Top Story Archives - Page 49 of 156

The Great Quake and the Great Drowning

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.

by Ann Finkbeiner, Hakai Magazine

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.”

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.

Tulalip removes statute of limitations on sexual assault cases

By Niki Cleary, Tulalip News

It’s a nightmare. Whether it happens to you or someone you love, or just someone in your community, it is a trauma with vast ripple effects. Rape. Sexual violence. Child molestation. Just naming the crime is uncomfortable, scary, traumatizing. Imagine if it happened to you, to your best friend or sibling, and it’s every parent’s worst nightmare to think it could happen to your child.

“Victims might hold onto an assault for years without saying anything,” said Tulalip Chairman Mel Sheldon. “In the past, when they found the courage, or the right situation came up where they could talk about it, the statute of limitations may have passed. There was no justice for them. This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”

According to the Department of Justice National Crime Victimization survey 284,350 people were victims of rape or sexual assault nationally. This doesn’t include domestic violence or intimate partner violence, which often includes a sexual assault component.

“We know Native American women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted,” said Tulalip Prosecutor Brian Kilgore. “It’s an epidemic and it drives a lot of the trauma and grief behind the drug epidemic.”

Only a fraction of sexual assaults are ever reported and fewer still are prosecuted. The reasons why are far from simple. They run the gamut from cultural norms to the physical, financial and psychological pros and cons of reporting. Particularly, since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known, or related to the victim.

A few of the lifelong effects of sexual assault include post-traumatic stress disorder, inability to form healthy attachments, sexual dysfunction, depression and anxiety. This is also further complicated by the reactions of those close to the victim when the victim discloses the crime. The fear of losing their support systems, or worse, being shunned or blamed for the assault, often stops victims in their tracks.

“This is about sending a message to those that were victimized, letting them know that we care and from this day forward there will be justice no matter when the crime happened.”

– Mel Sheldon, Tulalip Tribes Chairman

“If you have 100 sexual assault victims, maybe 10 or 15 will get reported,” explained Aaron Verba, the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigator for the Tulalip Prosecutor’s Office. “You might file three and then when it comes to a guilty verdict, maybe you’re down to one. It really comes down to the cost for the victim,” he continued. “There’s a 99 percent chance that you were victimized by someone you know or are related to.”

Because the perpetrator is often part of the community, peers and family may be unwilling to believe the crime happened. In many cases not believing the victim is a form of self-protection, Aaron described. Families don’t want to see another family member as an offender.

“Everyone is victimized,” he said. “For the family, if they support the victim sometimes they have to admit, ‘I believe this bad thing happened to you and I may have unknowingly been involved in the grooming process.’ The family has to decide whether it’s safer for them to support the victim or the perpetrator.”

Oftentimes, it’s easier to simply deny that the crime happened, to blame circumstances or even blame the victim. Jade Carela, of the Child Advocacy Center.

“Why don’t they come forward?” she asked. “As a community member, I feel like the community support isn’t there yet. We have sex predators in our community that hold high positions or spiritual positions in our tribe. Victims have to wonder, ‘Why would I come out in a community that still holds these people up? I’m not going to get support.’ In the past when they were ready, the statute of limitations may have been up, and then it was too late.”

“It’s especially hard to disclose if a victim has seen another victim disclose and it went badly for them. Sometimes people justcarry that trauma around with them,” Aaron continued. “It’s a conversation we have with every victim that walks in here. Or they may be thinking I’m going to put this person away for the rest of his life, and you have to have an honest and frank conversation about the fact that we may not get 40 years, or even 30. This person may be back in the community in one year.”

Particularly in Native American communities, after the perpetrator serves time, community will be looking to reintegrate the person into everyday life. That means that the victim will likely encounter the perpetrator at community events, family events and everyday activities like going to the grocery store.

“When you sit down and tell people realistically what is going to happen, sometimes they change their mind,” said Aaron.

With all of the obstacles and potential fallout surrounding sexual abuse, there are just as many positive reasons to disclose a sex crime.

Brian explained that most rapists have a history of sex crimes, and unless they’re prosecuted, a future. Making sure that a perpetrator doesn’t hurt someone else is a huge incentive for some victims.

