With the Tulalip Tribes doing the last bits of finishing work, the city of Marysville is now looking at its next big project: building 1.8 miles of new trail around the new estuary.
The city is planning a 12-foot wide paved trail that would lead from Ebey Waterfront Park down to the estuary. Another segment will run on the east side of the breached levee up to Harborview Park in the Sunnyside neighborhood.
If all goes according to plan, the two segments of trail would be complete by the end of 2016.
It’s a big deal for the city, which has relatively little in the way of publicly available waterfront.
“We’ve only had about 900 feet of access to our shoreline and this will change that significantly,” said Jim Ballew, Marysville’s director of Parks and Recreation.
The project is estimated to cost between $1 million and $1.2 million, $500,000 of which was in the most recent budget from the Legislature.
That also meant that the city’s trail project was delayed due to the extended budget debates in Olympia this year. The original plan was to have the western segment of the trail done by the end of the year.
“We had to wait for the Legislature to approve the funding, and that was so delayed this year that we don’t even have a contract yet,” Ballew said.
“We’ve got it within our capital budget; it’s ready to go,” Ballew said.
The new plan calls for finishing the design work by the end of the year and expanding the project to include not just the trail, but other waterfront improvements and interpretive signs along the route.
Further out, the plans will include the eventual construction of a mile-long loop around the estuary connecting the trail’s west and east legs.
Funding so far only exists for the initial segments, meaning there will be a gap in the trail until some time in the future.
The Qwuloolt Estuary restoration project is intended to create better habitat in the Snohomish River watershed for migratory salmon, especially juveniles that need a place to mature for up to a year or two while they gradually get used to a marine environment.
The Tulalip Tribes have spent $20 million over 20 years on the estuary, with the final levee breach taking place Aug. 28.
All that’s left now is to seal off the former tide gates and dig a final stormwater pond, said Josh Meidav, a restoration ecologist with the Tulalip Tribes.
So far, Meidav said, the results of the levee breach have met their expectations.
“The channel itself at low tide or incoming tide is actually capturing a good amount of the Ebey Slough inflow,” he said.
Some marine fish have been seen in the upper reaches of the estuary and the reed canary grass is starting to die off, Meidav said.
The city plans to reach out to the scientific community, the tribes and even the birdwatching community to provide input into the interpretive elements of the trail.
“We’ll be spending a lot of time with those specialists,” Ballew said.
A lack of water has left apple trees in Benton County dry and brittle as severe drought conditions persist across 68 percent of Washington State. Courtesy of Washington Department of Ecology
Don’t be fooled by the recent rain and cooler temperatures. Most of Oregon and Washington are still experiencing severe or extreme drought.
With many of the region’s reservoirs and streams still far below normal and a warm winter on tap, experts are predicting this year’s drought will likely continue into next year.
On a conference call Thursday, Washington Department of Ecology Director Maia Bellon said her agency is preparing for the worst: another year of drought that will take hold earlier and take an even bigger toll on the state.
“This historic drought is not over, and we’re already planning for next year,” Bellon said. “We face winter with a huge water deficit. Rains are desperately needed to recharge these reservoirs and even that won’t be enough to get us through next summer. We need winter snowpack – what we call our frozen reservoir – and there’s growing concern we may not get it.”
Projections for this year’s winter temperature and precipitation relative to normal conditions from 1981-2010.
Courtesy of Washington Department of Ecology
Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond said there’s a 10- to 15-percent chance this winter will be just as warm and devoid of snow as last winter.
“There’s been recently some rain and cooler temperatures, but are we out of the woods?” he said. “The answer, I’m afraid, is no. El Nino is rearing its ugly head in the tropical Pacific. It’s of the magnitude and type that is strongly associated with warmer than normal winters around here, and warmer ocean temperatures off our coat, the blob, will be a contributing factor. All in all, the odds are strongly tilted towards another toasty winter.”
Oregon’s outlook is much the same, according to Kathie Dello, associate director of the Oregon Climate Research Institute.
“Nothing is pointing to us having a great winter,” she said. “The warmer-than-normal temperature prediction is the most disconcerting.”
With so many low reservoirs and rivers, Dello said, even slightly below-average precipitation this winter would leave the region with a water deficit going into next year.
Indigenous struggles against resource extraction are gathering strength in the Pacific Northwest
Under the breaking waves of Lummi Bay in northwest Washington, salmon, clams, geoducks and oysters are washed in rhythmic cascades from the Pacific Ocean. Just north of here is Cherry Point, home for three intimately related threatened and endangered species: herring, Chinook salmon, and orcas. It is also the home of the Lummi Nation, who call themselves the Lhaq’temish (LOCK-tuh-mish), or the People of the Sea. The Lummi have gone to incredible lengths to protect the health of this marine life, and to uphold the fishing traditions that make their livelihood inseparable from the life of the sea — continuing a bond that has connected them to the salmon for more than 175 generations.
Photo by Nicholas Quinlan/Photographers for Social ChangeThe Lummi Nation is currently fighting a proposal to build the largest coal export terminal on the continent at Cherry Point.
The Lummi Nation is currently fighting the largest proposed coal export terminal on the continent (read “Feeding the Tiger,” EIJ Winter 2013). If completed, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would move up to 54 million tons of coal from Cherry Point to Asian markets every year. The transport company BNSF Railway plans to enable the terminal by adding adjacent rail infrastructure, installing a second track along the six-mile Custer Spur to make room for coal trains.
The project is one of many coal export facilities proposed across the US by the coal extraction and transportation industry. In the face of falling domestic demand for the highly polluting fossil fuel, the industry is pinning its survival on exporting coal to power hungry Asia, especially China.
The Gateway proposal has sparked massive opposition from the Lummi, who say it will interfere with their fishing fleet, harm marine life, and trample on an ancient village site that has been occupied by the Lummi for 3,500 years. The village, Xwe’chieXen (pronounced Coo-chee-ah-chin) is the resting place of Lummi ancestors, and contains numerous sacred sites that the Lummi assert a sacred obligation to protect. The Lummi’s connection to their first foods, and to the village site that holds their ancestors’ remains, goes the very heart of who they are as a people, and the Nation has pledged to protect both “by any means necessary”.
The Lummi are no strangers to stopping harmful development. In the mid-1990s they managed to stop a fish farm in the bay; in 1967 they fought back a magnesium-oxide plant on Lummi Bay that would have turned the bay lifeless with industrial waste.
