The Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation are the only tribes in the Columbia Basin to have reserved rights to anadromous fish in 1855 treaties with the United States.
The people of these tribes have always shared a common understanding--that their very existence depends on the respectful enjoyment of the Columbia River Basin's vast land and water resources. Indeed, their very souls and spirits were and are inextricably tied to the natural world and its myriad inhabitants. Among those inhabitants, none were more important than the teeming millions of anadromous fish enriching the basin's rivers and streams.
Despite some differences in language and cultural practices, the people of these tribes shared the foundation of a regional economy based on salmon. To the extent the resource permits, tribal people continue to fish for ceremonial, subsistence, and commercial purposes employing--as they always have--a variety of technologies. Tribal people fish from wooden scaffolds and from boats, use set nets, spears, dip nets, and poles and lines. Tribal people still maintain a dietary preference for salmon, and its role in ceremonial life remains preeminent. Salmon is important and necessary for physical health and for spiritual well-being.
Today, perhaps even more than in the past, the Columbia River treaty tribes are brought together by the struggle to save the salmon and by shared spiritual traditions such as the first salmon feast.
The Nez Perce homeland once consisted of 13 million acres in what is now Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The original land base included significant portions of six different drainages. Today, the reservation consists of 750,000 acres, of which 13 percent is owned by the tribe.
The management of land and natural resources continues to be paramount for the Nez Perce. The tribe is trying to buy back some of the 7.5 million acres originally reserved in the 1855 Treaty with the Nez Perce. The tribe's strong fish program employs nearly 50 full-time and part-time workers. Nez Perce co-management responsibilities extend to the Columbia, Snake, Tucannon, Grande Ronde, Imnaha, Clearwater, and Salmon drainages. Tribal members fish on the Clearwater River, which runs through the reservation near its northern and eastern borders, and on the Columbia, Rapid, and Selway rivers.
The General Council, which includes all voting-age members of the tribe, elects the nine-person Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee (NPTEC), the tribe's governing body. The tribe's fish and wildlife committee is made up of appointed members of NPTEC. The tribe, whose enrolled membership is about 3,000, is headquartered in Lapwai, Idaho.
When the leaders of the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla peoples signed a treaty with the United States in 1855, they ceded 6.4 million acres of homeland in what is now northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. Today the three-tribe confederation numbers 1,500. The 172,000-acre reservation, almost half of which is owned by non-Indians, includes significant portions of the Umatilla River watershed. The Umatilla and Grande Ronde rivers have been the focus of the tribe's fish restoration activities for more than a decade. Under the tribe's leadership, salmon were reintroduced in the Umatilla river in the early 1980s. The tribe, along with the state of Oregon, operate egg-taking, spawning, and other propagation facilities that are helping restore salmon runs. The first fall chinook, spring chinook, and coho salmon in some 70 years returned to the Umatilla River in 1984.
In the Grande Ronde watershed, the Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes along with state and federal agencies developed a state-of-the-art salmon habitat restoration plan for the USDA Forest Service. Other river basins in which the tribe has co-management responsibilities are the Columbia, Snake, Walla Walla, Tucannon, Grande Ronde, John Day, and Imnaha. In recent times, tribal fisheries have occurred only on the Umatilla and Columbia rivers.
The Umatilla are governed by the Board of Trustees composed of nine members elected by the General Council. Tribal headquarters are located in Mission, Oregon.
A 640,000-acre reservation in north central Oregon is home to a confederation of three tribes: the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute tribes. The Warm Springs Tribe is made up of the Upper Deschutes (Tygh), Lower Deschutes (Wyam), Tenino, and John Day (Dock-spus) bands. The Wasco tribe is made up of The Dalles (Ki-gal-twal-la) and Dog River bands. Several Paiute bands from southeastern Oregon were removed to the Warm Springs Reservation in 1869. In 1855 the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes treated with United States in the Treaty with the Middle Oregon Tribes of Oregon. In the treaty, 10 million acres of aboriginal lands were ceded to the United States. Today, the enrolled membership of all three tribes totals nearly 3,000. Most members reside on the reservation.
The reservation government is led by an 11-member tribal council. Three are chiefs who serve life terms, and the remaining eight are elected from reservation districts for 3-year terms. The Warm Springs Tribe co-manages the Columbia, Deschutes, Fifteenmile Creek, John Day, and Hood River watersheds. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service operates a chinook hatchery on the reservation. Tribal headquarters are in Warm Springs, Oregon.
The Cascade Mountains flank the reservation on the west, and the Deschutes River forms its eastern border. The river now supports spring chinook, fall chinook, and steelhead. Tribal members still fish with dip nets and set nets from wooden scaffolding at the falls near Sherars Bridge.
