For years there have been people in this community who have held on to their hate-filled beliefs that tribal fishers should not be allowed to harvest fish from the Nisqually. Courts have ruled otherwise, noting that treaties from the mid 1800s clearly give American Indians rights to fish and harvest other natural resources “in common” with settlers.
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Last week Sarah posted a message on OlyBlog shedding light on the travails that the Native American tribe faces as it fishes in the Nisqually River. I would highly recommend exploring some of the links that Sarah posted, but I’ll return to that later. While I am hesitant to put too much thought into what was perhaps simply a moronic and isolated occurrence, I do think there are some interesting issues that deserve a bit of attention.
A reporter from the Puyallup Herald tagged along with some researchers from the Puyallup Tribe as they conducted their first salmon surveys after the damaging winter floods:
One of the major problems biologists see with flooding is what’s known as “scour.” High and often fast-moving water will “dig out all the eggs that were laid down,” said Marks, ruining chances for increased numbers of young fish. He noted that coho and chum salmon spawning “were more or less lost” during the recent flood.
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The Puyallup Tribe of Indians recently released their summary report on juvenille salmon monitoring in the Puyallup River watershed. The tribe operates a smolt trap in the lower river which counts outgoing salmon. The report covers research between January 18 and August 10, 2008.
The most significant finding in the report is the high number of unmarked (assumed not to be of hatchery origin) chinook. (more…)
Russ Svec, fisheries manager for the Makah Tribe, and Craig Bowhay of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission were part of a presentation this morning on fisheries management to a state senate committee.
You can watch their testimony here: (more…)
From the Olympian: A vulgar graffiti message scrawled on the upstream side of the Old Pacific Highway bridge across the Nisqually River is a sign that racism hasn't died out…
The Daily Herald of Everett: The new president has been in office for less than 24 hours, but the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission is wasting no time in making their…
Recommendations from the 24 treaty tribes represented by the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission regarding treaty tribal natural resources management in the Pacific Northwest.…
Eric De Place at the Sightline Daily Score blog writes an interesting piece about salmon and floods:
…when I wrote that the costs of doing nothing about climate change outstrip the costs of fixing the problem, one person wrote asking for hard numbers. How do we know for certain which is more expensive? Maybe it will be cheaper to abandon ship, so to speak: move everyone (and everything) out of flood-prone areas and forget about reducing emissions. (more…)
Puyallup Tribal News looks at the tribe's plans for Boise Creek: One of the most critical spawning areas for salmon in the Puyallup River Basin is about to get some…