Tribes Sell Salmon, Steelhead Directly To Public Faced With Low Wholesale Prices, Indians Resume Practices Of 1950s

For the first time in decades, American Indians like Bill Yallup Jr. are selling their Columbia River catch of chinook salmon and steelhead directly to the public.

They call it an “over the bank” promotion; part of a coordinated move to help tribal anglers make more money for their work.

Today, some 500 tribal nets are stretched across parts of the Columbia River from Bonneville Dam to McNary Dam. Fishers tend them all night long and bring in the catch by midmorning. Tribal anglers expect to catch about 72,000 chinook and 28,000 steelhead this season.

“Fishing is pretty good right now,” said Roger Dick, a fisheries technician for the Yakama Indian Nation. “This is probably one of the better years.”

Sales of fish caught by tribal members harken back to the years prior to 1957, when The Dalles Dam was built and flooded Celilo Falls, a premier Indian fishery that brought a constant stream of buyers to the river.

In the late 1980s, commercial buyers were paying $2.40 a pound for the chinook, Yallup said. Now, they pay 30 or 40 cents a pound.

“America is not the wonderful land of opportunity it used to be,” Yallup said. “We’re struggling. We have a wonderful, quality resource that is being sold for pennies.”

And most of the time, Columbia River salmon are marketed in other parts of the country and around the world.

To bring Northwest salmon back to the region’s dinner tables, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission - comprised of Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes - is going straight to the people who eat their fish.

Commission finance manager Jon Matthews said the tribes are working together to market more of their products, such as jerky and canned and smoked salmon.

“We’re trying to look at a long-term solution for the tribal fisheries,” he said.

Friday and Saturday, Indians sold their catches at Cascade Locks and The Dalles in Oregon and Roosevelt, a tiny town on the Washington side of the river.

While visitors won’t see Indians nabbing fish from scaffoldings, as they did prior to the falls flooding, they will get fish straight off the boat.

Chinook and steelhead are sold for $2 a pound and sales are cash only. Most of the chinook weigh 20 to 40 pounds, and the steelhead weight range is about half that.

On Friday, a steady stream of people stopped at Roosevelt.

Pasco’s Doug Alford put one chinook and one steelhead next to the fishing poles in the back of his pickup truck. “I fished for steelhead, but I haven’t caught one yet.”

But the salmon sale is more than a monetary transaction. On Saturday, tribal members put on dances, songs and storytelling events to educate non-Indians about the history and culture of the salmon harvest.

“In our mythology, the salmon has made a compact with the people here thousands and thousands of years ago to come back and be hunted,” Yallup said. What salmon ask in return is to be honored in feasts and be put to good use such as eating or trading.

“They were giving their lives for a good reason,” he said.

Despite all the changes of the last 40 years, the fall chinook harvest remains a special time for Indians, Yallup said. “Fishing is in our blood.”