Tribes Join Forces To Renew Watersheds Outspoken Salmon Advocate Will Head New Department

Columbia River Indian tribes are looking to the source of all salmon runs, the region’s watersheds, in the campaign to save endangered Northwest runs.

The Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission has created a watershed department and named as director outspoken salmon advocate Donald Sampson, the former chairman of the Umatilla tribes.

The commission represents the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes, which have treaty rights to Columbia River salmon.

Sampson, a fish biologist by training, wants to showcase the tribes’ approach to salmon recovery.

He hopes the Umatilla tribes’ successful reintroduction of a spring chinook run to the Umatilla River in northeastern Oregon can be a model for the rest of the basin.

The tribes’ efforts come at a critical time in the salmon recovery effort.

The federal government has spent more than $3 billion on salmon recovery in the past 15 years, with no sign of success.

“We’re saying, ‘Look, if we use the Umatilla model in other basins, we can show results,”’ Sampson said.

The Umatilla project included streamside restoration, introduction of hatchery fish and agreements with irrigators. The Confederated Umatilla Tribes, working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and using federal money, reintroduced a run of spring chinook to the Umatilla as part of an effort to re-establish naturally spawning populations of fish.

No spring chinook had returned to the Umatilla between 1920 and 1987.

Sampson said he and a staff of three will coordinate the four tribes’ watershed restoration projects, working with state and federal agencies and private groups.

Will Stelle, the regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, welcomed Sampson’s continuing role in the salmon debate.

“A step-by-step, watershed-by-watershed approach, I think that is absolutely the right way to go,” Stelle said.

While the debate has bogged down in political and economic rhetoric over the hydroelectric dams, Stelle said the work being done in the watersheds shows that progress can be made in other areas.

“The fisheries agencies and the Northwest Power Planning Council have stepped up efforts in watershed restoration,” he said. “The tribes are playing a major role. It will be important to do it right, and I can’t think of anybody who is better suited to keep it on track and on course than Don Sampson.”

Scientists say the restoration of salmon depends greatly on clean spawning areas that are not adversely affected by irrigators drawing too much water, cattle trampling stream beds or loggers cutting trees too close to streams.

Conservationist Bill Bakke, director of the Native Fish Society, agreed that watershed improvements are a key to salmon recovery. But he questioned using the Umatilla project as a model.

He said there is no evidence the runs will be sustained in the long term, and he criticized the use of hatcheries to repopulate streams. Scientific research shows hatchery stocks genetically weaken wild stocks, Bakke said.