January 6, 2003
In the weeks after the general election, the writing is still on the wall. The tribes are a political force to be reckoned with.
This is true here in Washington, just as it is true in other parts of the country. In South Dakota, for example, tribes have been credited with winning re-election for U.S. Senator Tim Johnson in the recent election. That was a victory worth celebrating.
October 18, 2002
Treaty Indian salmon fishermen are struggling. There’s no market for our product.
We can’t compete with cheaper farmed Atlantic salmon, even though everyone knows that our Pacific salmon is better – better tasting and better for you.
All of our salmon comes onto the market in about a six-month period. Then it’s gone. Farmed salmon – from Chile and Norway and elsewhere – is heavily subsidized by those countries and is available year round. Restaurants and grocery stores like farmed salmon because it’s uniform in size and color. It can be sent almost anywhere in the world overnight. And it’s cheap.
September 24, 2002
Coastal treaty tribes will be especially hard hit by the sharp reductions in groundfish harvests off the Washington Coast this year.
Declining salmon runs and poor market conditions have been conspiring against the tribes for the past couple of decades. Now, just when they are beginning to access their treaty-reserved share of groundfish, deep harvest cuts must be made to address declining populations of some groundfish species.
Nonetheless, the Quileute, Hoh and Makah tribes and the Quinault Indian Nation will be doing their part to help protect and rebuild weak groundfish stocks.
August 7, 2002
Here we go again.
A second year of big returns of hatchery chinook returning to the Columbia River – coupled with more good returns of coho to Puget Sound – and some folks already are talking loudly again about easing salmon habitat protection measures.
Unfortunately, what these returns really amount to are two small spikes on the overall downward trend of the salmon resource. Two years of good returns do not amount to salmon recovery. In fact, these larger returns actually may cause more harm than good.
June 24, 2002
Why do rich farmers get all the breaks and poor fishermen get the shaft? The president recently signed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 into law, increasing federal subsidies to farmers in the United States by at least $83 billion to well over $100 billion over the next ten years—two-thirds of it going to the largest ten percent of farmers. It was the biggest such hand out in history, and it was an action by a president who came into office promoting free trade, not protectionism.
Obviously, people need food, and obviously, agriculture is critical to the economy.
The State of Washington has a duty to the treaty Indian tribes who have always inhabited this region.
That Duty is to not allow salmon habitat to be degraded to the point that salmon are no longer available for harvest by the tribes, who gave up nearly all of the land in what is now western Washington under treaties with the United States government. Through those treaties, the tribes reserved certain rights that were the most important for them. Foremost was the right to continue fishing in all of their traditional fishing areas. The tribes reserved this right because the salmon was the very basis of their culture.
This is a time of great change in the management of the salmon resource in the State of Washington. Listings of several local salmon stocks under the Endangered Species Act…
It has been a little over a year since Governor Gary Locke met with the tribes at the Sleeping Lady Resort in Leavenworth, where three November days of detailed discussion…
OLYMPIA (8/23/00)--Let's face it. The state of Washington has failed to protect the environment of our region from development and natural resource habitat destruction. Nowhere is this more evident than…
The confluence of the centuries should be like the joining of two rivers. As they merge, the memories of countless moments and places should fold one unto another, and form a deeper, broader flow of knowledge. As the 19th Century merged into the 20th, my father was a young man. He lived his whole life on the Nisqually River. He was born in a wooden longhouse to parents who had lived on the same river throughout their lives. The heritage of the Nisqually has been passed from generation to generation for thousands of years. As my father grew, he learned to fish, hunt and gather everything from cedar bark to a multitude of wild fruits and vegetables. He learned the legacies of stewardship.