The new threat to the Lummi Nation is being proposed by the global shipping giant SSA Marine. The coal would be supplied by Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak Energy — companies that mine in Montana and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It was also backed by Goldman Sachs until January 2014, when the company pulled its substantial investment from the project.
Jay Julius, a fisherman and Lummi Nation council member had attended the firm’s annual shareholders meeting back in 2013 and urged it to “take a look at the risk” of their investment.
Another coal export proposal of similar scale has been proposed in Longview, Washington about 235 miles south from Cherry Point. This has been opposed by the Cowlitz Tribe, who object to the impacts that coal would bring to the air and water quality along the Columbia River. This terminal would also create serious harm to another Native tribe at the point of extraction, 1,200 miles away in the Powder River Basin.
The Millennium Bulk Terminal in Longview is a joint proposal from the Australia-based Ambre Energy and Arch Coal, the US’ second largest coal producer after Peabody.
The terminal, which would export up to 48.5 million tons of coal annually, would be supported by Arch Coal’s proposed Otter Creek Mine in southeastern Montana (bordering Wyoming). If built, the mine could produce an estimated 1.3 billion tons of coal, and would span 7,639 acres along the eastern border of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. This would be the largest mine ever in the United States.
Photo by Mike Danneman Coal trains operated by BNSF would haul coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana to a series of proposed export terminals along the Pacific Northwest coast.
To connect the proposed mine to West Coast ports, Arch Coal and BNSF Railway want to build a new 42-mile railroad — called the Tongue River Railroad — through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Members of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and their allies have pledged fierce resistance if regulators approve the mine and the railroad, which they say, would have significant impacts on public health and the environment. According to BNSF, anywhere from 500 pounds to 1 ton of coal can escape from a single loaded rail car – on trains pulling 125 cars.
At a June hearing on the railroad organized by the US Surface Transportation Board, federal regulators heard nothing but fierce opposition to the proposed mine and its enabling railroad. A significant proportion of the Lame Deer community from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation turned out to the hearing. Their opposition to the project was echoed by local ranchers.
One rancher told the officials that they needed to understand the importance of history when they propose such unprecedented projects. “Northern Cheyenne history is very sad – it’s tragic – and they have fought with blood to be where they are tonight.”
“My ancestors have only been buried here for about four or five generations,” he said, but “we know of lithic scatters, we know of buffalo jumps, we know of stone circles, camp sites, vision quest sites… and it is my obligation as a land owner, even though I am not a member of this Nation, that we protect what is there.”
One tribal member, Sonny Braided Hair, was more explicit in his history lesson. “Let us heal,” he said, “or we’ll show you the true meaning of staking ourselves to this land.” He was referring to the Cheyenne warrior society known as the Dog Soldiers, who became legendary in the mid-1800s for holding their ground in battle by staking themselves to the earth with a rope tied at the waist.
Such concerns about sacred sites are too often validated. In July of 2011, before applying for any permits, SSA Marine began construction at a designated archeological site in the ancient Lummi village at Cherry Point, where the Lummi have warned of numerous sacred sites, and where 3,000 year-old human remains have been found.
Pacific International Terminals had earlier promised the Army Corps of Engineers that this site would not be disturbed, and that the Lummi Nation would be consulted before any construction began nearby. They also acknowledged their legal obligation to have an archaeologist on staff when working within 200 feet of the site, along with a pre-made “inadvertent discovery” plan if any protected items were disturbed. Despite all of these assurances, the company illegally sent in survey crews to make way for their terminal, where they drilled about 70 boreholes, built 4 miles of roads, cleared 9 acres of forest, and drained about 3 acres of wetlands.
In August, Whatcom County, Washington, (where Cherry Point is located) issued a Notice of Violation to Pacific International Terminals, and the Department of Natural Resources documented numerous violations of the state Forest Practices Act. The total fines and penalties, however, added up to only about $5,000.
That’s a small price to pay for early geotechnical information, says Philip S. Lanterman, a leading expert on construction management for such projects. According to Lanterman, the information provided by those illegal boreholes was probably a huge economic benefit to the planned project. Needless to say, the meager fines don’t come close to discouraging the behavior. For opponents this incident is just a taste of things to come, and one resounding reason to never trust King Coal.
In the face of such blatant violations of their treaty rights, several Native tribes in North America — from the Powder River Basin, through the Columbia River to the Salish Sea —have banded together and declared that it is their sacred duty to protect their ancestral territories, sacred sites, and natural resources.
In May 2013, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) unanimously adopted a resolutionopposing fossil fuel extraction and export projects in the Pacific Northwest. In the resolution, the 57 ATNI Tribes of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, southeast Alaska, Northern California, Nevada and Western Montana voiced, “unified opposition” to investors and transporters and exporters of fossil fuel energy, “who are proposing projects in the ancestral territories of ATNI Tribes.” The resolution specifically calls for protection of the Lummi Nation’s treaty-protected fishing rights, and the sacred places that would be affected by the Cherry Point project.
Indigenous resistance to these projects has been bolstered by allies in the environmental movement who have been fighting the export of US coal to foreign markets in the East. Of 15 recent proposals to build major new coal export facilities across the US, all but four (including Gateway and Millennium) have been defeated or canceled within the past two years.
In January this year, the Lummi Nation asked the Army Corps to immediately abandon the environmental review for Gateway Pacific and the Custer Spur rail expansion, stating that the project violates their reserved and treaty-protected fishing rights. If the environmental review is abandoned, the Army Corps would have effectively cancelled the project. In response to this letter the Army Corps gave SSA Marine until May 10 to respond, but later extended the deadline by another 90 days. Environmental reviews of the terminal and BNSF’s Custer Spur rail expansion are due in mid-2016, but it appears likely that the Army Corps will have rejected the Gateway Pacific terminal by then, rendering any rail expansion redundant.
Photo courtesy of Sierra ClubIn 2013, James launched a totem pole journey to build solidarity for Indigenous-led struggles against fossil fuels, including the struggle to protect Xwe’chieXen. Pictured here, ranchers, environmentalists, and members of the Northern Cheyenne totem pole blessing ceremony in Billings, Montana.
In order to keep the pressure on, leaders from nine Native American tribes gathered in Seattle on May 14 to urge the Army Corps to deny permits for SSA Marine. “The Lummi Nation is proud to stand with other tribes who are drawing a line in the sand to say no to development that interferes with our treaty rights and desecrates sacred sites,” said Tim Ballew II, Chair of the Lummi Indian Business Council. “The Corps has a responsibility to deny the permit request and uphold our treaty.”
