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The Work of Salmon Restoration
In 1977, the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce tribes recognized that, in order for us to effectively fulfill our management responsibilities, we needed to coordinate many of our fishery policies and objectives, and needed a staff that could help us efficiently deal with many legal and technical issues we have in common.
In the early years, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission mainly provided assistance to the tribes to ensure that tribal fishers could exercise treaty-reserved fishing rights. The 1969 U.S. v Oregon federal court decision had affirmed those rights and clarified tribal management responsibilities.
As the Columbia River salmon crisis has deepened, CRITFC’s efforts have increasingly assisted the tribes in using legal and technical means to protect and restore salmon. Commission staff coordinated with tribal policy makers and tribal fish and wildlife staff to produce a salmon restoration plan, Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit (Spirit of the Salmon). The plan blends the wisdom developed from observing salmon for thousands of years with the principles of conservation biology, a science based on rebuilding populations of animals pushed to the brink of extinction.
To the extent that we have been able to put our plan and our principles into practice, we have gotten results:
- The Nez Perce Tribes has reintroduced coho into the Snake River basin where coho had not returned since 1986.
- Working with irrigators, ranchers, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Umatilla Tribe has restored several species of salmon to the Umatilla Basin. For the past seventy years, only steelhead had persisted.
- The Warm Springs Tribe is working collaboratively with private landowners and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to enhance runs in the Hood. River.
- The Yakama Tribe is operating a state-of-the-art hatchery that will provide salmon to many parts of the Yakima River Basin where salmon populations are badly depleted or where salmon can no longer be found.
Our restoration efforts are benefiting salmon, but by themselves, they are not enough. It will take all of us who live here in the Columbia Basin to rescue our salmon from extinction; we must use our successes as patterns for other restoration efforts. We have a duty to salmon, to ourselves, to those who follow us.