Mount Adams, the Klickitat River, and the Yakima River are among the defining features of the 1.2 million-acre Yakama Indian Reservation in south central Washington. In the 1855 Treaty with the Yakama, 14 bands and tribes ceded 11.5 million acres to the United States. The bands and tribes in the Yakama confederation are the Kah-milt-pah, Klickitat, Klinquit, Kow-was-say-ee, Li-ay-was, Oche-chotes, Palouse, Pisquose, Se-ap-cat, Shyiks, Skinpah, Wenatshapam, Wishram, and Yakama.
Today, representatives of the 14 bands and tribes make up the Yakama Tribal Council. A general council includes all tribal members over 18 years of age. The tribe, which uses an interdisciplinary and sustainable approach to care for the land and natural resources, operates a fisheries program with approximately 40 employees. Among its fisheries projects is its unique work with the US Department of Energy to use abandoned intake settling ponds at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to acclimate about 500,000 fall chinook juveniles before releasing them into the Columbia. (The concrete pools were tested and found to have no contamination.) The Yakama Indian Nation co-manages the Columbia, Wind, White Salmon, Klickitat, Yakima, Wenatchee, Methow, Entiat, and Okanogan rivers.
The tribe has usual and accustomed fishing places in many locations in the Columbia River Basin and some outside the basin. Salmon continue to be the lifeblood of the nearly 8,400 Yakama tribal members.
The Importance of Salmon to the Tribes
The native peoples of the Columbia River Basin have always revered the way the Creator took special care of nature and the way nature obeyed the Creator. This was a perfect mystery. For that reason, Columbia River tribes found it easy to embrace the concept of stewardship. For them, stewardship extends respect for life beyond the dignity of the human person to the whole of creation. That respect involves the responsibility to honor what the Creator provides. As long as nature is taken care of, nature will take care of the people. The tribes continue to acknowledge this traditional wisdom.
The tribes developed "gravel-to-gravel" management principles from this traditional wisdom. Gravel-to-gravel management acknowledges the relationship between the biology of the fish, the degree of human pressures on them, and the condition of their physical environment throughout all life history stages. It is an ecologically sound approach that is at the same time sacred and regulatory.
In non-Indian parlance, traditional wisdom is systems thinking. It is a discipline for seeing wholes, recognizing patterns and interrelationships, and learning how to structure human actions accordingly.
This way of thinking is the foundation of the recommendations for salmon restoration. The recommendations are intended to harmonize what Indian people know about the basin's natural environment, what humans have imposed on that environment, and what can be done to create a balanced and sustainable existence.
Tribal management begins with a recognition of nature's bounty as a gift from the Creator. They are humbled by the salmon's faithful return to the rivers to serve human and other needs. Tribal people celebrate nature's preeminence and the need for human society to harmonize itself with the structures and rhythms of nature. They believe that everything in nature has a purpose, whether or not humans know the purpose. Today tribal respect for nature is evidenced in time-honored ceremonies such as the seasonal first-food feasts held each year, when the human world stops to honor the return of nature's gifts.
In the native cultures of the Columbia Basin, food and water were never taken for granted, as they often are in today's society. Tribal society recognized that food and water are always matters of survival and of spiritual well-being.
Today people are often far removed from the sources of their food and drinking water. Very few are engaged in growing or gathering food for the table, and a growing number are no longer even involved in food preparation at home. Under such circumstances, it becomes difficult to appreciate our place in the natural cycles of life. Contemporary society is removed from what traditional native thinkers of the Columbia Basin called the "connectedness" or "connection of all life."
Indian culture and religion are attentive to the human place within nature. A drink of water, the aroma of roasting salmon, or a bite of the crispy kouse (root) are ordinary reminders that all humans are dependents of nature. As we are served, we must also serve.
The complexity of human minds was simplified in the indescribable beauty of songs that expressed a culture based on the fundamentals of love, purity, respect, and worship which sustained life for natives before the time of Christianity, Judaism, or any other of the great world religions. This strength should not be lost.
Many laws and rules were the subject of the hundred or more songs that the people knew. In them were instructions on how to live, expressed in "a way that opens your mind up." Some explained that as "the givers of life," the salmon, the deer, the roots, and the berries must be enjoyed as food and in ceremony. How water and the four great foods are to be honored and cared for are also prescribed in the songs.
Non-Indian attempts to subjugate nature and the resulting spiritual bankruptcy are what many Indian people and others believe are among the root causes for many current environmental and social problems, including the salmon crisis.
Perhaps nowhere are the differences in the Indian and non-Indian ways of relating to nature more evident than in the treatment of water. The tribes have always regarded water as a medicine because it nourishes all of life. Water flushes poisons out of humans, other living creatures, and the land. Traditional culture teaches that to be productive, water must be kept pure. When water is kept pure and cold, it takes care of the salmon. It takes care of humans as well. Water that cannot take care of salmon cannot take care of humans.