The Lummi have clearly had important successes in stopping harmful development in the past. But with so much on the line for coal companies, can they really use treaty rights to stop a coal terminal of this size? “Without question,” says Gabe S. Galanda, a practicing attorney specializing in tribal law in Washington State. “Indian Treaties are the supreme law of the land under the United States Constitution, and Lummi’s Treaty-guaranteed rights to fish are paramount at Cherry Point.” If the Army Corps decides to deny their permit, Galanda says that coal developers would find it “very difficult if not impossible” to successfully challenge them. By contrast, he says, “the Lummi Nation would have very strong grounds to attack and invalidate” any approval that the Army Corps might grant to the coal exporters.
In a similar case last year, Oregon’s Department of State Lands denied a key building permit for Ambre Energy’s coal export terminal project in Boardman, Oregon. The terminal was planned directly on top of a traditional fishing site of the Yakama Nation. In both Boardman and Cherry Point, the coal companies have implied that the protected Indigenous sites that would be harmed by their projects either do not exist, or that the tribes using them are too incompetent to know their true location.
Just two years after filing paperwork with Whatcom County admitting that they had “disturbed items of Native American archeological significance”, Bob Watters of SSA marine wrote “Claims that our project will disturb sacred burial sites are absolutely incorrect and fabricated by project opponents.”
One of the Cherry Point Terminal’s most fierce opponents is the diplomat, land defender and master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James. James is the head of the Lummi House of Tears Carvers, and has created a tradition out of carving and delivering totem poles to places that are in need of hope and healing.
In 2013, James launched a totem pole journey to build solidarity for Indigenous-led struggles against fossil fuels, including the struggle to protect Xwe’chieXen. James traveled 1,200 miles with his totem pole in 2013 — from the Powder River Basin to the Tsleil Waututh Nation across the Canadian border. In 2014, he launched another 6,000-mile totem pole journey in honor of revered tribal leader Billy Frank Jr, a Nisqually tribal member and hero of the fishing rights struggle. Frank passed away on May 5, 2014 — the same day he published his final piece condemning coal and oil trains.
These totem pole journeys have gained international attention as pilgrimages of hope, healing, decolonization, and Native resistance to the extractive industries.
At the end of August, James concluded his third regional totem pole journey against fossil fuels, carrying the banner of resistance to many tribes who are standing up as fossil fuel projects get knocked down. He held blessing ceremonies in Boardman and Portland where coal and propane projects were recently shot down, passed through the Lummi Nation and Longview where coal has yet to be defeated, and ended in the Northern Cheyenne Nation at Lame Deer, where the community has rallied in opposition to a mine whose devastation would reverberate from Montana, down the Columbia River, and up to Cherry Point.
“There are many of us who are joining, from the Lakota all the way to the West Coast, to the Lummi, south to the Apache, up to the Canadian tribes,” said Northern Cheyenne organizer Vanessa Braided Hair at a recent Tongue River Railroad hearing. “We’re gonna fight, and we’re not gonna stop.”
Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight. Illustration by Jeffrey Veregge
Mega-quakes have periodically rocked North America’s Pacific Northwest. Indigenous people told terrifying stories about the devastation but refused to leave.
In the year 1700, on January 26, at 9:00 at night, in what is now northern California, Earthquake was running up and down the coast. His feet were heavy and when he ran he shook the ground so much it sank down and the ocean poured in. “The earth would quake and quake again and quake again,” said the Yurok people. “And the water was flowing all over.” The people went to the top of a hill, wearing headbands of woodpecker feathers, so they could dance a jumping dance that would keep the earthquake away and return them to their normal lives. But then they looked down and saw the water covering their village and the whole coast; they knew they could never make the world right again.
That same night, farther up the coast in what is now Washington, Thunderbird and Whale had a terrible fight, making the mountains shake and uprooting the trees, said the Quileute and the Hoh people; they said the ocean rose up and covered the whole land. Farther north still, on Vancouver Island, dwarfs who lived in a mountain invited a person to dance around their drum; the person accidentally kicked the drum and got earthquake-foot, said the Nuu-chah-nulth people, and after that every step he took caused an earthquake. The land shook and the ocean flooded in, said the Huu-ay-aht people who are part of the Nuu-chah-nulth, and people didn’t even have time to wake up and get into their canoes, and “everything then drifted away, everything was lost and gone.”
Here’s what geologists say: the earthquake that almost certainly occurred on the night of January 26, 1700, ruptured North America’s Pacific Northwest coast for hundreds of kilometers, from northern California, through Oregon and Washington, to southern Vancouver Island. Along this coast, the Juan de Fuca plate was pushing under the larger North American plate, had gotten stuck—locked—but kept pushing until it released, abruptly and violently. The earthquake that resulted was probably a magnitude 9, about as big as earthquakes get. The coast dropped by as much as two meters, and a tsunami brought floods more than 300 meters inland.
Geologists now know that the Pacific Northwest has been having these earthquakes and tsunamis irregularly every 500 years or so; their oldest record in sediments goes back at least 10,000 years. The evidence is massive: subsided marshes, drowned forests, sediment layers showing enormous landslides that flowed out on the ocean floor, seismic profiles of the Juan de Fuca plate, and satellite measurements of a coast deforming from the stress of a plate that’s once again locked. In the next 50 years, the chance of another magnitude 9 earthquake there is 1 in 10.
On Vancouver Island, the Nuu-chah-nulth people told tales of mountain dwarves inviting a person to dance around their drum. When the person accidentally kicked the drum—depicted in the illustration above by Nuu-chah-nulth artist Tim Paul—he got earthquake foot and his steps set off vast tremors. Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
In the cities of the Pacific Northwest, the impact will be terrible. Many buildings were built before architects knew the area had earthquakes; later buildings were built with short, sharp California earthquakes in mind, not the Northwest’s longer, larger ones. “The ground’s going to shake for three minutes,” says Thomas Heaton, geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the first to propose the area’s earthquake potential. “And [in simulations] it’s easy to come up with ground motion that would collapse tall buildings.” Then comes the tsunami, and “with magnitude 9 earthquakes,” says Heaton, “you always get tsunamis.” Governments of course know this: seismic networks and a tsunami warning system are in place; governments and institutions in the Pacific Northwest have emergency plans, are educating the public in how to respond, and have published evacuation maps; buildings and bridges that fail to meet the modern earthquake building codes are being retrofitted.
