Trailing California's Salmon and Their Stewards: The Salmon Fishing Crisis for Pacific Native Communities

April 6, 2023 marked the end of Chinook salmon fishing for many on the West Coast. The Western Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) acted first, halting commercial and recreational salmon fishing on the California coast (Pacific Fishery Management Council, 2023). Within the following hours, acting governor Eleni Kounalakis requested a Federal Fishery Disaster Declaration for Chinook salmon fisheries on the Sacramento River (California Governor, 2023). The frenzy to protect the Chinook salmon spread northwards on the coast. The PFMC’s decision extended upwards to Cape Falcon in northern Oregon. Within the next month, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) received a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Rivers (2023) to list Washington’s spring-run Chinook salmon as an endangered species, and a judge ordered the Southeast Alaska/Yakutat winter troll fishery to shut down for the summer season (O’Malley, 2023). Following the closures in California, the Department of Commerce approved Kounalakis’ request (California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 2023), while NMFS opened investigations into the center’s petition (KXRO News Radio, 2023) and the troll fishery (NMFS, 2023). The Alaskan investigation and case continues today, as do repeat recommendations from the PFMC (2024) and repeat requests from the Californian government (Kounalakis, 2024) for the closure of Chinook salmon fisheries. All the while, larger newspapers like The New York Times and The Guardian reported on the economic crash of salmon fishing on the West Coast, a regional event only witnessed once prior in the two centuries of fisheries’ existence.

This cursory observation of the Chinook salmon population and the growing fear of extinction amidst “record-low” salmon run forecasts overlooks the fears of Pacific Natives who have witnessed its decline for years. Before the 2023 closures, Natives involved in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission saw disease, overfishing, and economic takeovers through larger fisheries in the Pacific Northwest reduce salmon population sizes (Fears, 2016). Simultaneously, a report conducted by NMFS (2016) found population sizes well below viability targets along the North-Central and Central Californian coasts and deemed Chinook salmon at increased risk of extinction. But other closures only occurred in the 2008–2009 seasons during an economic collapse, and the worries of Pacific Natives went largely ignored. Even today, in the midst of these season cancellations, many argue that these worries remain unknown. When the World Trade Organization (WTO) adopted their Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (FSA), many praised it as the first WTO agreement to focus on global oceanic sustainability and ecological protection. Few noticed the absence of acknowledgment of Native sovereignty. The agreement lacked representation for tribal fishing rights and the coexistence of Native tribes alongside and within other national fishing communities, including through modern scenarios such as fishery-to-fishery cooperation, tribal consultation, and negotiation over aquatic resources between sovereignties (Crepelle, 2023). This is far from the first time that Native sovereignty has been forgotten with regard to aquatic resources. Rather, the repeat rejection of their rights to fishing is rooted in the two centuries that fisheries have existed and, alongside federal government, have disregarded Native fishing rights, tribal sovereignty, and Natives’ offered cooperation towards the protection of natural resources. This rejection paints a grim forecast for the future of Pacific salmon, their dependent ecosystems, and their consumption—one leading to an outcome already seen in Californian history—and tracing its past may help combat the issues faced by Pacific Natives for years and the rest of the Pacific now.

Regardless of which population one observes, the Chinook salmon as a whole is a keystone species in both the natural ecosystem and in that fostered by human communities. The necessity to protect these salmon and its predators, such as the orca, is pressing enough that the Wild Fish Conservancy filed against the Southeast Alaska/Yakutat winter troll fishery, the largest fishery in Alaska and a primary economic resource, to close for the incoming season. Meanwhile, tribes such as the Swinomish are entwined with the salmon, harvesting it as their primary source of nutrition and making feasts with them in all transitional ceremonies. Though examples pulled from the Pacific Northwest are well-known, largely in part by their appearance in larger newspapers and through historical events such as the Fishing Wars, the populations of salmon specific to Californian territory have been just as important to both communities. Evidence shows pre-contact peoples in regions of Northwestern California and the Central Valley, many lining the Klamath—Trinity and Sacramento rivers respectively, held “first-salmon” rites at the beginning of the salmon run. These rites often connected their respect for the salmon to their beliefs, or to prayers for abundant salmon harvests and good health for the village (Barrett, et al., 1908). The Yurok, Karok, and Hupa also built dams which functioned as part of the rites, as well as to increase salmon yield and efficiency. These were temporary dams. Villages further downstream who erected them, such as the Hupa by Trinity River, opened them to prevent overflow. After ten days, they took them down to preventing habitat destruction and unwanted conflict between tribes while the salmon swam further upstream (Swezey & Heizer, 1977). Pre-contact and early settler accounts suggest an abundance of salmon procured each season supported the ceremonies and celebrations recalled by the Swinomish.