“Rape kits are expensive to test,” said Brian. “The State of Ohio had thousands of untested rape kits sitting on a shelf and they paid to have them all tested. When they did they found a pattern because most rapists are serial rapists. It’s not a comfortable thing to say, ‘I was raped,’ but there’s a good chance if they’ve done it to you, they’ve done it to other people. The only way to stop them is to shine some daylight on it.”

Removing the statute of limitations on sex crimes isn’t just an empty political move, said Jade, it’s a step towards justice, healing for victims and an overall healthier community.

“As a community, we can show these victims that we love them by not being secretive about this. We need to educate our children, and come forward. Know that from here forward, whenever you are ready, we can still prosecute the crimes that happened to you.

“We always talk about the drug epidemic,” she continued. “Drugs are a symptom, they’re not the cause. The root cause is that when these drug addicts were little kids, things happened to them. If we want to eradicate drug use on the reservation, what we need to do now is keep our children safe.”

Aaron agreed, “There’s an incredibly high correlation between drug use and trauma. If you poll all the people who come through our court for drug offense, I’m guessing that 99.99% of them would have some sort of emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse, or sexual abuse. Ultimately there’s a reason that you use drugs to change your reality, usually it’s because your reality sucks.”

Last, both Jade and Aaron agreed, disclosure is about healing.

“The women coming out now were children when this happened to them,” Jade said. “Hopefully, now they’ll feel safe enough to tell the reality about what happened to them so that they can get help. So that they don’t pass that on to their children.”

Aaron pointed to the new law as a sign of the changing times. But family support is going to be even more valuable.

“The important thing is how we support a victim,” he said. “When they disclose, they need to know they’ll be believed and someone will do something about it. The big thing about disclosure is that’s when you start healing. You can’t truly heal a wound until you take care of it, you can cover it up, you can ignore it or pretend it didn’t happen, but you can’t truly heal.”

Aaron also pointed out that sexual assault leaves scars that can take generations to heal.

“I heard once that it takes seven generations for sexual abuse to get out of a family,” he said. “That’s if the first person actually gets treatment, resolves issues and gets back to a somewhat healthy way. That person is still going to pass some of it on. You can’t not pass your life experiences on to your children, whether you know you’re doing it or not. We have people who have kept that stuff hidden for 30 or 40 years. The people on this reservation are still dealing with the effects of sexual abuse in boarding schools.”

This resolution is not retroactive. If the statute of limitations has already expired, the crime may not be prosecuted in Tulalip Court. However, Brian explained, it’s still worthwhile to report it.

“If you have DNA evidence, the federal statute of limitations runs from when you test the evidence,” he said. “For a lot of folks, the police may have a current file on the perpetrator, and any information will help them in their investigation. We can never promise that a case is going to be prosecutable, but we don’t know if it’s never reported.”

If you were the victim or witness of a sexual assault, or any crime, the first step is to call the police, regardless of how much time has passed. In emergencies always call 911. For non-emergencies you can reach the Tulalip Police Department at 360-716-4608.

10,000-year-old stone tools unearthed in Redmond dig

“We were pretty amazed,” said archaeologist Robert Kopperl of the finds at the site. (SWCA Environmental Consultants)

Archaeologists working near Redmond Town Center have unearthed stone tools crafted at least 10,000 years ago by some of the region’s earliest inhabitants.

By Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times science reporter

The project started off as nothing special — just a standard archaeological survey to clear the way for construction.

But it quickly became clear that the site near Redmond Town Center mall was anything but ordinary.

“We were pretty amazed,” said archaeologist Robert Kopperl, who led the field investigation. “This is the oldest archaeological site in the Puget Sound lowland with stone tools.”

Kopperl and his colleagues published their initial analysis earlier this year in the journal PaleoAmerica. He’ll discuss the findings Saturday morning in a presentation sponsored by the Redmond Historical Society.

The discovery is yielding new insights into the period when the last ice age was drawing to a close and prehistoric bison and mammoths still roamed what is now Western Washington.

