Nez Perce Endorse Breaching

The Nez Perce Tribe has formally endorsed the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River as a way to save endangered runs of salmon and steelhead.

The resolution passed Tuesday by the tribe’s executive committee cites the Nez Perce’s cultural and religious reliance on the fish “since time immemorial.”

Breaching the four dams between Pasco and Lewiston is one of the options being considered for fish restoration in a $20 million study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Based on that study, the National Marine Fisheries Services this year is expected to recommend a course of action to Congress, which will make the final decision.

Tribal officials said in a statement that they based their decision on various studies showing that breaching the dams is the best hope for the fish, which once returned from the Pacific by the millions each year.

Last year, about 10,000 steelhead and chinook salmon returned to the Snake, along with two sockeye. The river’s last known coho salmon was counted in 1986.

The Nez Perce reservation was located along the Clearwater River, a tributary that joins the Snake at Lewiston, so the tribe could always harvest salmon, as guaranteed in its 1855 treaty with the U.S. government, tribal Chairman Samuel Penney wrote in the statement.

Penney acknowledged that breaching the dams would end barging and power generation and have other economic costs.

“The single largest cost involved in the status quo is the virtual disappearance of salmon in the upper Columbia River Basin, and that is an unacceptable cost to the Nez Perce Tribe,” he wrote.