But all this—the governments’ plans for the next earthquake and geologists’ understanding of the ancient ones—happened only in the last few decades. For the same 10,000-plus years that the Pacific Northwest has been having the earthquakes, indigenous groups have been living there. They have known forever that what the ground did was sudden and violent, that it came accompanied with catastrophic floods, and that it made people die. The questions for us, living in the present, are obvious. What was it like? And what was the impact of millennia of repeated catastrophes on the indigenous groups of the region? The answers seem obvious too, but they aren’t; this turns out to be a story about stories—how they merge into histories, how fragile they are, and how urgent.
What the indigenous people knew all along, geologists have known only since 1984. Thomas Heaton was still in college in 1970 when geologists, who knew that the world’s largest earthquakes occurred where one tectonic plate descended under another one, first recognized that one of these subduction zones ran between the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. But the so-called Cascadia Subduction Zone had no record of ever producing large earthquakes. So, says Heaton, “they thought it was aseismic, just creeping.”
Then in the early 1980s, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was considering whether to locate nuclear power plants in Washington and Oregon, and, just to be sure, asked the US Geological Survey (USGS) whether the Cascadia Subduction Zone was safe from earthquakes. Heaton, then at the USGS, knew about subduction zones because he’d consulted for Exxon on oil platforms in earthquake-prone Alaska. He compared the Cascadia zone with known earthquake areas and told the NRC, “Well, maybe it is aseismic, but another interpretation is, it looks like Chile—which is also aseismic, except for the big ones.” Perhaps, Heaton suggested, the Cascadia zone had escaped earthquakes only because it was currently locked.
Heaton published his surmise in 1984, and within a few years, Brian Atwater, also at the USGS, and other geologists found evidence of moving ground and great floods. But building geological evidence into a credible theory can take decades, and in the meantime, a colleague of Atwater’s and Heaton’s named Parke Snavely had been reading stories from the Makah people in Washington that described what sounded like floods. One Makah story in particular resembled the 1700 tsunami. “A long time ago but not at a very remote period,” the story began, the ocean receded quickly, then rose again until it submerged Cape Flattery; canoes were stranded in trees and many people died.
Snavely told Heaton about the stories, and the two of them did something un-geoscientific: they decided to take the Makah story not as myth, but as history. That is, they assumed the Makah were describing a geologically-recent tsunami, compared the Makah narrative with their understanding of Cape Flattery’s geology, found the similarity between story and geology “noteworthy,” and published their findings in the scientific literature. After that, other scientists also went looking in the stories for history. A team of anthropologists, geologists, and indigenous scholars led by geologist Ruth Ludwin of the University of Washington took 40 stories collected from native groups along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They compared the narratives to what was known of the 1700 earthquake and tsunami, and found in effect, that the whole coast had been telling stories about it.
Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson—archaeologist and geographer, respectively, from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia—found other stories, most of them undateable, that were probably about other, even earlier earthquakes. The two scientists systematically plotted these coastal stories on a map of the archaeological and geological evidence of all Cascadian earthquakes and tsunamis. Along the coast—from the Yurok and Tolowa in northern California, the Tillamook in Oregon, the Quileute in Washington, to the Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island—were stories of Earthquake, Thunderbird, and Whale, or the mountain dwarfs and their earthquake drum. The Cowichan people on Vancouver Island, the Squamish in southern British Columbia, and the Makah in Washington each had stories about the earth shaking so violently that no one could stand, or the houses falling apart, or rockslides coming out of the mountains and burying villages. The Nuu-chah-nulth, like the Makah, told stories of the ocean receding suddenly, then flooding back powerfully and killing many, many people.
From the Tolowa people in northern California: one autumn, the earth shook and the water began rising. People began running and when the water reached them, they turned into snakes. But a girl and a boy from the village, both adolescents, outran the water by running to the top of a mountain where they built a fire to keep themselves warm. After 10 days, they went back down and the houses they lived in were gone, all that was left was sand, and all the people and animals were lying on the ground dead. The boy found food for the girl and then set out to look for people and a place to live. But the only people he found were dead ones. The boy came back and said he could find no one else for either of them to marry, so they’d better marry each other. They built a house and after a time, had babies. And many years and many generations later, there were many people who were “scattered everywhere and in every place there was a man living with his wife.”
Many scientific papers say that the indigenous stories are reasonable records, covering an unknowable amount of time, of earthquakes and tsunamis along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They also add that so much destruction repeated for so long must have had a terrific impact on the indigenous groups’ worlds—that given their history, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest would have taken catastrophe to heart. You might expect that they’d arranged their culture and lives around disaster. And further, you might hope that the impact on them would have some message, some advice, for us in the 21st century, waiting for our own disaster. But here’s where this storyline goes cold. Any such impact ought to show up in archaeological and anthropological evidence and it just doesn’t.
The people must have lost their houses and villages and livelihoods, they must have been ruined; but afterward they went back to living in the ruined places. McMillan went looking in the archaeological record for evidence of habitation and abandonment over the past 3,000 years in 30 excavated villages along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts. “The seismic events were catastrophic but short term,” McMillan says. “The evidence is all that the sites were reoccupied afterward.”
Illustration by Mark Garrison
Nor did the people ultimately change the ways they lived. Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, looked for evidence that after the 1700 earthquake the Tillamook people of Oregon changed what they hunted, what they ate, how their houses were built, and where they lived. “In the short term, the earthquake must have been horribly traumatic,” Losey says. But in the long term, “I don’t think it made a difference.”
Anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that not only was it normal to return to the life you already know how to live, but, as Losey says, it was also reasonable. The catastrophes came generations apart. The food that was gathered and hunted apparently rebounded quickly. And the architecture designed for seasonal mobility was generally single-story, made of flexible wood tied with cord, and might as well have been built to modern earthquake codes. “The First Nations did an entirely human thing,” Losey says. “They went right back and settled in harm’s way.” The Pacific Northwest turns out to be, in the long run, a place conducive to resilience.
So the clearest evidence of the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis on the coast’s indigenous people has to be in the stories. Maybe the stories explain how to be resilient, how to outsmart disaster. Maybe they warn the children to warn their own children. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that killed 200,000 people in the Indonesian province of Aceh, killed only seven of the 78,000 people living on the island of Simeulue because the Simeulueans had been telling stories for generations of what to do during tsunamis. That may well have been the case in the Pacific Northwest, but the fact is, nobody knows for sure.