The site on the shores of Bear Creek, a tributary to the Sammamish River, appears to have been occupied by small groups of people who were making and repairing stone tools, said Kopperl, of SWCA Environmental Consultants.

Chemical analysis of one of the tools revealed traces of the food they were eating, including bison, deer, bear, sheep and salmon.

“This was a very good place to have a camp,” Kopperl said. “They could use it as a centralized location to go out and fish and hunt and gather and make stone tools.”

Stone points excavated near Redmond Town Center have unusual concave bases. (SWCA Environmental Consultants)

The site was initially surveyed in 2009, as the city of Redmond embarked on an $11 million project to restore salmon habitat in Bear Creek, which had been confined to a rock-lined channel decades before. The work was funded largely by the Washington State Department of Transportation, as a way to mitigate some of the environmental impacts of building the new Highway 520 floating bridge over Lake Washington and widening the roadway.

The first discoveries were an unremarkable assortment of artifacts near the surface, Kopperl explained. But when the crews dug deeper, they found a foot-thick layer of peat. Radiocarbon analysis showed that the peat, the remains of an ancient bog, was at least 10,000 years old. That’s when things got exciting.

“We knew right away that it was a pretty significant find,” said Washington State Historic Preservation Officer Allyson Brooks.

As they delved below the peat in subsequent field seasons, the crews started finding a wealth of tools and fragments. Because of the artifacts’ position below the peat, which had not been disturbed, it’s clear they predate the formation of the peat, Kopperl explained. Radiocarbon analysis of charcoal fragments found with the tools confirm the age.

Only a handful of archaeological sites dating back 10,000 years or more have been discovered in Western Washington. They include 12,000-year-old mastodon bones near Sequim and prehistoric bison remains on Orcas Island from about the same time period. But neither site yielded stone tools.

“It’s hard to find this kind of site west of the Cascades, because it’s so heavily vegetated and the Puget Lobe of the big ice sheet really affected the landscape,” Kopperl said.

A handful of sites have been discovered east of the mountains with tools dating back between 12,000 and 14,000 years.

So it’s clear that humans have lived in the area since soon after the glaciers retreated, but a lot of mystery still surrounds the region’s earliest occupants and their origins.

By 10,000 years ago, the ice that covered the Redmond area was long gone, leaving Lake Sammamish in its wake. But the lake’s marshy fringes extended much farther than they do today, Kopperl said. Pine forests were dominant instead of the firs that are now so common.

Excavations in the 1960s at what is now Marymoor Park, just south of Bear Creek, revealed abundant evidence of people living there about 5,000 years ago.

In fact, most of the region’s streams and waterways were probably occupied or used by early Native Americans — just as they were later used by white settlers and today’s residents, Brooks said.

“It just shows you that humans continuously use the landscape, and that the places that people use today are the same places that people used yesterday,” she said.

Among the most unusual artifacts from the Bear Creek site are the bottoms of two spear points. The points don’t display the graceful fluting characteristic of what’s called the Clovis method of toolmaking. Instead, they have concave bases, which has only rarely been seen.

So perhaps the tools represent an earlier style that’s still not well understood, Kopperl said.

While great for archaeology, the serendipitous discovery at Bear Creek added to the cost of the restoration and delayed the project’s completion by about two years, said Roger Dane, of the city’s natural resources division.

Officials worked with the Muckleshoot and Snoqualmie tribes, whose ancestors might have been among the actual toolmakers, to ensure that the site is permanently protected, Dane explained.

The goal of the restoration was to return the creek to a meandering bed and add vegetation, woody debris and shallow areas to make it more hospitable for salmon.

“For a creek that runs through an urban area, it’s one of the more productive salmon streams in the area,” Dane said.

When Kopperl and his team are done analyzing the artifacts, they’ll hand them over to the Muckleshoot Tribe for curation. There are no immediate plans to display the artifacts publicly.

Construction at the site was completed this year, including addition of a thick cap of soil and vegetation over unexcavated portions to protect and preserve remaining artifacts.

Signs explaining the restoration and the site’s archaeological significance will be added next year.

