EVERETT — The Snohomish County Public Utility District on Thursday received federal approval for plans to place two large turbines on the sea floor off Whidbey Island.
The pilot project has been in development for years, and if the PUD’s Board of Commissioners signs off on the project, it may be a few more years before the turbines are installed.
Snohomish County PUD This artist’s rendering shows the tidal energy turbine Snohomish County Public Utility District plans to test to determine if tidal energy is a viable source of electricity.
The project is a test to see if using tides to generate electricity is technically, commercially and environmentally viable, said Craig Caller, an assistant general manager for the PUD.
It would be the first time tidal power turbines in Puget Sound would be connected to the larger electricity grid.
So far, the PUD has raised about $13 million in federal Department of Energy grants, which is expected to cover about half the cost of the project. The rest would come from a mix of more grants and money from the utility’s Resource Reinvestment Reserve, Caller said.
The test area is 200 feet deep in Admiralty Inlet, less than half a mile off the west shore of Whidbey Island and not far from the Keystone ferry slip and Fort Casey State Park.
The utility is to operate the turbines for three to five years, during which time it will study the turbines’ actual performance versus the expected output, maintenance requirements, underwater noise and response of nearby fish and marine mammals.
Gathering that data will determine whether the utility proceeds with a commercial deployment. Right now there isn’t enough data to make even an educated guess as to tidal power’s viability.
“It’s in its infancy. It’s about where wind technology was decades ago,” said Dave Aldrich, president of the PUD’s Board of Commissioners.
In issuing the license, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ruled that the PUD has addressed concerns raised by Native American tribes and an undersea cable company.
The Tulalip Indian Tribes, the Suquamish Tribe and the Point No Point Treaty Council, representing the Port Gamble and Jamestown S’Klallam tribes, opposed the project, saying the turbines posed a risk to fish and fishing nets and would force the state to close the area to fishing.
A data communications company, Pacific Crossing of Danville, Calif., also protested the project. The company operates more than 13,000 miles of undersea fiber-optic cable that pass through Admiralty Inlet to Harbour Pointe from Asia and California. It is concerned cables would be damaged by the operation of the turbines.
Caller said that FERC in its ruling said the turbines posed no risk either to undersea cables or marine wildlife, nor would they impede the tribes’ fishing rights.
Officials from the Tulalip Tribes and Pacific Crossing could not be reached for comment.
In the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, another pilot project using the same model of turbines found there was no danger to wildlife.
“What they found consistently over that time is that when the turbine is rotating, that fish and mammals simply avoid it,” Caller said.
The turbines are to be made by the Irish firm OpenHydro. They are approximately 20 feet in diameter, weigh 414 tons each and sit 65 feet high on a triangular platform 100 by 85 feet.
At peak generation, the turbines could produce 600 kilowatts of electricity. But because this is a pilot project, it is unlikely the turbines would ever generate that much electricity for the grid, Caller said,
If the PUD’s board votes to move forward with the project — Aldrich said it likely will — the utility will need to obtain permits from Island County, where the power would be brought to shore, order the turbines and hire contractors.
It’s brand new territory for the utility, and installation of the turbines is years away.
“We’re pioneers if we go through with this,” Aldrich said.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165 or cwinters@heraldnet.com.
The Upper Skagit Indian Tribe is tagging juvenile steelhead to estimate freshwater productivity and learn more about smolt-to-adult survival in the Skagit River.
Steelhead have a complex life history, making it hard for salmon managers to forecast returns. Juvenile steelhead can leave freshwater habitat between their first and fourth year of life, and return from the salt water after one to five years. In addition, steelhead are repeat spawners, unlike other species of salmon, so they can return to salt water before coming back to fresh water to spawn again.
Compared to other river systems in Puget Sound, the Skagit River still has an abundance of wild steelhead.
“We estimate how many adult steelhead come back to the Skagit River based on spawning ground surveys,” said Jon-Paul Shannahan, biologist for the Upper Skagit Tribe. “Right now, we don’t know how many juvenile steelhead leave the watershed.”
A fish weir guides juvenile steelhead into a trap in Hansen Creek. The steelhead are tagged and then released to help fisheries managers learn more about smolt-to-adult survival.
The tribe has partnered with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to collect steelhead smolts using screw traps in Hansen and Illabot creeks. The smolts are tagged with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags that will provide data when the steelhead leave and return to the two tributaries. These PIT-tagged steelhead can also be monitored for encounters in other research or harvest sampling.