The reason is, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest didn’t write down their earthquake stories; the stories were told only face to face. And apparently they’re not told much, if at all, any more.
The only stories that we know for certain still exist are the ones collected and written down by ethnographers—the Yurok stories by A. L Kroeber, for instance, or the Makah stories by Judge James Swan—a century and more ago. Deborah Carver, an independent scholar, followed up the collected Yurok stories by tracking down the descendants of one storyteller and asking if they had heard the stories. “Nobody in the present had,” she says, except for one guy and his grandmother.
David Lewis, an anthropologist, independent scholar, and a member of the Grand Ronde tribe, never heard the old stories growing up, “only in my adult life,” he says, “since I’ve been working for the tribe.” And when someone did tell the stories, it was only “because I asked.” So the existing stories have the same caveats that archeological artifacts do: they’re incomplete, depend on what happened to be collected, and may not accurately represent the folklore at all.
The stories are incomplete in another, more fundamental, way: stories not written but told depend on having a culture that keeps telling them. In the late 1700s, Europeans began turning up regularly in the Pacific Northwest, bringing with them waves of epidemics, most notably smallpox. Since no one knew how many indigenous people lived there then, no one knows for sure how many died, but the estimates are shocking: they range from 30 to 95 percent.
Later Europeans continued what disease began. They wanted the coastal land, the fur of its animals, and the gold underneath it, and thus began the long indigenous history of resettlement onto reservations, re-education in government- and church-run boarding schools, and outright slaughter in warfare. Whatever the motives or intents of European explorers, government agents, fur traders, gold miners, and educators, their result was cultural scorched earth. Jason Younker is an anthropologist at the University of Oregon and a member of the Coquille tribe: growing up, he explains, “my father said to forget what I knew about being Coquille because it will do you no good.”
Kill the culture and the stories die. “If you think about the history of First Nations in the last couple hundred years,” says Losey, “huge amounts of the population were lost even before ethnographers could get to them. We have no idea how many stories existed—ethnographers published a few thousand—but certainly [there were] far more than were written down.” Ruth Ludwin, the geologist at the University of Washington who collected earthquake and tsunami stories, wrote that 95 percent of the stories were lost.
But even in the few stories that are left, earthquakes and tsunamis are still so vivid that the complete range of stories must have been full of them. “There was a great storm and hail and flashes of lightning in the darkened, blackened sky, and a great and crashing ‘thunder-noise’ everywhere,” said the Hoh people of Washington. “There were also a shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters.”
Younker himself had heard at least one of the stories. He was about to leave home to begin a decade of graduate work in anthropology when his uncle took him to Sundown Mountain along the Oregon coast, and up to a high plateau, where they watched the fog coming off the ocean and moving up through a river valley. “You see, Jason, how the fog is coming in?” the uncle said, and told him a story. Not all that long ago, a great tide came in the same way, the water rushed up the valleys, drowned the villages, and covered the trees. Some people climbed into their canoes, along with long ropes they’d prepared, tied themselves to the tops of the trees, and rode out the flood. The people who hadn’t prepared long ropes were swept away and were never seen again. Younker thinks his uncle told him that story partly so that Younker could tell even younger people how to prepare, and partly to say, “make sure you keep your ropes long and your connections to home are well-maintained so you can pull yourself back to home. Because you really can’t separate the past from the present.”
Robert Dennis, Chief Councillor of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation in British Columbia, had also heard stories. When he was 11 or 12 years old, he used to visit his great-grandfather, who’d been chief of the Huu-ay-aht for decades. “He’d say, ‘I’m going to tell you things that might be important in your life, and this could happen again.’” One of his stories was about his great-grandfather who lived at Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One night the land shook, and a big wave smashed into the beach, and the people who lived on the bay were all killed. But the people who lived on high ground, the water couldn’t reach them, and they came out of the tsunami alive. Dennis thought his great-grandfather told him this story so Dennis could someday tell the story himself and because he also would be a leader responsible for his people. So years later when the Huu-ay-aht were planning a community center, they first consulted their elders, then they built the center not down in the flats but up on high ground. Now they have to stock it with food and emergency gear and keep it stocked. “I’m not going to rest,” says Dennis. “I’m going to keep pushing it. So we’re ready.”
The ground moves and doesn’t stop moving, and almost no one survives the tsunami. So get off the beach. Go up into the hills. Build on high ground. Tie your boats with long ropes. Make sure your children know, as Robert Dennis’s great-grandfather said, that this is “what this land does at times.” And don’t bother trying to separate the present from the past.
Smaller than average coho and pink salmon are returning to local rivers, and the warm water blob off the coast could be to blame.
The runs are smaller in both number and weight. The average coho size in the recent catch of a Squaxin Island tribal fisherman was just 3.4 pounds, less than half of the 8-pound average weight of a coho.
Lorraine Loomis, NWIFC chair and Swinomish fisheries manager, observed the trend in smaller pink salmon in a recent fishery.
“Where they’re usually four and a half, five pounds, they’re about three, three and a half pounds now,” she said. “So they’re quite small.”
Dower and other researchers have been concerned what might be happening to the important food source as the water off the B.C. coast has warmed over the past year and a half.
“We were quite keen to get out here and see what was going on,” he said.
“One way to think about plankton is you’ve got your crunchies and you’ve got your squishies.”
The species that usually dominate in colder water tend to be “crunchies,” he said: krill and other shrimp-like animals that are high in nutritious fatty acids and oils.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of [squishies], gelatinous types of zooplankton, and they’re not nearly as nutritious as the normal species of plankton that we find off the coast here.”
By Shannen Kuest, Skagit Valley Herald, goskagit.com
A federal judge ruled Friday that a lawsuit filed by the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community against BNSF Railway over oil train shipments may continue in federal court.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik denied a motion by BNSF to refer key questions to the Surface Transportation Board, a three-member board in Washington, D.C., that oversees railroad operations, according to a news release.
The Swinomish tribe sued BNSF in April for violating the terms of an easement agreement allowing trains to cross its reservation in Skagit County.
The lawsuit concerns train tracks laid along the northern edge of the reservation in the 1800s without consent from the tribe or federal government. The tracks serve two Anacortes oil refineries, and in 1976 the tribe filed a lawsuit for nearly a century of trespass.