The excavation also uncovered a single fragment of salmon bone, testament to the fact that the Northwest’s iconic fish has made its way up local streams for at least 10,000 years.

“Since finding the site was based on a salmon-restoration project,” Kopperl said, “it’s kind of like coming full circle.”

Lummi tribe says talk of Cherry Point land grab is a fabrication

BY RALPH SCHWARTZ, The Bellingham Herald

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

Bringing life back to the Qwuloolt Estuary

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

Tulalip Tribes Removes Statute of Limitations on Sex Crimes

On September 3rd, the Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors passed a resolution to remove statute of limitations on sex crimes.

According to Theresa Sheldon, Tulalip Tribes Board of Directors, “Removing the statute of limitations will give the power back to those who have suffered crimes against their spirit and bodies. Prior to this resolution, you only had three years to report a sexual violence crime to authorities. Now those years are no longer valid from this day forward.”

Feds give tribes access to crime database

Source: Chris Ingalls, KING 5

The Tulalip Tribal Courts started a new procedure this week. It’s hoped that it will help reduce crime, like the Marysville Pilchuck High School shootings.

Tulalip – and all tribal courts of law across the country – now have access to the federal crime database called the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

Before the Marysville shootings on Oct. 24, the U.S. Department of Justice did not allow tribal courts like the Tulalips to access the NCIC. Non-tribal police and courts use the database to check on the criminal histories and court orders of suspects.

A problem came to light when investigators determined that Jaylen Fryberg used his father’s handgun to murder four classmates in Marysville.

A Tulalip Tribal Court protection order barred Raymond Fryberg from owning firearms. But he was able to purchase a handgun from a licensed firearms dealer in 2003 because the court order was not entered in NCIC. The dealer sold Fryberg the gun because the federal background check came up clean.

“If the Tulalip Tribe had the ability to put that information into the system, it would have had the potential to eliminate the father from being able to purchase the weapon,” said Judge Richard Black.

Judge Blake is president of the National American Indian Court Judges Association.

Last month, tribal court organizations convinced the U.S. Department of Justice to allow tribal police and courts to have full access to NCIC so its officers and judges can review criminal histories and enter court judgments into the database.

While Tulalip leaders would not speak on camera citing the sensitivity of the Fryberg case, they confirm that this week tribal police and court officers completed training and they are accessing NCIC directly for the first time.

Judge Blake, who sits on a tribal bench in California, says the new rules mean better community safety both on and off tribal land.

“Without the ability for the tribes to input directly, it delays justice for the victims,” said Judge Blake.

Mountain Camp 2015: Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors

By Micheal Rios, Tulalip News; Photos courtesy of Libby Nelson, Tulalip Environmental Policy Analyst

Wilderness. The wild. Whether intentional or not, using the world “wild” to designate landscape and environment sets the land apart from us. Americans are civilized, Natives are savages, and the land is wild. Sound familiar? Because of American formal education and informal borrowing of traits from other cultures, Americans believe they can visit the wild, but can never live in it. Americans are trained to think that those who do choose to live in the wilderness are either Natives (read savages) or half-crazed tree huggers.

But the concept of wilderness was obsolete the minute it was born. We, as a Native society and Tulalip people, know every inch of this land used to be Indian Country. Every inch. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a “wild” or a “wilderness” on this continent. All things are related. This notion of connectedness to all things was so central to our ancestors, to the very essence of Native culture, but has dissipated as generation after generation of Native peoples have found themselves urbanized; slowly transformed by the contemporary world of independence, big cities, and a relentless dependence on technology.

So then how can we reasonably begin to understand our ancestors, their actions, thoughts, and values? If we live in a modern time that is inherently different in nearly every respect than the time of our ancestors, how can we truly grasp the culture we stem from? The culture we fight to hold onto, both externally and internally, every single day, while the world around us constantly tells us to give it up, get with modern times, and stop looking backward, look forward.

There is no simple solution, yet as we look around we can clearly see a persistence and resurgence of Tulalip culture that we refuse to let die. There is the plan for Lushootseed immersion classrooms, the stead-fast work of our Rediscovery Program, the restoration of the Qwuloolt Estuary, and, most recently, the reintroduction of our ancestral mountainous areas to a new wave of Tulalip citizens, known as Mountain Camp 2015.

