A powerful message to to start considering the needs of Pacific Salmon comes from the native peoples of the coastal region that straddles the US Canadian border
Salmon people pray for sacred fish to return to historic home
Northwest tribes urge US and Canada to revise Columbia River Treaty to allow safe passage for salmon crossing dams
by Kevin Taylor
KETTLE FALLS, Wash. — Along a rocky shore where his ancestors gathered for millennia at once thundering but now flooded rapids, Richard Armstrong stepped into the Columbia River to pray.
With eyes closed, Armstrong, a member of the Okanagan Nation Alliance, pounded a rhythm on a small hide drum and prayed and sang in a Salish-language dialect. His prayers urged the U.S. and Canada to renegotiate the Columbia River Treaty, which has cut salmon off from this stretch of water.
For thousands of years, Native people had gathered at these falls to spear and net the leaping fish. Armstrong is a descendant of the last salmon chief who regulated the bustling fishery.
But since 1942, adult chinook and sockeye salmon returning from the ocean have been blockaded more than 100 miles downstream by Grand Coulee Dam, a high-head hydropower dam with a massive concrete face 551 feet high. It was built with no provision for fish passage.
Saving salmon runs wasn't important to the engineers who designed Grand Collie Dam to meet the need of white farmers for water and white industries for power. The Salmon were not considered as important . except to the tribes they were everything. Their economy collapsed after Grand Coulee was built and most of their most fertile land was flooded.
My grandfather was born just up river from Kettle Falls when it was still a place where native peoples gathered to fish for salmon. His mother, my great Grandmother had a mixture of white and tribal heritage. This fight is personal as well as being a part of the struggle to save thousands of species, most of which aren't as well known as Pacific Salmon, and the man-made Great Extinction picks up its destructive momentum.