This spring, the Upper Skagit Natural Resources Department plans to install one PIT tag antenna array in Hansen Creek that will record information when tagged fish swim over the antennas. If funding is secured, another antenna array will be installed in Illabot Creek next year.
Previous data has shown that steelhead out-migrate from the upper Skagit watershed at an older age compared to fish in the lower watershed. Illabot Creek is near Rockport in the upper watershed, and Hansen Creek is in the lower watershed near the tribe’s Sedro-Woolley reservation.
“These two creeks represent a tiny sliver of the available habitat,” Shannahan said. “We picked these two productive tributaries as initial sites to represent the age diversity of the smolts and the habitat conditions from the entire basin. We have decent adult return data, some decent habitat and flow data, and plan to expand this data to get a picture of the entire basin productivity. ”
Ultimately, the tribe wants to incorporate this research into long-term monitoring in the Skagit basin, but has not identified a long-term funding source.
“We believe this is a unique project on the Skagit,” said Scott Schuyler, natural resources director for the Upper Skagit Tribe. “Given how complex the life history is for steelhead, this is an great opportunity to truly learn more about the species.”
For more information, contact: Jon-Paul Shannahan, Upper Skagit Tribe, 360-854-7089 or jonpauls@upperskagit.com; Kari Neumeyer, NWIFC, 360-424-8226 or kneumeyer@nwifc.org
Western Washington tribes are quickly recovering from a sudden ban in December 2013 on selling geoduck to China.
The Asian country claimed it received a shipment of geoduck from Ketchikan, Alaska, that had high levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning, and a shipment from Poverty Bay in Puyallup, Wash., that had high levels of arsenic.
Suquamish Seafoods employee James Banda packs geoduck for international shipping.
As a result, China announced it was banning all imports of bivalve shellfish from Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California. This was just before the Chinese New Year, a lucrative time for harvesters and buyers, when geoducks are traditionally served.
“It was bad at the beginning because we didn’t know what was going on,” said Tony Forsman, general manager of the Suquamish Tribe’s Suquamish Seafoods, which regularly ships shellfish internationally. “China didn’t tell us for two weeks they were doing this.”
Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been working with Chinese officials to determine how they came to their conclusions and have been in close communication with Washington Department of Health and western Washington tribal officials about the progress. Officials from NOAA are meeting in person with officials from China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine this month to further discuss the situation.
The shellfish in question from Poverty Bay passed all the rigorous tests needed to be exported to China, said David Fyfe, shellfish biologist for Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
“We’re working with China to figure out why we suddenly don’t meet their standards,” he said.
In the meantime, harvesters and buyers are continuing to send their catches to other Asian countries, including Vietnam. U.S. officials are asking China to reduce the ban area from the West Coast to just the two original areas of concern.
Suquamish Seafoods had to layoff nine employees in December – including those who sort, pack and ship the shellfish – but everyone was re-hired by mid-February. Suquamish Tribe harvesters annually gather nearly 500,000 pounds of geoduck.
“There have been blips in the market, such as having to sell smaller geoduck, plus market pressure forced prices down,” Forsman said. “We’ve all just had to adjust – divers, market, buyers, us. Things are fine now but we had to adjust and adjust fast.”
Despite the “blip”, it did prove that the United States shellfish quality control system works, Fyfe said. Harvesters have to meet the National Shellfish Sanitation Program standards, which includes providing information about the harvester, day and tract from which shellfish was harvested.
Concerns rise over failing fish populations, meaningless water rights and pushback from other governments
Trinity Lake is one of the largest reservoirs in California, and much of its water goes to the Central Valley and its agriculture. Reservations are often left dry. Photo: Tim Reed/USGS
Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series examining how drought affects Native Americans and their communities.
Drought maps this winter have shaded swaths of the American West in oranges and reds to signify severe, extreme and even exceptional levels of drought.
And exceptional drought gets attention, especially when it hits America’s vegetable basket, California’s Central Valley.
Speaker of the House John Boehner in January stood in his shirtsleeves in a dusty, bare field in Bakersfield. He supported a state bill that would quash salmon restoration in the San Joaquin River delta, joining the cry that scarce water should go to farms, not fish.
President Barack Obama, a month later, stood in his shirtsleeves in a dusty, bare field in nearby Fresno, offering $183 million in aid and announced an initiative on climate change to address larger issues affecting the three-year drought.
But living in the dry is nothing new for Native Americans in the West. Nor is being overlooked.
In wet years as well as dry, many American Indians live in chronic droughtlike conditions, thanks to decades’ worth of dams that hold water back or divert it from reservations which were usually sited on already marginal land.
