Can the blueback survive?

I look back at our history of our blueback and back then thinking we’re always going to have blueback. Come May and June, we’re going to be able to get fish to eat, I didn’t have to worry about that. Now this year we had to shut the river down and it did hurt. It did hurt and it was disappointing. This year has been one of the toughest. When you don’t have any blueback for a funeral, let alone a birthday or an anniversary, it breaks your heart. It’s who we are. It’s our foundation. That’s what it is to us, that blueback salmon. As long as I could remember attending funerals, weddings, birthday parties, I grew up with cooked blueback on a cedar stick just as my family has for thousands of years.

01:33 - Well, I used to go down there down at the mouth of the river and I’d be with my dad and he’d be catching all these blueback and I’d walk down the beach and the waves would be coming in and as the waves are coming in, the blueback would get washed ashore. I’d go running after trying to catch them, you know, never could catch them. They’re slippery and everything but there are so many fish out there. They were just all over down the mouth of the river then. Each season as I was growing older, my dad would involve me more in the fishing. And he would teach me: Watch this. This is what we have to do. This is the way we take the fish out. You got to be here at this time, you know. I learned a lot from him down there. Towards the end to my dad’s life he told me: Go get an education, son, because fishing’s not going to be here. I don’t know what it was that he seen that was out there that made him say this, but that was his teaching for me. I for one should have been able to look back and see that there’s a problem there. I kind of closed my eyes and said things are going to get better.

03:08 - Beginning in the early 1900s with homesteading and other land-use activities including logging for the World War I effort to collect spruce for airplanes, a lot of the mature forests about 99 percent of the mature forests in the upper Quinault Valley were removed. The river channel began to unravel. There just wasn’t room for the number of spawners that used to go into the upper river. There wasn’t any place for them to spawn anymore. If there is not intervention on the Upper Quinault River it will continue to deteriorate. We took this on as one of the most important objectives this nation is undertaking.

03:55 - The restoration plan applies to about 9,000 acres and twelve river miles of the Upper Quinault River from Lake Quinault up to the forks of the East Fork and North Fork Quinault River. Another key element is the lake fertilization program and the purpose of that program is to increase the productivity of the zooplankton and plankton populations in the lake, which provide the basic prey for the sockeye juveniles that rear in the lake. Our third component is blueback supplementation program. Every fall and winter we have crews that go out onto the spawning grounds of the Upper Quinault and collect spawners: adult sockeye males and females. Spawn them in the hatchery and then rear their eggs to fry that we release into the lake.

04:41 - We’re very aggressive in our treatments on the river in terms of building as many logjams as we can with the available funding we have. Fish are utilizing those habitats immediately so we’ll see sockeye in the same area we just treated earlier that summer, using a new habitat feature that has been created. Just finished a matter of a few weeks or a few months. So in that sense we’re seeing fish utilize these habitats right away. So that gives me some optimism that if we’re able to increase those areas of new habitat and continue the restoration effort throughout the reach that we’re going to start seeing a response.

05:21 - I was sure that through some good management, some sound science, we would find find some of the reasons for the decline and we’d be able to fix them. The big disturbing thing is the things that we don’t have any control over and that’s the way the climate has changed. We are at ground zero of the impacts of climate change. We are facing sea level rise and we’re also facing ocean acidification, warming ocean temperatures. In the upper reaches of the Quinault, an entire glacier has disappeared: the Anderson Glacier.

06:08 - It means that the the status of the blueback population now is more precarious than it was 10 years ago. So that puts emphasis on our work in the freshwater environment. We need to provide as high quality and high quantity freshwater habitats as we possibly can that allows opportunity for the population to adapt to the changing ocean conditions. If we can do what we can to ensure when they get here they’ve got a better chance than they did from the year before or the year before that. I think the problem is still solvable. It’s more difficult. It’s a more difficult problem than I had imagined.

06:59 - We need to look at at the condition of the Quinault blueback and its history and trend as the canary in the coal mine. This earth cannot go on the way that it is. We’re in trouble now and every day it isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. What we’re leaving for our kids, our grandkids and our great-great grandkids is frightening. The Quinault Nation is aggressively addressing the impacts of climate change and not only in the Quinault River system but across the country and around the world. Quite frankly we could not find leaders in Washington DC. I could hardly engage with anyone. I would talk about climate change, the room would get quiet, and then someone would change the subject. We went outside the United States and we began to reach out to other parts of the world on climate policy, on emerging and best practices in a scientific community. Every bit of the democratic process seems to be pandering to outside interests. We have to be a leader where there’s a leadership void.

People are willing to sell out, 08:21 - politicians are willing to sell out. Corporations are willing to make a profit at the expense of everyone and at the expense of precious resource for which no amount of money, no amount of insurance will ever recover or restore. The treaties appear to be the last line of defense to absolute annihilation of our natural world. We’re able to hold corporations accountable. We’re able to stop projects. We’re able to advance a clean healthy agenda. And it’s those treaties that our ancestors envisioned for this generation. You know I look at climate change as a people. As American people. I don’t care who it is. We should work together. That’s half the battle.

09:16 - When one is in a position of extreme adversity and when you’re facing adverse circumstances, there’s a simple choice. You could either crumble and become weak or you can realize there’s strength in pain. There’s strength in adversity. When our ancestors faced challenges, they never gave up. The blueback is a prized sacred resource that should not only be enjoyed by this generation, but for the next seven generations. We cannot give up. We have to know that if we work and live in a way that is true to our values, we can leave this place in a better state than we ever inherited it. .