Saving Seafood

Oregon, California senators step up pressure on Trump administration to approve salmon emergency cash

October 5, 2017 — Oregon and California’s four senators, all Democrats, stepped up the pressure on the Trump administration Wednesday to approve disaster assistance for salmon fishermen along 200 miles of coastline.

In April, the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages coastal salmon seasons, recommended closing coastal and commercial salmon fishing entirely along an area equal to roughly half of Oregon’s coastline. Govs. Kate Brown of Oregon and Jerry Brown of California requested emergency funding relief in May, to no avail.

The fall chinook fun on the Klamath is the biggest and is important for recreational and tribal fisherman as well as commercial fisheries. The Yurok tribe, which has preference along the waterway, also had its allocation severely curtailed this year, to roughly 650 fish. Management officials estimated returning salmon to be roughly 12,000.

Oregon has had success in securing emergency assistance for salmon fishery disasters under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Emergency funds were approved in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, and their California counterparts, Sens. Diane Feinstein and Kamala Harris, sent a letter Wednesday to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries division urging action before the end of 2017.

Read the full story at The Oregonian

Removal of Klamath Dams Would Be Largest River Restoration in U.S. History

October 25, 2016 — “The eagles are perched up here in the tree,” says Mike Belchik, a fisheries biologist for the Yurok tribe, whose lands extend 44 miles from the Pacific Coast inland. “The osprey is dive-bombing them.”

Belchik claps loudly to break up the birds. “They both live around here and they fight all the time,” he laughs.

People along the Klamath once fought bitterly over this river, too. But that’s beginning to change.

Four hydroelectric dams may soon be demolished along the Klamath, near the California-Oregon border. Hundreds of miles of the Klamath would run free to the Pacific Ocean — opening up the largest river restoration in U.S. history.

What’s made this possible is compromise, forged over years of negotiation, among upriver and downriver interests, in California and Oregon, farmers and tribes and fishery advocates.

Two incidents of deep and painful loss, in 2001 and 2002, sparked this new era. First, the federal Bureau of Reclamation cut off water supplies to almost all irrigators on the Klamath Irrigation Project upriver, to protect water flows to endangered fish, including salmon. Angry farmers who were losing their crops converged at the main irrigation canal’s controls in Klamath Falls, Oregon, turning the water back on. A crowd of 18,000 cheered them on.

Read the full story at KQED

To Protect Native Culture, Bring Back the Salmon

October 25, 2016 — The people who have lived along the Klamath River for millennia are now facing crisis levels of violence, disease and depression. Diabetes and heart ailments run rampant in their communities, and suicide rates have skyrocketed.

To save his people, Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, believes there is one thing to do: Bring back the salmon.

“We’re salmon people,” says Hillman, a tribe member in his early fifties who lives in the riverside town of Orleans. “Our very identity is based on salmon.”

His tribe, working with the neighboring Yurok and Hupa tribes, has been at the front lines of the political battle to save and restore the Klamath’s dwindling Chinook runs, both by demanding better management of water flowing out of the upstream reservoirs and by calling for removal of four dams that make hundreds of miles of salmon habitat inaccessible. In protests and marches the Klamath basin tribes have often targeted PacifiCorp, which owns the Klamath’s dams. They have crashed company meetings and even dumped bucketfuls of toxic river algae – which thrives in the slow-moving, sun-warmed reservoir water – on the front steps of PacifiCorp’s Portland, Oregon headquarters. They’ve done the same several times at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Sacramento office.

The tribes, working together as the Klamath Justice Coalition, have also negotiated over dam removal with state and federal agencies, and soon their efforts are going to pay off. The giant concrete barriers, built between World War I and the 1960s, are now slated to be removed – which will certainly go down in the books as one of the greatest environmental and cultural victories in the West.

Salmon, primarily Chinook but also coho, were the core of many California Indians’ nutrition, wealth and culture. For young Karuk boys, catching and killing a Chinook was an important rite of passage, and the villages along the river subsisted on salmon almost all year. Of several seasonal runs of Chinook, the spring run was the most plentiful and important on the Klamath. Using nets and spears, fishermen caught tens of thousands of the big fish, which often weighed more than 40 pounds. Tribes on other river systems along the north coast of California and in the Central Valley were similarly dependent on Chinook salmon.

Read the full story at KCET