“We are definitely one of the overlooked groups of people in the U.S.,” said Margaret Hiza Redsteer from her office in Flagstaff, Ariz. A member of the Crow Nation, Redsteer is a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and has been monitoring 18 consecutive years of drought conditions in the Southwest, primarily on Hopi and Navajo lands.
“The California drought is getting a lot of attention right now, and I keep thinking ‘You know, we’ve been facing this problem for a while now’ … [but] we don’t supply the food to the rest of the country, so people haven’t noticed,” she said.
The dry side of reservoirs
Her concerns are echoed in the Great Plains — where reservoirs behind federal dams have displaced Indians — and in Northern California, where once teeming salmon streams shrink as water is diverted south.
During the last century, California constructed a massive system of dams, reservoirs, tunnels and canals to funnel water to the Central Valley, which has become an industrial agriculture wonderland. According to the USGS California Water Science Center, Central Valley agriculture is a $17 billion per year industry that supplies a quarter of America’s food, including 40 percent of its fruits and nuts.
Lettuce, carrots, tomatoes and fruit take tremendous quantities of water, and the dry fields where Obama and Boehner were standing during their media events are often irrigated with water that comes from far away.
In fact, 557 miles to the north, amid the forested ridges that outline the sinuous Trinity River, Rod Mendes reflected about being on the dry side of the Central Valley Project dams.
People need to keep in mind, as [drought] legislation is drafted, that farms can be bailed out but fish populations can’t.
Dave Hillemeier
fisheries manager, Yurok Tribe
“For the most part, the Hoopa Indian Reservation is kind of in a drought situation all the time anyway,” said Mendes, who is writing an emergency drought plan for the tribe. “We have a lot of dams in the area. They control the flow of the river whether we’re in a drought year or not. We’re not getting the flows we were getting before the dams.”
A half-century of lesser flows has reduced coho salmon runs to the point they are on federal and state endangered species lists. Officials with both the Hoopa and Yurok tribes say they are concerned that California’s declaration of a drought emergency in January will make things worse by loosening environmental protections known as CEQA, California Environmental Quality Assurance.
“We’re concerned because during the process the tribes really haven’t been consulted with,” said Hoopa Valley tribal chairwoman Danielle Vigil-Masten. “All this legislation that’s getting put through really fast. They have legislation to increase water flows into the Shasta Reservoir. They have other bills to do with the Trinity River. We have to constantly go online and look and try to understand what the information is that we are reading. We have our attorneys on it.”
“People need to keep in mind, as [emergency drought] legislation is drafted, that farms can be bailed out but fish populations can’t,” said Dave Hillemeier, fisheries manager for the Yurok Tribe. “Once you lose the genetics that make up your fish population, they’re gone.”
Salmon returning from the ocean last year faced such obstacles as low flows in the Trinity and Klamath rivers, higher water temperatures, algae blooms from agricultural runoff and even dewatering — stretches that were sucked dry by irrigation or consumption.
“Too much water has been allocated to too many people,” said Konrad Fisher, executive director ofKlamath Riverkeeper. Along the Scott River, an important tributary of the Klamath, Fisher said, “an 18-mile stretch … was completely dry,” because of overappropriation of water rights.
Dry stretches strand returning salmon, keeping them from reaching spawning grounds.
Talking to the elders
Pressure on Northern California water may be especially dire this year. According to the California Water Science Center, “2013 was the driest calendar year for California in 119 years of recorded history.”
Foreshadowing a bone-dry 2014, snowpack in the north ranged from 22 percent to 25 percent of normal by late February. Snowpack provides about one-third of the water used by California’s cities and farms, the center said.
In the Southwest, “It’s a year without a winter here,” Redsteer said from her USGS office in Flagstaff. She has chronicled the worsening scarcity of water by setting up her own weather stations and interviewing up to 100 tribal elders about changes they observed during their lifetimes, which included winters without snow, summers without monsoons and vanishing streams, plants and animals.
One of the ways USGS geologist Margaret Hiza Redsteer tracks climate change is by talking to Navajo and Hopi elders. Photo: U.S. Geological Survey
Streams on the Navajo reservation have dried up one after another. Without moisture in the ground, perennial grasses don’t grow. Without grass cover, sand dunes begin to migrate and advance on dwellings, roads and grazing land. Dry riverbeds release fine sediment to the winds, and the airborne dust settles on the snowpack of the southern Rockies. Dust absorbs more heat from the sun and melts the snow more quickly.
