July 15, 2025 — Are you an optimist? If you thought a lasting agreement over what to do about the Lower Snake River Dams (LSRD) was at hand in 2023, the answer is probably yes.
Too often, environmental challenges defy resolution. These four dams, while a clean source of hydroelectric power and a boon to agriculture in the Pacific Northwest, significantly impede the migration of spawning salmon. And while they transformed Lewiston, Idaho, into the most inland port on the West Coast, they created a series of reservoirs in which warm water and reduced velocity set the stage for predation of fish. Several salmon and steelhead runs that once were at the heart of Native American life are nearing extinction.
The four tribes whose rights to fish in “usual and accustomed places” are enshrined by treaty, along with environmentalists and fishing interests, have sued the government numerous times for failing to meaningfully protect salmon.
Construction of the first dam began in 1955. The first tribal fish-ins, so-called, were staged in the 1960s in the name of reclaiming fishing rights.
The tide, as it were, began to turn in 2016, when a federal judge found that the government’s plans for protecting fish in the Lower Snake River were inadequate and ordered a new plan — one that “might well require” breaching of the dams — by 2018.
In 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the tribes’ request to remove the dams.
In 2022, Washington’s U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Gov. Jay Inslee released a study that concluded that dam removal was the salmon’s best bet. Murray, The New York Times reported, had “previously resisted” this conclusion.
Finally, in 2023, the Biden administration entered a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) valued at $1 billion with the treaty tribes to restore the wild salmon population. The agreement did not commit the United States to removing the dams, saying that was a decision for Congress. But the table was set.