The idea behind Mountain Camp helps us begin to answer the critical questions about how we keep in touch with our ancestors in modern times. Instead of bringing traditional teachings to an untraditional space, we learn our ancestral teachings in an ancestral space, to walk as they walked. The pristine swədaʔx̌ali co-stewardship area, located 5,000 feet up in the Skykomish Watershed, was a space where our ancestors once resided. It was a place where they hunted, gathered, and lived only off the sustenance the land offered them. Most importantly, after all these years, the swədaʔx̌ali remains a land our ancestors would recognize today, unhampered by urban cities and deconstruction.

“I think for our youth to be up in the mountains it is critical for them to get a strong, firm understanding of who they really are as Tulalip people,” says Patti Gobin, Tulalip Foundation Board of Trustee. “It’s been a long time since our people, our children in particular, have been allowed into these areas. After the signing of the treaty, we were confined to the reservation at Tulalip, and many of us grew up thinking that’s all we were, Tulalips from a reservation. But we are far more than that. From white cap to white cap, as Coast Salish people, this was our ancestral land and it means everything to have our children up here to allow the spirits of our ancestors to commune with them and talk to them, and for them to experience what it is to be out in the wilderness, the way we have always lived.

“If they are given the gifts of what the woods have to offer them and they have ears to listen, then those gifts will strengthen them as young men and women. They’ll never forget this experience and they’ll always come back here and they’ll always fight for the right to come back here, which is critical for future generations.”

For the inaugural Mountain Camp 2015 (held in mid-August), three camp leaders led eight Tulalip tribal members, all 7^th and 8^th graders, in the experience of a lifetime. They spent five days and four nights in the swədaʔx̌ali and surrounding areas living as our ancestors lived; setting up and taking down camp as they moved locations, singing, storytelling, making traditional cedar baskets, foraging, berry picking, preparing meals, building fires, using the crystal clear lake to cleanse their bodies and spirits, learning traditional values in the sacred land, and coming together as a supportive family.

In order to give the Tulalip youth the most impactful experience possible, the Natural Resources Department teamed with Cultural Resources and Youth Services to develop two main themes for the camp: reconnecting to the mountains and x̌əʔaʔxʷaʔšəd (stepping lightly). Both themes aspire to reunite the children with teachings and values central to our ancestors; recognizing the connectedness of all things while respecting the Earth.

“Mountain Camp is all about having a space for kids to come up and just enjoy the outdoors, connect with their mountain culture, learn how to camp, learn how to be out here and be safe,” says camp leader Kelly Finley, Natural Resources Outreach and Education Coordinator. “I grew up in the mountains hunting, fishing, and playing in the trees. It was a vital part of my youth and to this day I love being out there. It is an honor to provide an opportunity for young people to love the outdoors as I do. I hope through this experience there will be a better understanding of our natural world and how we all connect to our environment. I look forward to continue this work next year with new and returning students.”

In keeping with their traditional teachings the youth introduced themselves to the mountains and forest that make up the swədaʔx̌ali region. They took turns stating their names, their parents’ names, and the names of their grandparents. The mountains took notice and later that night swədaʔx̌ali formally introduced itself to the kids in the form of a glorious show of thunder and lightning.

“Thunder is medicine to our people, it was the mountain’s way of welcoming our people back to the place we’ve been absent far too long,” says Inez Bill, Rediscovery Program Coordinator. “The children were in an area where the spirits of our ancestors could see them. We, the elders who volunteered and visited the youth on their camp, did our best to impart the meaning and importance of what they were doing. They were experiencing a place, a spirit of our ancestors that most people will never be able to experience. We hope that experience helps lead those youth to live a good life. As younger people they are in their most formative years. We used to have rites of passage, and for these youth, Mountain Camp represented a rite of passage for them.”

Indeed, the Tulalip elders and volunteers added to the overall experience of the youth; helping to explain how their ancestors were one with their environment and lived a fulfilled and spiritual life, all without the uses of cellphones, computers, T.V., and the internet. A true highlight was the elders teaching the youngsters how to make their very own cedar baskets so that they could go huckleberry picking during their brief stay in the mountains. The messages of finding strength and beauty in all experiences with nature were taken in by the youth and each did his and her best to internalize those values.