Is it climate change? “That’s the $10 million question, and frankly it’s a question I don’t think you’ll ever be able to answer. It’d be like trying to claim which cigarette gave the person lung cancer,” Redsteer said.
What can be said, she added, is that drought conditions are intensified by warmer temperatures. Plants don’t remain dormant in winter anymore. They germinate and use up scant moisture. Higher temperatures increase aridity, which steals water from plants through evapotranspiration.
Use it or lose it
But haven’t indigenous cultures in the Southwest long adapted to arid climates?
“First of all, the traditional way of adapting to dry seasons was to move,” Redsteer said. These days, “If you have a reservation, and the reservation is established where there are the most limited water resources in the region, the odds of you being able to make it through dry seasons are stacked against you.”
Indeed, she said, census data shows the reservation population in decline even as there are more Navajo. “There is a notable emigration from the reservation and mostly it’s young people who are leaving because they can get jobs in cities,” she said. This is due in part from the limited, land-based economies on the reservation.
“There’s not a lot of alternatives out there,” Redsteer said.
When it comes to drought planning, she praised the Navajo and Hopi tribes but added, “What is it that we do after the first 10 years?” Redsteer asked. “People on the reservation use one-tenth of the water that people in Phoenix use every day. How do you conserve when you are already using so little? They don’t have lawns, they don’t wash their cars on a regular basis. It’s hard to say, ‘Well, we really need to conserve now,’” she said with a laugh.
And Phoenix, a desert city that glimmers with emerald golf courses and backyard swimming pools when seen from the air, highlights the archaic nature of water laws.
“One of the real ironies is that western water law is ‘use it or lose it’. Phoenix … to keep its Colorado River allocation, has to use that allocation or it will lose its rights to it. So in some ways there’s a disincentive to conserve,” Redsteer said.
The aftershocks of dam building resonate throughout Indian Country, even on the Great Plains.
“It is no coincidence that the major dams on the Missouri are on Indian reservations,” added Gary Collins. Collins is a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who has spent much of his career in natural resource and water issues.
“Actually, the tribes on the Missouri didn’t get the dams, they got the reservoirs,” said Bob Gough, secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, based in Rosebud, S.D. “When the dams were built for flood control, it actually means the tribes were permanently flooded and someone else is in control. That’s what ‘flood control’ means if you are an Indian.”
Collaboration among tribes and federal and state agencies is welcome but is fraught with ugly history such as Indians being flooded out by dams. “It was forced displacement, and that provides the mistrust tribes have with the government,” Collins said.
Some tribes, such as those on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, have fought for more control by having their water rights adjudicated — which clarifies how much water a user has a right to use and who has priority during times of scarcity.
“It was 37 years in the courts,” Collins said. “We are constantly having pushback from non-Indian society wanting more of the tribes’ assets.”
Tribes are first affected and most affected. They are the ones on the ground who sustain themselves with subsistence hunting and fishing and gardening.
Gary Collins
Northern Arapaho tribe
With drought, Collins said, “Tribes are first affected and most affected. They are the ones on the ground who sustain themselves with subsistence hunting and fishing and gardening.”
Gough is among the lead authors of a chapter on the effects of climate change on indigenous people — the first time they have their own chapter — in the forthcoming third edition of the National Climate Assessment.
Among the observations: “A significant decrease in water quality and quantity caused by a variety of factors, including climate change, is affecting Native Americans’ and Alaska Natives’ drinking water supplies, food, cultures, ceremonies and traditional ways of life. Native communities’ vulnerabilities and lack of capacity to adapt to climate change are exacerbated by land-use policies, political marginalization, legal issues associated with tribal water rights and poor socioeconomic conditions.”
It often comes down to poverty, Gough said. “When you get to Indian Country, you see that these reservations have already been beset upon with with all sorts of vulnerabilities.”
Poverty often means that even if tribes have senior water rights, “they don’t have a lot of money for infrastructure to actually get the benefits of those water rights,” Redsteer said. It’s not uncommon for tribes to bargain away some of their rights to have water returned via someone else’s pipes.
“It doesn’t do any good to have water rights on paper,” she said.
Meanwhile, as they prepared for the predicted dry summer, people enjoyed the few days of late-winter rain that spattered Northern California.
“I love the rain. I went out and took a walk in the rain,” Yurok chairman O’Rourke said.
“I love the smell of rain,” Hoopa chairwoman Vigil-Masten said. “It seems that when it rains, we are all happy, really. Because you can see the water in the river start to increase.”