These practices were disrupted en masse when settlers migrated to the Gold Rush. Over the first four years of the Gold Rush, at least 250,000 settlers would migrate to California, with 2,000 of those settlers stationing around the Trinity River. Only two years in, frenetic mining and disregard for the rivers and soil destroyed the rivers. Upturning mud for gold and dumping mercury-laden water in the absence of it clouded Pacific rivers. Wastefully diverting water for mining, gold panning, and settling onto the land disrupted the waterflow in the very way that the Yurok, Karok, and Hupa had tried to prevent (Norton, 2020). Natives were often killed for remaining on their homelands: settlers feared they would steal their resources. More commonly, many Pacific Natives, already being attacked through starvation as their food and their homes were demolished, fled from the plains to hills and mountains. At the height of the Gold Rush, no one was there nor left to steward for the Central Valley salmon nor the ecosystem that maintained the miners’ ability to reside on the West Coast.

Even when the settlements were given statehood and more migrated, it would take years for the United States to attempt to repair the damage done to the West Coast. Instead, before substantial change, the United States focused on occupation and expansion. They settled over the aggravated soil, endangered abundant animal populations, and offered Natives what remained, so long as they adapted to a changing territory under settler jurisdiction. Although treaties were made earlier promising many reservations through the region, including a twenty-five square mile reservation for the Winnemem Wintu along the McCloud, Pit, and Sacramento rivers, settlers lobbied against them, and none of the initial treaties were ratified (Houck, 2019). Instead, many who survived attempted genocide were pushed onto a one-mile reservation, twenty miles from the Klamath estuary, and expected to fish and grow crops. This included the merged group of Yurok, Tolowa, and Karok peoples; scattered Wiyot, Whilkut, Sinkyone, and Chilula peoples found south of the river; and eventually an entire village of Wiyot in 1860 (Most, 2007).

The quality of Californian rivers remained untouched for over two decades. Statehood and jurisdiction under the federal government, as well as the Civil War, were greater priorities to the United States, even as new reports of muddy rivers and disfigured riverbeds emerged. Federal awareness came about in 1871 when president Ulysses S. Grant established the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries (USCFF), but change came slower. A year after the USCFF was created, Livingston Stone, the first U.S. Deputy Fish Commissioner for the Pacific Coast, established a salmon hatchery by McCloud River in the Central Valley. In his first reports on the salmon hatchery, he observed the loss of salmon not only in the McCloud River tributary, but in the Feather, Yuba, and American rivers. Stone realized that all other available tributaries were unusable due to temperatures unsuited for fish spawning or mining operations that ruined the tributary; the only tributary he could use to repopulate the Sacramento River salmon was McCloud, and it had only remained so because the riverbeds showed no signs of having gold (Stone, 1874).

Stone’s work was indispensable to the repopulation of Chinook salmon in California. However, by his own admittance, his work would have been impossible without the help of the local Natives. Stone only managed to find the spawning grounds to begin with because someone had noticed the Winnemem, who remained on their ancestral grounds after their repossession, spearing fish by their spawning ground. Further, many helped Stone by constructing a hatchery dam, handling the salmon and their eggs, and working “from eleven o'clock one morning until four o'clock the next morning without taking any rest” when emergencies occurred (Stone, 1874). Despite this, the Winnemem have been ill recognized for their work, let alone as a tribe; the Winnemem are one of many tribes who were not federally recognized in 1994 and continue as such today. They have never been addressed on a federal level, including the 1941 Central Valley Project Indian Lands Acquisition Act which enabled government repossession of their land to construct the Shasta Dam: the act simply referred to “Indians”, even though it pertained to land on which they, the Hupa, the Pit River, and the Karuk had lived for generations. Despite their attempts, the Shasta Dam was completed in 1945, generating hydroelectric power and redirecting water through Southern California at the cost of Native lands and history. The Winnemen were the worst off immediately after its completion: they lost nearly all access to their ancestral lands, including a cemetery which was buried under the Shasta Dam, and federal recognition laws prevent them from accessing it (Houck, 2019). But the Shasta Dam and its sibling developments arrived with another cost that affected the Winnemen severely and would affect its creators soon enough: the Chinook salmon were endangered yet again.