“The elders have been telling us stories about what they used to do when they used to go berry picking, and how it was tradition that they make it look like they weren’t even there. They just picked a little bit and moved along,” explains camp participant Jacynta Myles. “They made cedar bark baskets and used them for berry picking baskets. You can go from blackberries to huckleberries and store practically anything in it.

“I love the area. How we woke up to thunder this morning, I’ve never heard it that loud. I think every area in the woods is pretty special, but being here in this area, all together, makes it even more special. And we’re having fun.”

“It’s all about going into the wilderness, no electronics or nothing like that,” says youth participant Sunny Killebrew. “We’re just like on our own, no parents, just depending on ourselves and making new friends. We’ve been learning that this is the land where are ancestors were raised, grew up, and lived. They hunted, they ate, they slept, they did everything on this land right here. It feels good, like I’m doing something they would want me to do.”

For the tribal elders and everyone involved who contributed to making Mountain Camp a reality, it was a dream come true to witness the camp youth as they one-by-one grasped the importance of walking in their ancestor’s footsteps. The entire project had been in the works over the last few years, allowing Natural Resources the necessary time to find funding and the resources to build a Mountain Camp program for our youth.

“This, as the first year, was a big learning experience for all of us. While there are things we might tweak for next year, overall we believe this first year was a big success and deeply worthwhile, as measured by the experience these eight kids received and all that we, as program leaders, learned as it unfolded,” said Libby Nelson, Tulalip Environmental Policy Analyst. “Success this year can be attributed to the collaboration with our Cultural Resources, Language and Youth Services staff; and a very successful and helpful partnership with the YMCA Outdoor Leadership Program in Seattle, the US Forest Service, and our own Rediscovery Program in Tulalip’s Cultural Resources division.

“This Mountain Camp experience presented an opportunity to reconnect tribal youth to these inland, mountain ancestral territories where their ancestors lived, while also explicitly reserving rights to continue using these areas for hunting, fishing and gathering.”

From practically being inside a thunder and lightning storm at an elevation of 5,000 feet, to storytelling in their Lushootseed language as they witnessed a meteor shower, to creating their own cedar bark baskets for huckleberry picking, the Tulalip youth created many memories that will last a lifetime. As they grow and mature into adults, their sense of appreciation for what they were able to be a part of and experience will undoubtedly grow immensely. It’s a difficult task for anyone to be expected to live as their ancestors lived, let alone asking that of a 7^th or 8^th grade student. In honor of their efforts and achievements while participating in Mountain Camp 2015 the youth were honored with a blanket ceremony when they got back home to Tulalip.

“The ceremony was to acknowledge what the kids went through. It was an accomplishment for them to go through everything that they did while up in the mountains, living in nature,” continues Inez Bill. “They didn’t have their cell phones or any of the other electronic gadgets they would have back home. They experienced something together, they grew together, and they had a rite of passage together. I covered the kids with blankets as a remembrance of what they went through. The ceremony recognized that rite of passage, of how we want them to be as young people.

“In our ancestral way, they were brought out to nature to find their spiritual strength. I think later in their lives, that spiritual strength will give them direction and confidence when they need it most. And for the parents and grandparents who were at the ceremony, I think they were happy and truly touched.”

Following the ceremony the camp participants mingled a while longer, still wrapped in their blankets, and talking about their favorite moments from Mountain Camp. Going to their ancestral lands, being immersed in their cultural teachings, a rite of passage, experiencing nature as it was meant to be experienced. There are so many possible takeaways, but none bigger than that of camp participant Kaiser Moses who says, “I feel empowered. I feel I can do anything!”

Plans are already underway for Mountain Camp 2016. Stay on the lookout for more details and registration information in future syəcəb and online on our Tulalip News Facebook page.

Hard Work Leads To Recovery of Summer Chum

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.

“Is this the world that we want to leave to our children?”