Image source: twitter.com/BuffySteMarie ‘If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing,’ says legendary musician-activist Sainte-Marie.
For decades, Buffy Sainte-Marie has been an artistic trailblazer. The Sixties folk explosion saw the Canadian-born Cree songwriter confront the colonial status quo with hit songs like “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” as well as the anti-war anthem “Universal Soldier.” Sainte-Marie, who is currently based in Hawaii, is gearing up to record her first album of new material since 2008 (more on that later), and took a few minutes to share her thoughts on a number of topics with ICTMN.
We’ve seen your Tweets (@BuffySteMarie) about the oil sands, or tar sands as they’re sometimes called — what’s your take on the situation?
Almost a year ago I went to Fort McMurray (Alberta) and I was just devastated with what’s going on there. Just devastated. I just told everybody I could: “You’ve got to take this seriously.” Even since I was there, other people have really stepped forward in their own ways, Neil Young in particular. He’s caught a lot of criticism because he didn’t involve me, Susan Aglukark or other Native people. Neil came to the induction ceremony in Nashville, at the Musicians Hall of Fame, and I told him I’d seen some of the criticism and not to listen to it at all! Because it’s so important, it has to be everybody doing whatever they can, whenever they can, and being effective at whatever level they can be. You reach people your way, I do it my way and Neil does it his way. But people have to see it.
It’s really worth a trip to Fort McMurray just to see it with your own eyes. If you really want to see something historic in your life, go to Fort McMurray and just bear witness to what they’re doing. It’s never going to return, and this is the future of the planet if the present people are allowed to stay in charge. We are allowing them to stay in charge. We are allowing it. That’s why we have wars. We have to be really vigilant and supportive of one another, because it has to stop. There’s no turning back.
Neil Young toured with the First Nation that’s experiencing high cancer rates from the tar sands. And yet he also caught criticism when people said, “Oh, he’s just an outsider, he lives in California — what right does he have to criticize this?”
(Laughs). Because it’s not only about Canada, that’s why! Good for Neil for stepping up. Everybody should be stepping up at whatever their most effective level is. It’s not just about Native people and it’s not just about Canada. Just the weather changes are indicative: people just gotta wake up.
Have the issues changed over time, or is it still the same root issues as in your songs “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or “Universal Soldier”?
The root issue is always the same. It’s about corporate greed in charge of all of our energy. That’s the root issue. But in the 1500s it was gold and silver in Central America, and then coal, oil, and now uranium. I have a song that’s going to be on the album I’m recording now called “The Uranium War.” It has a line:
Coal and oil and hey, now uranium
Keep the Indians under your thumb
Pray like hell when your bad times come
Get ’em up, rip ’em up, strip ’em up
Get ’em with a gun.
So the violence that occurs, and has been occurring against Indigenous People in the world because of resources has now become obvious to the non-indigenous people too. There are now more people understanding how devastating the misuse of resources not only can be, but just plain is.
Let’s talk about the Longest Walk. Richie Havens passed on last year, and you were a long supporter of the Longest Walk and affirming treaty rights. Could you offer some thoughts on him, his passing and his legacy?
He and I kind of emerged around the same time — the summer of 1963-4. We would see each other over the years. He came and visited me in Hawaii a few times. We were good friends. He was such an incredible interpreter of other people’s songs, and such a good guy. Pete Seeger too — he just did so much for the world through music, in ways both subtle and big. You know, heaven must be a great place, because there’s a lot of people going there!
Pete Seeger with Buffy Sainte-Marie. Source: twitter.com/buffystemarie
You were with Pete Seeger at Clearwater Fest last summer. The photos were just beautiful, you guys having a lovely hug.
He was just really, really special, huh?
Do you ever feel nostalgic for that era, when you all emerged almost at once? It must have been such a different energy because it was also a social movement as well as being about music.
It was, but I’ve been waiting for it to come back. And I think it has. For me, the Internet is like the Sixties. It used to be, in the Sixties, all kinds of music was available to you, but it was kept away. You had to go with this label and that genre. It really became a very narrow-minded corporate world. They’d sign 90 artists and shelve 90 others. It used to be so unfair. But now you can hear all kinds of music, and everybody can get played, publish a song, or share things on the Internet. It’s such a wonderful time that we’re living in. You shouldn’t discount it or think that the Sixties were better. The Sixties were about a true student movement. And now there’s another true populist movement, so let’s do what we can, while we can.
To learn more about Buffy Sainte-Marie, visit her official site BuffySainte-Marie.com.