In 1991, the tribe and BNSF signed an agreement settling that lawsuit and granting BNSF an easement with several conditions: BNSF would regularly update the tribe on the type of cargo, and only one train of no more than 25 railcars would cross the reservation in each direction daily. In exchange, the tribe agreed not to “arbitrarily withhold permission” from future BNSF requests to increase the number of trains or cars.
The tribe learned from media reports in late 2012 that “unit trains” of 100 railcars or more were beginning to cross the reservation. Today, BNSF is reportedly running six 100-car unit trains per week across the reservation, more than four times as many railcars daily as permitted by the easement, according to the release.
Each of these trains carry between 2.8 million and 3.4 million gallons of Bakken crude, a particularly explosive cargo that has drawn the attention of lawmakers and federal regulators.
The tribe never granted permission to increase the number of railcars and repeatedly demanded that BNSF stop violating the easement. So far, BNSF has refused.
BNSF argued it has a responsibility to provide service, even for hazardous commodities, and that the easement doesn’t give the tribe power to “dictate the commodities that BNSF can handle over the line,” according to the release.
Tribal attorneys argued that the tribe does not want to regulate BNSF operations, but wants BNSF to live up to its contractual obligations.
Lasnik agreed, writing in a six-page ruling that, “In the context of this case, referral to the (transportation board) is neither efficient nor necessary.”
The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction prohibiting BNSF from running more than one train of 25 cars in each direction and shipping crude oil from the Bakken region across the reservation. The tribe also seeks judgments against BNSF for trespass and breach of contract.
A nonprofit with close ties to a proposed coal terminal at Cherry Point is telling local and federal agencies that Lummi Nation plans to take over part or all of Cherry Point in an effort to “de-industrialize” an area that already includes two oil refineries and an aluminum smelter.
Lummi Chairman Tim Ballew called the claim a fabrication and a distraction from the tribe’s effort to halt Gateway Pacific Terminal through an exercise of its treaty rights to fish near Cherry Point and elsewhere in north Puget Sound.
“There’s just no way they could be blowing the cover on some plan we don’t have,” Ballew said.
Northwest Jobs Alliance wrote to the Whatcom County Planning Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last month, asking them to oppose a tribal takeover of Cherry Point.
“It has come to our attention that there are those who would de-industrialize the Cherry Point (industrial area), but this rather radical notion would not serve the public interest,” the Alliance wrote in an Aug. 12 letter to the Planning Commission. The letter was signed by Chairman John Huntley and President Brad Owens.
Not named in the letter was Craig Cole, who is listed in the state’s corporations database as the director of the Northwest Jobs Alliance. Cole also was hired to do public relations for Gateway Pacific Terminal’s proponent, SSA Marine.
Cole said on Friday, Sept. 11, he is one of more than 100 members of the Alliance.
“I am one of the directors and support its focus on family-wage job growth and retention,” Cole said, along with “the continued viability of the Cherry Point industrial area.”
The Alliance delivered its message to the public in a press release on Thursday, Sept. 10.
The release refers to “a plan by the Lummi Nation to annex Cherry Point to its reservation.” The Alliance equivocates on just how much land it believes the tribe would take, but in some of its statements the group assumes the worst.
“It would decimate the job and tax base of the county, in particular the budgets of the Ferndale and Blaine school districts and Fire District 7, for which Cherry Point industries carry much of the tax load,” Huntley said in the release.
“While the Lummi people themselves and their treaty rights deserve great respect, this ploy to snatch nontribal land is just plain wrong,” the Alliance said in an Aug. 20 letter to the Corps.
The Alliance points to a single page that it claims is a “Lummi Nation planning document” from 2012. The page describes a strategy that includes defeating the coal terminal, acquiring Cherry Point and placing it in trust.
Tribes can ask the federal government to acquire properties and hold them in trust for tribal use, even land outside a tribe’s reservation.
Lummi Chairman Ballew reviewed the document and said it did not come from the tribe.
“What they presented definitely has not been produced by the Nation,” he said.
Owens didn’t answer directly when asked by a reporter if the Alliance believed Lummi Nation wanted to tear down existing industries at Cherry Point.
“The indicators are that they’re in opposition to growth at Cherry Point, and that their goal is to acquire Cherry Point property and have it placed in trust,” Owens said.
Cole said the documented evidence of the tribe’s intentions said “in an unambiguous way” that the tribe is intent on taking Cherry Point land.
“Some of it is pretty direct,” he said.
Documents used by the Alliance to support its claim include a 2012 resolution by the Lummi Indian Business Council to acquire Cherry Point “in order to prevent any further projects” and protect the cultural value of the area “in perpetuity.”
The only property specifically mentioned by the tribe for acquisition was the terminal site, and only after the coal terminal project was defeated. The documents say any acquisition of the terminal site would happen through negotiations with its owner, SSA Marine — not through a forceful snatching of the land, as the Alliance stated.
Ballew, who was not chairman when the 2012 ordinance was approved but sat on the council, acknowledged that acquiring a portion of Cherry Point was “a part of the operative part of the resolution.”
“But the more significant policy statement in that resolution is to protect the site,” Ballew said. “That doesn’t mean necessarily that the tribe acquires the land.”
“As far as I know the property isn’t for sale, and we haven’t taken that into consideration,” he said.
Ballew emphasized the importance of protecting the tribe’s cultural heritage at the coal terminal location, which he said was the site of an ancestral village. For now, he said, the tribe is focused on protecting its fishing rights through its request to the Corps to stop Gateway Pacific Terminal.
“They’re fabricating a false conspiracy,” Ballew said. “This is a distraction to our request to the Corps to protect our treaty rights.”
The tribe says the terminal pier and up to 487 ships per year traveling to and from the port would do irreparable harm to tribal fishing. At full capacity, Gateway Pacific Terminal would export 48 million metric tons of coal a year to overseas markets.
In its letter, the Alliance asked the Corps to “publicly disassociate” itself from the tribe’s takeover plans and reject its request to halt the terminal project.
Corps spokeswoman Patricia Graesser said the agency continues to consider the tribe’s request.
“The Army Corps of Engineers is focused on evaluating the actual proposal we have in hand for the Gateway Pacific Terminal and not on speculation regarding what may or may not happen with regard to future property ownership at Cherry Point,” she said.
Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article34980117.html#storylink=cpy
Partners from the Tulalip Tribes and a dozen other agencies and groups, including Marysville, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and NOAA, take in the view of the Qwuloolt Estuary on September 2, 2015. The levee was breached August 28, allowing the return of its native marshland.
By Micheal Rios, Tulalip News
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project took 20 years to complete. The finish line was crossed on Friday, August 28, when massive excavators and bulldozers breached a levee and reopened 354-acres of historic wetlands to threatened Puget Sound chinook salmon. The levee breach culminated what has been recognized as the state’s second-largest ever estuary restoration project.
“This is a great, great day. It’s been a long time coming,” says Kurt Nelson, Tulalip Tribes’ Environmental Department Manager, at the September 2 levee breach celebration. “I’ve been on this project for 11 years and there have been many challenges and hurdles, but we’ve gotten through them all. What we have now is a 354-acre estuary wetland complex that saw its first tidal flows in 100 years last Friday [August 28].
“If you watch the live-stream webcam in fast motion, you’ll notice it’s almost like this site is breathing. The estuary is flooding and draining, flooding and draining with tidal waters, like a lung does with oxygen. It’s a nice comparison to bringing some life back to an isolated floodplain that hadn’t seen that kind of life in a longtime.”
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project (QERR) is a partnership of tribal, city, state and federal agencies aimed at restoring a critical tidal wetland in the Snohomish River estuary. The Qwuloolt Estuary is located within the Snohomish River floodplain approximately three miles upstream from its outlet to Puget Sound and within the Marysville City limits. The name, Qwuloolt, is a Lushootseed word meaning “salt marsh”.
Historically, the area was a tidal marsh and forest scrub-shrub habitat, interlaced by tidal channels, mudflats and streams. However, because of its rich delta soil, early settlers diked, drained and began using the land for cattle and dairy farming. The levees they established along Ebey Slough, as well as the drainage channels and tide gates, effectively killed the estuary by preventing the salt water from Puget Sound from mixing with the fresh water from Jones and Allen Creeks.
For the past 100 years the estuary was cut off from its connection with the tidal waters and denied the ability to act as a restorative habitat for wild-run chinook salmon and other native fish, such as coho and bull trout. Through the cooperation of its many partners, this project has returned the historic and natural influences of the rivers and tides to the Qwuloolt.
The purpose of the project is to restore the Qwuloolt Estuary to historic natural conditions, while also mitigating some of the damage caused by the now defunct Tulalip Landfill on Ebey Island’s northwest edge. The former 145-acre landfill was operated on Tulalip Reservation land by Seattle Disposal Co. from 1964 to 1979 and become a Superfund site (polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations) in 1995, before being cleaned up and capped in 2000.
Qwuloolt will provide critical habitat for threatened Puget Sound chinook and other salmon, as well as for waterfowl and migratory birds. Native habitat and functioning tidal marsh ecosystem were lost when the estuary was diked and cut off from tidal influence. This project will restore tidal flows to the historic estuary and promote: Chinook, bull trout, steelhead, coho and cutthroat rearing habitat, salmon access to greater Allen Creek, migratory and resident bird habitat, water quality improvements, Native vegetation growth and restoration, and natural channel formation.
Trying to recover these critical estuary habits are crucial to migrating juvenile salmon for the salmon recovery effort in the Snohomish region. The Qwuloolt Estuary can now, once again, provide food and refuge for those fish. The intent of the project is to increase the production and quantity of those salmon that are extremely important to the Tribe and our cultural-economic purposes, as well as to the public and State of Washington.
“[Qwuloolt] is not only a nursery area for hundreds of thousands of juvenile salmon that migrate from the upper basins of the Snohomish that will come through this estuary and feed on various prey species and grow very rapidly, but also contributes to the survival of fish all over the Snohomish basin,” explains Nelson. “It will improve the water quality of Jones and Allen Creek, while being an extremely important bird habitat for migratory waterfowl, as well as restoring native wetland vegetation.”
The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project is overseen by a planning team with representatives from the Tulalip Tribes, NOAA, USFWS, WDOE, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NRCS, and the city of Marysville. Representatives from each entity were blanketed at a September 2 event celebrating the levee breach.
The US Army Corps of Engineers were responsible for the levee construction and the levee breach, while the Tribes were responsible for the channels, the berms, the planting, and some of the utility work that needed to be done. From beginning to end QERR was all about partnership and working together in getting this project done. The US Army Corps of Engineers, the Tulalip Tribes, the city of Marysville, Department of Ecology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with the Puget Sound Partnership and Fish and Wildlife services, all played instrumental roles in completing this project and it could not have been done without the collaboration each and every partner.
“As evidenced here today, it really has been a tremendous collaboration between the tribes and federal, state and local governments to bring this project through and really make a significant change for our environment,” says Col. John Buck of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “Over the past century we’ve seen this continuing degradation of our environment in the northwest and it’s through collaboration and partnership we can really affect change.”
*The Qwuloolt Estuary project cost $20 million. That money was obtained over a 17 year period that involved federal, state and tribal money. It also includes settlement and foundation money. Property purchase was $6 million, $2 million in planning, design, permitting and studies, $10 million on the levee, and another $2 million on constructing channels, berms and all the interior work.
Qwuloolt is:
Physical stream restoration is a complex part of the project, which actually reroutes 1.5 miles of Jones and Allen creek channels. Scientists used historical and field analyses and aerial photographs to move the creek beds near their historic locations.
Native plants and vegetation that once inhabited the area such as; various grasses, sedges, bulrush, cattails, willow, rose, Sitka spruce, pine, fir, crab apple and alder are replacing non-native invasive species.
Building in stormwater protection consists of creating a 6 ½ acre water runoff storage basin that will be used to manage stormwater runoff from the nearby suburban developments to prevent erosion and filter out pollutants so they don’t flow out of the estuary.
Construction of a setback levee has nearly finished and spans 4,000 feet on the western edge on Qwuloolt. The levee was constructed to protect the adjacent private and commercial property from water overflow once the levee is breached.
Breaching of the existing levee that is located in the south edge of the estuary will begin after the setback reaches construction. The breaching of the levee will allow the saline and fresh water to mix within the 400-acre marsh.
Other estuary restoration projects within the Snohomish River Watershed include; Ebey Slough at 14 acres, 400 acres of Union Slough/Smith Island and 60 acres of Spencer Island. The Qwuloolt Estuary Restoration Project has been a large collaboration between The Tulalip Tribes, local, county, state and federal agencies, private individuals and organizations.
