treaty came about in Washington in 1854 with the Treaty of Medicine Creek and the Nisqually and Puyallup Tribes, among others.

Yet these treaties only guaranteed what was already part of tribal life for countless generations.

“For tribes, these issues don’t live in a vacuum,” George said. “A couple hundred years of nearly being wiped out can’t be resolved in 30 years.”

Even though inter-governmental collaborations haven’t always been smooth, experts say that things have improved.

“From a resources perspective, we went from arguing to protecting,” said Craig Bowhay, Fishery Programs Director at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Committee, in an interview. “The degree we get along with the state as co-managers ebbs and flows — but overall it’s much better.”

That wasn’t always the case, says Bowhay, who started as a regional biologist with the NWIFC 37 years ago. A few decades back, as conservation work became a more prominent fixture in governance, the lack of tribal inclusion was painfully obvious. Bowhay said this was the case even at formal stakeholder meetings on fisheries.

“They used to hand out reports, but not to the tribes,” he said, recalling coordinators simply running out of packets by the time they got to tribal representatives. “Now they get copies.”

Bowhay helps to oversee fish health, hatchery science and fishery planning and management at NWIFC. He said that as time has passed, the overall work has also gotten more precise and targeted. 

Collaboration has also evolved, to the point that now dozens of organizations and partners are involved.

“The level of detail has increased,” he said. “We are much more cognizant about the genetics. Now we’re involved in shoreline management. But funding is never enough.” 

Washington’s evolving salmon efforts 

Despite the prescient roadblocks of funding, development and a warming planet, efforts to truly turn the tide on salmon recovery and their habitat persist. Part of that has been Washington’s public declarations of future plans. In early December 2024, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a broad and far-reaching Executive Order 24-06 that prioritizes the health of rivers and the future of salmon.

It reflects very clearly the huge influence tribes in the state have had on how environmental issues and conservation work are framed. 

“We need to think of our state and its waters as borrowed rather than inherited. We owe future generations a healthy state,” noted Inslee in a Medium post. “These fish and these waters are our responsibility to defend. We’ve charted a course for salmon recovery, and this order holds us to it.”

Coordinated through the Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office, the order carries on the course of the 1999 Statewide Strategy to Recover Salmon and subsequent strategy updates.

The plan reiterates and underlines, in extensive detail, one crucial piece of the recovery puzzle: tribes.

In another far-reaching initiative put forth in 2023, the four major tribes and bands along the Columbia River joined Washington and Oregon — known collectively as the “Six Sovereigns” — to create the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative.

The partnership includes the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs.

In 1977, these same four tribes came together to form the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fishing Commission with the goal of protecting and preserving salmon. Decades later, they continue to build on lessons learned to create a better future for salmon.

“Salmon are one of the most important aspects of the cultures of the Indigenous peoples of the Columbia River Basin,” notes the CRITFC website. “They could rightly be called Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum or ‘Salmon People’ for how completely these sacred fish shaped our cultures, diets, societies, and religions and continue to do so today.”  

The heritage and future of Washington salmon 

Still, when it comes to government-led efforts at conservation and natural resource management, Pacific Northwest tribes have only had a seat at the government leadership table for the blink of an eye.

At NWIFC, much of the relationship between the state and tribes has evolved around a core mission to preserve and restore the all-important salmon. Revered and prized around the world, Pacific Northwest salmon have complex genetics and have specific habitat requirements.

Viewed through the lens of burgeoning development and global warming, they have become Washington’s veritable “canary in a coal mine.”

Multiple types of salmon in the region are closely monitored. That’s crucial, as the WDFW describes salmon as an “ecological process vector” that transports crucial energy and nutrients amidst freshwater, estuary and ocean environments.

They are also a key part of the diet of other threatened wildlife, notably Southern Resident killer whales. The whales get 80% of their diet from threatened Chinook salmon, according to regional nonprofit Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group.

Few other species of fauna are as closely monitored, or invested in, and for good reason. Without salmon, the ecosystem of the region would be vastly worse off, perhaps even unstable.

NWIFC’s Bowhay says that despite challenges, there has been measurable progress.

“We have our chronic, critical salmon that is the focus,” Bowhay said. “We are now at a point that summer chum in the Hood Canal waterstream could possibly be delisted soon [from the threatened species list]. The spring Chinook in White River used to be a huge concern — now it has attained an abundance status that allows for resumed commercial fishing.”

Bowhay notes that there have been ups and downs for salmon over his decades with the agency, despite success stories like the Elwha River dam removal.

“You can look around and find those stories,” he said. “But we’re not yet to what our recovery goals are.”

Some efforts have lost ground. One of the main culprits is Earth’s warming climate. The temperature of the environment where salmon live is particularly crucial. In order to live a full and healthy life cycle, they need clean, cool water. 

“Climate change, that’s a problem,” Bowhay said. “But really we just haven’t gotten a grip on handling our growth and water issues.”

Because of this, some species of salmon that have been making strides toward recovery are now at risk again. Despite massive funding windfalls, there just never seem to be enough resources, including people. “The demand is an ever-increasing list,” Bowhay said. “But we’re not increasing our manpower.” 

 This article was produced in collaboration and with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

 Genevieve Belmaker is an award-winning journalist and author who joined McClatchy as Public Service Journalism Editor in 2022. She’s a graduate of the University of Southern California and studied journalism at New York University.