K-Cups seem like the complicated Starbucks order of today: an expensive, caffeinated way to express your oh-so-unique taste and personality. Who needs to run out for a tall caramel macchiato when you can make a single serving of Wolfgang Puck’s Jamaica Me Crazy medium roast in the comfort of your kitchen?
Except all those little plastic cups add up to some massive trash. Ten and a half loops around the equator, in fact, according to Mother Jones. Kind of ridic for a company owned by a fair-trade, organic coffee brand, no?
Plus, the No. 7 plastic blend is BPA-free, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Even if all that plastic magically disappeared into the ether on disposal, its manufacture could be making workers sick, writes MoJo:
One concern with this plastic mix is the presence of polystyrene, containing the chemical styrene, which Hoover warns is especially worrisome for workers. A possible carcinogen, styrene can wreak havoc on the nervous systems of those handling it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
Keurig would not tell me what types of plastic go into its #7 blend, saying the information was proprietary, nor would it confirm or deny the presence of polystyrene in the mix.
If that weren’t bad enough, Keurig taxes you for being bad at math: K-Cups cost you more than twice what a bag of beans does — about $50 a pound. Damn, son! If you refuse to surrender your Keurig, reusable filters or biodegradable pods are the way to go.
Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell has announced that $3.2 million has been awarded to 21 tribal projects to assist in developing energy and mineral resources, including $655,000 to the Crow Tribe to advance a hydroelectric project that will provide low-cost clean power to tribal members and encourage business on Crow lands.
Secretary Jewell, who serves as Chair of the White House Council on Native American Affairs, announced the grants during a visit to the Crow Reservation in southeastern Montana. Jewell was joined by Senator Jon Tester, the new chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Larry Roberts.
Jewell is making a three-day visit to Montana, meeting with tribal and business leaders, ranchers, hunters and anglers and other stakeholder groups to discuss the economic value of public lands to local communities, the importance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in expanding access to hunting and fishing areas, and public-private partnerships that protect public lands, such as the Blackfoot Challenge for the southern part of the Crown of the Continent ecosystem.
The $655,000 grant to the Crow Tribe will allow completion of all technical, environmental, engineering and economic analyses required for an 8 to 12 megawatt hydroelectric project at the Yellowtail Afterbay Dam on the Crow Reservation. This will allow the Tribe to seek power purchase agreements and financing to build the facility, which will provide electricity to its members and invite industry to the reservation with the certainty of reliable, sustainable and clean low-cost power. The project is also expected to improve the Big Horn River’s downstream fishery by reducing excessive nitrogen and oxygen levels.
In 2009, Senator Tester introduced and then successfully helped pass the Crow Tribe Water Settlement Act that authorized the Crow to develop hydropower at the dam.
As Chair of the White House Council on Native American Affairs, Secretary Jewell leads a comprehensive Federal initiative to work more collaboratively and effectively with Tribes to advance their economic and social priorities. Informed by consultation with the Tribes and reflective of tribal priorities, the Interior Department’s FY2015 budget requests $2.6 billion for Indian Affairs, $33.6 million above the 2014 enacted level, to sustain the President’s commitment and honor Interior’s trust responsibilities to the 566 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes.
Recognizing this commitment to tribal self-governance and self-determination, the budget fully funds contract support costs that Tribes incur as managers of the programs serving Native Americans.
A full list of the 21 projects receiving grant awards for energy and mineral development is available here and includes six for mineral extraction, two for oil and gas production and 13 for renewable energy, including wind, hydropower, geothermal and biomass proposals.
Funding for construction of the Crow hydropower project was authorized in the Crow Water Rights Settlement that President Obama signed on Dec. 8, 2010. In March 2011 Crow tribal members voted to ratify the Settlement legislation and the Crow Tribe-Montana Water Rights Compact. The Settlement legislation provided the Tribe with the authority to develop hydropower at Yellowtail Afterbay Dam along with some funding to assist in the development along with other energy development on the Reservation. The Grant announced today is an additional and needed boost to the Tribe as it works to develop hydropower.
Together, the Settlement Act and the Compact quantified the Tribe’s water rights and authorized funding of $131.8 million for the rehabilitation and improvement of the Crow Irrigation Project and $246.4 million for the design and construction of a Municipal, Rural and Industrial (MR&I) water system to serve numerous reservation communities.
The Crow Reservation is the largest of seven Indian reservations in Montana, encompassing 2.3 million acres and home to 13,000 enrolled Crow tribal members.