Contact Micheal Rios at mrios@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov
Researchers find oil can harm herring and salmon at much lower levels than once thought. The work raises questions about Puget Sound pollution.
Herring, with much smaller eggs than pink salmon, are more susceptible to the effects from the polycyclic aromatics released from crude oil spills. (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)
By Hal Bernton, Seattle Times
Federal scientists based in Seattle and Alaska have found that oil — by impairing heart functions — can cause serious harm to herring and pink salmon at far lower concentrations than previously documented.
The research, published Tuesday online in Nature’s Scientific Reports, could help unravel the mystery of why herring stocks in Prince William Sound collapsed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Their work also has implications about the effects of low levels of chronic oil pollution in Puget Sound and elsewhere in the world.
“What this study shows is that in very, very low concentration of oil, embryonic fish … get born with a mild heart defect,” said John Incardona, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration toxicologist at a Seattle fisheries science center. He is one of 10 co-authors of the study.
Those fish may look OK on the outside, but the heart defect makes them less fit, so they can’t swim as fast. They may succumb to predators at higher rates than other fish and may be more vulnerable to infections, according to Incardona.
The findings reflect years of studies that explored the effects of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, compounds released by crude oil spills, but also contained in many other forms of fossil-fuel pollution such as tailpipe emissions from Puget Sound motorists that condense and are carried into the water by runoff.
The research examined the effects on fast-growing zebrafish, and then replicated the heart damage in more complex experiments that exposed embryonic herring and pink salmon to oil.
The researchers found that oil’s effects are greatest in cold-water environments, where fish embryos are less able to metabolize the pollutants. And herring, with much smaller eggs than the pink salmon, suffered the most severe effects from the polycyclic aromatics.
In the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill that dumped nearly 11 million gallons of crude in Prince William Sound, Alaska became the first — and so far only state — to create a water-pollution limit for the polycyclic aromatics, according to Incardona.
That Alaska state limit is 10 parts per billion, but the researchers found herring embryos could be affected at levels 10 to 50 times lower than that. At those levels, herring that returned to spawn in Prince William Sound in 1989 as well as subsequent years could have produced offsprings with damaged hearts.
Those offspring would have hatched, but few may have survived long enough to reach spawning age. That could be a big reason spawning stocks of Prince William Sound herring crashed four years after the 1989 spill.
“The thresholds for developmental cardiotoxicity were remarkably low, suggesting that the scale of the Exxon Valdez impact in shoreline spawning habitats was much greater than previously appreciated,” the researchers wrote.
In the more than quarter century since the Exxon Valdez spill, Prince William Sound herring stocks have failed to recover even as oil pollution has declined to levels unlikely to affect them.
The study published Tuesday does not try to explain the herrings’ current problems, although Incardona says once fish stocks get knocked to a very low level, recovery can be very difficult.
The situation is very different in Puget Sound, which has the highest levels of polycyclic aromatics of any estuary due to ongoing chronic pollution, according to Incardona. The Puget Sound levels are not that far below those found to have effects in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez, and raise questions about whether this pollution is harming Puget Sound’s struggling herring stocks.
Incardona, who said that federal researchers hope to work with Washington state biologists to try to answer that question.
By Lorraine Loomis, Chair, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
Hood Canal/Eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca summer chum is the only threatened salmon population in western Washington showing clear signs of recovery.
It’s thanks to a 20-year cooperative effort by state and tribal salmon co-managers, conservation groups, local governments and federal agencies that is balancing the key ingredients needed for recovery: harvest, hatcheries and habitat.
Summer chum were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1999 along with Puget Sound chinook and Lake Ozette sockeye. Puget Sound steelhead joined the list in 2007.
The program’s success comes from a core principle that salmon recovery must address all factors affecting natural production. For far too long the federal government’s main response to protect ESA-listed salmon has been to cut harvest. Meanwhile, the primary threat to wild salmon and their recovery – ongoing loss and damage of their habitat – continues to be ignored.
Past overharvest and poor ocean conditions combined with degraded habitat to spark the steep decline of summer chum that began in Hood Canal streams in the late ’70s. By the early 1990s, fewer than a thousand summer chum were returning from a population that once numbered 70,000 or more.
The tribal and state co-managers responded with strong harvest management actions beginning in 1992. Fisheries impacting summer chum were reduced, relocated and delayed to protect the returning fish.
But it didn’t stop there. Working with federal agencies and conservation groups, tribal and state salmon co-managers began hatchery supplementation programs to boost populations of summer chum.
A portion of the wild run returning to the Big Quilcene River was moved to a federal fish hatchery and spawned, with the offspring released to rebuild the remaining run. Four years later, about 10,000 adult summer chum returned to the river.
Since then, additional hatchery supplementation efforts have led to summer chum becoming re-established in most of its historic range. To protect summer chum genetics, supplementation programs were limited to three generations, or 12 years. Some programs met their goals and were ended earlier.
Habitat protection and restoration was the third key to bringing back summer chum. Projects such as dike removals, protecting and restoring instream habitat, planting streamside trees and removing invasive plants have all contributed to the effort’s success. Nearly 700 acres of estuary and an equal amount of upland stream habitat have been improved to support the recovery effort.
More work is planned and ongoing in streams, estuaries, and the nearshore throughout the area
Balancing harvest, hatcheries and habitat is the key to salmon recovery. Equally as important is the need for monitoring and evaluation to apply lessons learned and improve effectiveness.
Cooperation is the third essential ingredient. Only by working together can we hope to meet the challenges of salmon recovery. If we are ever going to recover Puget Sound chinook and steelhead, we will need to use the same approach we are using to save Hood Canal summer chum.
Despite the best efforts of fisheries managers to restore summer chum, they remain vulnerable to climate change and ongoing development. Because they arrive in streams to spawn during the late summer months, they are especially threatened by low flows like those we are seeing during this year’s record-breaking drought, which is far from over.
Ongoing loss of habitat and a number of other factors still must be fully addressed before summer chum can be removed from the ESA list. There’s still a ways to go, but at least we are on the right path.
How will we know when we have recovered summer chum? When they are once again abundant enough to support sustainable harvest. To the tribes, that is the true measure of salmon recovery and the commitment to fulfill the promises of the treaties we signed with the U.S. government.