James Jewell, Master Carver of the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers.Photo/Niki Cleary, Tulalip News — James Jewell, Master Carver of the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers.
Photo/Niki Cleary, Tulalip News

by Kim Kalliber, Tulalip News

“Is this the world that we want to leave to our children?”

That is the question posed by Jewell James, Master Carver of the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers, of the numerous coal port projects around the northwest and beyond.

“We know the answer,” continued James. “We want our children to have healthy air, water and land.”

For the third year in a row, Lummi carvers have hand-carved a totem pole that will journey hundreds of miles, raising public awareness and opposition to the exporting of fossil fuels. And the timing couldn’t be more important, as the Army Corps of Engineers may be deciding by the end of this month whether or not it will agree with the Lummi Nation and deny permits for the Gateway Pacific Terminal Project at Cherry Point. Lummi Nation, in fighting to block the terminal, cited its rights under a treaty with the United States to fish in its usual and accustomed areas, which include the waters around Cherry Point.

This year’s journey, aptly named ‘Our Shared Responsibilities’ began August 21 in Bellingham, the location of the proposed Cherry Point terminal. The pole then traveled through British Columbia, Tulalip, Portland, and Celilo Falls on the Washington/Oregon border, and then on to Yakama, in opposition with the Yakama Nation of the Port of Morrow export project. The journey continues to Spokane, where the Spokane and Blackfeet tribe will unite in their opposition to accelerated hydrological fracking and oil leasing in the northern range of the Rocky Mountains. The journey’s final destination, scheduled for August 28, will be Lame Deer, Montana, to support the Northern Cheyenne, whose sacred lands would be devastated by a proposed coalmine.

Lump carvers hand-carved this totem pole to raise public awareness and opposition to the exporting of fossil fuels. Photo/Kim Kalliber — Lump carvers hand-carved this totem pole to raise public awareness and opposition to the exporting of fossil fuels.
Photo/Kim Kalliber

“The totem pole design includes an eagle, a buffalo, two badgers, two drummers with a buffalo skull and drum, and a turtle with a lizard on each side. These are symbols of their culture,” explains James. “These people want everyone to know that they love the earth, they love their mother, and they want us to help them protect our part of the earth. “

On August 23, the Tulalip Tribes welcomed the totem pole and guests with songs and blessings. Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon opened the ceremony and tribal member Caroline Moses led a blessing song for the totem pole.

Tulalip tribal member Caroline Moses blesses the totem pole. Photo/Kim Kalliber — Tulalip tribal member Carolyn Moses blesses the totem pole.
Photo/Kim Kalliber

“The salmon are already dying in the river because of the high temperature. The spawning grounds are poisoned. They [coal companies] have yet to feel the repercussions of that. They are walking away with their hands slapped. These ports, Cherry Point, Port of Morrow, we’re talking about 153 million tons [of coal] annually coming into the Pacific Northwest, loaded with arsenic and mercury,” said James to the group of tribal and community members gathered at the shores of Tulalip Bay. “We’re saying no; we’re united. We’re happy to be at Tulalip because Tulalip is a leader tribe.”

James went on to speak about the united effort to defeat these fossil fuel export projects, saying that, “nobody hears us, because the media doesn’t come to Northern Cheyenne.” The totem pole journey plays an important role in bringing people together, creating new alliances, and empowering the public with information about fossil fuels and the damage they are causing the environment.

Jewell James and Tulalip Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon Photo/Niki Cleary, Tulalip News — Jewell James and Tulalip Tribal Chairman Mel Sheldon
Photo/Niki Cleary, Tulalip News

“Pope Francis came out with a statement last year that they were wrong and they should have taught the people how to love the earth, not destroy it. They made a mistake. What we need to do as tribal people is to make sure that they live up to the words they put out publicly. We’re calling on everybody to join together. We need to get together because the Earth’s dying. July was the hottest recorded July in recorded history. The Earth is burning. Global warming is a reality and they’re syphoning our rivers dry. Our salmon, our fish, and everything else that depend upon it is dying around us.

“We say it simply, love the Earth. That’s the message that we’re bringing to Northern Cheyenne in unison with us.”