Northwest tribes and their Canadian counterparts are meeting in Spokane this week to discuss engineering solutions for getting salmon over Grand Coulee Dam.
Returning chinook, sockeye and steelhead to the upper Columbia River is a long-standing dream for indigenous people on both sides of the border. When the 550-foot-tall dam began operation in 1942 without fish ladders, it cut off access to hundreds of miles of upstream habitat, delivering the final blow to a fishery already weakened by overharvest on the lower river.
“We all know that our biggest challenge is Grand Coulee, because it’s such a big dam,” said Paul Lumley, executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Portland.
But it’s a worthy challenge, Lumley told 120 people gathered for the three-day technical workshop at Northern Quest Casino in Airway Heights, which kicked off Tuesday.
“I certainly hope to see (the salmon return) in my lifetime,” he said. “It’s not just about tribal culture, it’s for all citizens of the Columbia Basin. We all care about the fish.”
Renegotiation of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty between the U.S. and Canada created the opening for discussing fish passage over Grand Coulee. Federal agencies, Northwest states and 16 Indian tribes favor amending the treaty to address ecosystem functions, such as salmon and climate change.
The treaty, which governs flood control and hydropower generation on the Columbia, is up for possible renegotiation beginning this fall.
The tribes and Canada’s First Nations are pushing for fish passage at Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams on the Columbia, and at three Canadian dams: Hugh Keenleyside, Brilliant and Waneta.
They favor pilot-scale reintroductions of fish and said identifying funding for the work should be discussed by the U.S. and Canada during treaty negotiations.
Innovative engineering for getting salmon over high dams is already occurring in smaller watersheds in the basin, said D.R. Michel, executive director for the Upper Columbia United Tribes. Tuesday’s session featured discussions of trapping and transporting fish around dams, as well as methods for getting them safely through dams. Speakers also discussed where good salmon habitat remains upstream of Grand Coulee.
With the climate projected to warm, returning salmon to historical spawning grounds in British Columbia becomes critical, said Bill Green, director of the Canadian Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries Commission.
Under climate change modeling, precipitation becomes more uncertain and stream temperatures are expected to warm, Green said. But British Columbia will continue to have glacier-fed streams that will provide cold water for spawning, he said.
The Upper Columbia River was once home to prolific salmon and steelhead runs, with some fish traveling 1,300 miles to spawn in the river’s headwaters. The annual harvest from the Upper Columbia once numbered between 980,000 and 1.6 million fish, said Sheri Sears, a policy analyst for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Salmon was a daily part of tribal members’ diets and integral to culture and religion.
“Without an opportunity to catch salmon, tradition skills and knowledge associated with the harvest, preparation, and use of the fish … is being lost,” the tribes and First Nations wrote in a recent policy paper.
The potential for restoring salmon over Grand Coulee also raises the possibility of salmon returning to the Spokane River, said Matt Wynne, a Spokane tribal council member.
The Spokanes once trapped salmon at Little Falls by building rock barriers partway across the river and spearing fish caught in weirs. They also fished at the Spokane River’s confluence with the Little Spokane and Latah Creek. However, three dams owned by Avista Utilities blocked fish passage on the lower Spokane River even before Grand Coulee was built.
The tribe is starting to analyze what it would take to restore salmon to the Spokane River system, Wynne said. The Little Spokane River in particular still has good habitat, he said.
Inez Bill discusses how to gather Nettle. Photo: Francesca Hillery
By Andrew Gobin, photos by Francesca Hillery
The nuisance in the back yard known for its annoying sting and pungent earthy smell, nettle is not the most desirable flora of the Pacific Northwest. For northwest tribes, however, nettle is a cultural and traditional staple. The Rediscovery Program at the Hibulb Cultural Center began their spring harvest of nettle sprouts March 12th, working to reintroduce the use of nettle into the community and continuing the revitalization of our culture.
Inez Bill, who has spent the last ten years learning about how to use nettle, harvested nettle sprouts on the bluff above Arcadia on the Tulalip Reservation. Derek Houle, who has been involved with the culture program for most of his life, and Lauw-Ya Spencer, who became involved in 2012 through the summer youth program, joined Bill as they gathered the sprouts to use in the rediscovery program. They then process the nettle sprouts for use in foods and preserve some nettle for continued use throughout the year.
“Nettle was a staple for our people for hundreds of years,” explained Bill, “It has tremendous health benefits. For food you have to harvest the sprouts in the spring, or in the summer you can harvest the tops of the nettle, the stock gets too hard. Here at the museum we have expanded the uses. We make nettle tea and different flavored lemonades with nettle tea. We also have created Hibulb Bread, which is like buckskin bread, only more healthy and nutritional.”