Non-Indians, on the other hand, have used the water without fully understanding that it must be treated with respect to remain powerful. By causing the water to warm, by restricting its flow and by putting pollutants in it, they have made the water sick. It can no longer be used as a cleansing agent. The water is so inhospitable that at times it can no longer take care of the salmon.
After European-introduced diseases took their toll, after treaties and the reservation system were firmly installed, and as non-Indian cultural domination spread, a great deal of tribal "encyclopedic" knowledge of the natural and spiritual world was lost. What is known comes from tribal elders, from the study of the language and culture, from records, and from other analytical sources.
What is known, for example, is that hundreds and hundreds of plants, animals, and geographic locations were identified. Each of these plant and animal species had a particular purpose or use. Tribal people knew their characteristics and properties, the habitat and environmental conditions in which they could be found, and the ritual and practical methods for using and preserving them. For animals, tribal people also understood migration, nesting, and mating habits. For plants, they knew when, where, and which varieties could be picked.
Different types of biogeographic formations (of water and land) were distinguished. Plants, animals, and especially places were also repositories for historical, social, and spiritual lessons. This knowledge and more was transmitted to succeeding generations as part of their inheritance.
With regard to fish, each species was known by its shape, size, color, taste, and swimming and jumping abilities. Tribal people differentiated between anadromous and non-anadromous fish. In their taxonomy, steelhead are considered one of the salmon (nusux) by virtue of their anadromous habits, their size, and other characteristics.
Traditional tribal experts could distinguish among stocks of salmon. That is, they could tell for which tributary a run of salmon was destined. Tribal experts could predict the arrival of salmon by observing, for example, the new growth of grasses and shrubs.
Within the context of their systems frame of reference (i.e., their ecological and spiritual values), tribal people applied this extensive knowledge to fisheries practices and management. Today, tribal people use some of the same methods that were used for thousands of years. Rules and regulations, management areas, law enforcement, and research and analysis (the accumulated observations and interpretations described above) were all integral parts of tribal resource management. The result was that for thousands of years, and until the arrival of non-Indians, tribal leaders managed their resources successfully. The people fished, and the salmon returned.
The mainstem Columbia River was divided into territories, each with its own regulatory body. For example, on either side of the Celilo Falls fishing area were important territories. Downstream were Big Eddy and the Great Cascades, and upstream, a fishery was centered around what was later called John Day Falls. Among the tribes and bands who fished the river there was general recognition of each other's areas, who fished there, and when. Although fishing rules varied according to area, they were similar and were usually enforced by a headman (sometimes referred to as a salmon chief) and his committee.
More is known about the Celilo Falls fishery because it was in continuous use until 1957. It was the last major fishing area in the Basin to be inundated by backwaters from dam construction. At Celilo, the headman was responsible for conducting an orderly fishery in compliance with the traditional laws of his people so that the salmon returned year after year.
Following the traditional law, the headman determined when and how long fishing occurred. For example, no fishing could take place until the first salmon feast was held. The headman determined when the feast would occur. To prevent over-harvest, fish were caught at their prime. A fisherman was to catch only what was needed for food or for trade. Wasting fish or parts of fish was prohibited. Even the head and backbone were used; they were, for example, made into a soup. Night fishing was prohibited to allow upstream-destined salmon to continue to spawning grounds.
To maintain an orderly fishery, a headman, along with his committee, enforced other regulations. They often dealt with matters such as property rights, standards of behavior, polluting the water, or safety. Fishing sites were individually owned and were inherited. Owning a site did not mean that only one family would benefit. Unwritten but understood ethics of sharing dictated an owner allow another the opportunity to catch at least one fish or might require that preference be given to elders. However, a nonowner always sought permission to use another's site. For rule breakers, there were punishments, often involving banishment from the fishing area for a day, a fishing season, or in extreme causes, longer.
It is important to note that tribal people did not rely exclusively on salmon. Such a reliance would not have been very practical. Fishing was mostly an intermittent spring-to-early-fall activity. Most places were fished only during certain times of the year.
Rather than being permanently located in fishing villages, most of the people of the Columbia Basin made the seasonal round. At each place, they carefully appropriated nature's abundance and moved on. Seasonal movement avoided overuse of resources and abuse of the environments that supported them. A typical seasonal round took village members from their winter lodges near the rivers, to root-digging fields, to fishing areas, to the mountains for summer recreation and berry picking, to the big river for fishing and other activities, and back again to the winter lodge.
During winter, village leaders made what we now call resource
management plans. Based on accumulated knowledge and current observations
such as weather, water conditions, animal behavior, and other data, they
planned for the next year's seasonal round. Evolving over thousands of
years, the seasonal round--with significant dependence on fisheries--was
a successfully managed, sustainable lifestyle compatible with the basin's
environment.