The Puyallup Tribe of Indians is helping to fund a program that is restoring spring chinook in the upper White River watershed. “For over 18 years we’ve been working with the state to release juvenile spring chinook produced at the Minter Creek hatchery into acclimation ponds in the upper White River,” said Russ Ladley, resource […]
Point Elliott Treaty tribes are using a safer, less-expensive method of collaring and tracking elk in the Nooksack herd. Tribal and state wildlife co-managers monitor the Nooksack herd via helicopter surveys. In the past, animals were fitted with tracking collars after being tranquilized by aerial darts. However, helicopter time is expensive and aerial darting poses […]
An empty plastic kerosene can with Japanese writing on it washed onto Point Grenville in March, possibly some of the first debris to reach the Olympic Coast following Japan’s catastrophic tsunami in 2011. Tribal, local, state and federal agencies are preparing for the possibility that tons more debris may wash ashore. However, little wreckage has […]
A quarter million juvenile coho salmon took a quarter-mile ride through a 4-inch pipe when the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe recently transferred the young fish from shore to the tribe’s floating net pens in Port Gamble Bay. The fish came from the Washington Department Fish and Wildlife’s George Adams Hatchery near Shelton. Arriving in a […]
Including traditional foods – like huckleberries, nettles, camas and salmon – into tribal members’ everyday diets is the goal of the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty program. The two year project is funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is supported by Northwest Indian College’s Traditional Plants and Foods Program. “This effort is about eating healthy […]
The Suquamish Tribe recently pulled up the bones of a gray whale from Agate Pass, with hopes of rebuilding the skeleton for educational purposes. The tribe acquired the remains of the juvenile whale in July 2011 after the mammal beached itself and died near Silverdale. After biologists gathered tissue samples, the tribe wrapped the whale […]
The Tulalip Tribes and the U.S. Forest Service have partnered to enhance huckleberry fields for tribal gathering in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Wild mountain huckleberries are sacred to northwest tribes, but traditional gathering areas have suffered from generations of fire suppression and forest management activities favoring old growth forests that don’t support mountain huckleberry […]
For the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN), it is a grim truth that to protect the marine resources that sustain them, they must meticulously inventory those resources. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska graphically demonstrated the need to quantify baseline populations of marine and intertidal life. To accomplish the task, QIN and other tribal communities […]
It’s a mixed bag of razor clam populations on beaches from Copalis to Kalaloch, an annual survey by the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN) and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife shows. While some beaches had fewer clams available for harvest, others had more. The co-managers use seawater to pump razor clams to the surface inside […]
Bull elk on the north Olympic Peninsula are surviving today at roughly the same rate as they did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to early results of a two-year study by the Makah Tribe. The tribe is halfway through the second year of a bull and calf elk survival study to update […]