Bill and her husband, the late Hank Gobin, learned to harvest and prepare nettle and other traditional flora from Valerie Segrest, Elise Krohn, and the late Bruce Miller, whose dedicated themselves to cultural revitalization and educating about traditional flora. Bringing that knowledge to the rediscovery program, Bill continues their work in revitalizing traditional plant use. As a girl, Bill’s elders instilled in her the respect and reverence for these traditional plants as foods and as medicines and she hands down those teachings throughout the rediscovery program. She also gets creative, incorporating nettle into many recipes.
“The Hibulb bread is diabetic friendly. It is made with ground almond meal instead of flour, and without salt or sugar. Ground nettle is added, but we had to play around with how much was the right amount.” said Bill.
A true superfood, nettle is packed with nutrients. It can be ground up and added to almost any dish for a healthy boost. The cultural center makes a seasoning, ground nettle for recipe ingredients, blanched and frozen nettle for later in the year, nettle stock, nesto (nettle pesto), and so much more. As a cultural staple, beyond food, nettle was traditionally made into twine and nets, it is one of the stronger natural twines.
To learn more about the rediscovery program, or to participate in activities, contact Inez Bill at the Hibulb Cultural Center at (360) 716-2638.
Sidebar:
Nutrients of nettle mg/100g (About 1 Cup)
Calcium 2900
Magnesium 860
Iron 41.8
Potassium 1750
Vitamin A 18,700 AU
Vitamin C 83
Thiamine .54
Riboflavin .43
Niacin 5.2
Chromium 3.9
Cobalt 13.2
Phosphorus 447
Zinc 4.7
Manganese 860
Selenium 2.2
Sodium 4.9
Protein 16.5%
Andrew Gobin is a reporter with the See-Yaht-Sub, a publication of the Tulalip Tribes Communications Department. Email: agobin@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov Phone: (360) 716.4188
Forget about reading, writing and ’rithmetic. Reality, risk and response are the new three Rs, scientists say, and the situation is dire.
The incremental changes taking place in the global climate will in the not-too-distant future add up to irreversible damage, says a new report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Compiling all that is known to date about the changes taking place in Earth’s air, water and land, the U.S.’s top scientists are trying to get humanity to listen up.
“This new effort is intended to state very clearly the exceptionally strong evidence that Earth’s climate is changing, and that future climate change can seriously impact natural and societal systems,” said James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University and one of three chairs of a panel that issued the 20-page report, What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change. “Even among members of the broader public who already know about the evidence for climate change and what is causing it, some do not know the degree to which many climate scientists are concerned about the risks of possibly rapid and abrupt climate change.”
McCarthy is one of 13 panelists offering expertise on the matter via lectures, testimonials on a new website accompanying the report, and outreach to fellow professionals, the AAAS said in its media release.
“We’re the largest general scientific society in the world, and therefore we believe we have an obligation to inform the public and policymakers about what science is showing about any issue in modern life, and climate is a particularly pressing one,” said AAAS CEO Alan Leshner in the group’s statement. “As the voice of the scientific community, we need to share what we know and bring policymakers to the table to discuss how to deal with the issue.”
The first new R is Reality, the AAAS said.
“Climate scientists agree: Climate change is happening here and now,” the AAAS said, emphasizing that 97 percent of climate experts agree.
“The second [R] is Risk—that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts,” the association said. “We are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts.”
That leads to the third R.
“The third R is Response—that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be,” the AAAS said. “The sooner we act, the lower the risk and cost.”
Inaction, however, could exacerbate extreme weather conditions and cause, for example, crop failure and thus famine. Although many factors—ranging from variations in the Earth’s crust, to changes in orbit and tilt toward the sun—can cause climate changes, this time human activity is the main driver, the AAAS report said.
“Decades of human-generated greenhouse gases are now the major force driving the direction of climate change, currently overwhelming the effects of these other factors,” the AAAS report said. “Many studies show that the combined effects of natural drivers of climate cannot explain the temperature increase observed over the past half century.”
The full AAAS report is available for download, along with a huge volume of information, at the What We Know website.
“Climate change is already happening. More heat waves, greater sea level rise, and other changes with consequences for human health, natural ecosystems, and agriculture are already occurring in the United States and worldwide,” said the AAAS report, released on March 18. “These problems are very likely to become worse over the next 10-20 years and beyond.”