The Shasta Dam is a permanent dam that blocks the northern end of the Sacramento River and its tributaries, including the McCloud River, to form the Shasta Lake reservoir. It is also one of the largest obstacles to the salmon of the Sacramento River. Winter-run Chinook salmon live in the reservoir and in the Sacramento River, but the dam prevents both groups from accessing the other. This locks the former out of access to the sea and the latter to high-elevation, ideal spawning grounds: both have contributed to lower fitness and spawn survival rates since the dam’s creation. Workers must transport both groups between the Sacramento River and the McCloud River to increase their survival rates (Bridge Bay Resorts, 2023). And while spawning odds may be the largest of present concerns for the Sacramento River, with time, they may not be the only ones: other constructions besides the Shasta Dam have shown that.
A far crueler example was shown northwards in the Klamath Basin, a tract marked by the Klamath—Trinity rivers at its southern end and their crossing over the California—Oregon border. The basin contained an intensive agricultural and fishing culture for both settlers and Natives, including the Klamath tribes, which frequently conflicted with low water supplies and extreme droughts. To combat this, four hydroelectric dams were constructed in the Upper Klamath Basin, sequestering the Upper Klamath Lake, the manmade Copco Lake, the John C. Boyle Reservoir, and the Iron Gate Reservoir from the Klamath River. These reservoirs and the irrigation system in the Upper Basin relied on tempestuous weather and federal management, which conflicted with environmental species policies in the region. Both converged in the 21st century. A series of droughts in the basin from 1992 onwards, endangering 1,744 farms and the Klamath wildlife, as well as inadequate government support for the farms boiled over in April 2002. Government deemed it safe to divert water from the reservoirs to the farms as the spring-run salmon returned. The resulting low water supply, exacerbated by another drought season, led to the confirmed deaths of 34,000 Coho and Chinook salmon through a parasitic disease made virulent in meager warm waters (Doremus & Tarlock, 2003).

Blame fell on the federal government for the mismanagement of reservoir quality, irrigation, and the creation of the dams that created the dependent reservoirs in the first place. To repair the harm done to the basin, three of the Klamath tribes, irrigative farmers, fishermen, and lower-level government convened and proposed the Klamath Basin Agreements (KBAs) (Guiao, 2012). The second of these agreements, which proposed the removal of the four dams in the Upper Basin, succeeded, and the dams are being drained and removed through the present year (American Rivers, 2023). The KBAs succeeded largely due to agency and tribal participation and the recognized sovereignty of the Klamath tribes. Their collaboration obligated the federal government to participate in the KBAs without proposing for the termination of tribal water rights (Guiao, 2012).

One can compare the Klamath Basin’s success to the Winnemem’s present fight to protect their remaining cultural sites against the proposed raise of the Shasta Dam and their struggles to gain ground through federal sovereignty. Although Guiao (2012) argues Native negotiation and collaboration could increase the chances of resolving Native issues, the case studies and parties discussed in her analysis all possess federal recognition and tribal sovereignty. Her analysis excludes a key difficulty in Native resolution: in the absence of tribal sovereignty, Native parties are placed at a significant cultural, economic, and political disadvantage. Unrecognized tribes like the Winnemem who rely on rivers, lakes, and their harvestable ecosystems are harmed more by the alteration and destruction of their habitats. The absence of tribal sovereignty forces them to utilize litigative, remonstrant, and political alternatives which can ultimately be less successful or less efficient. In a crisis like that of the Pacific salmons, especially one which coincides with similar climate and environment issues in the region, the efficiency of these alternatives may determine their fate even before their utilization. The lengthy periods in which relative legislation might fail after years of planning, as it did for the initial KBA after six years (American Rivers, 2023), or in which Native protests go unnoticed, as the Winnemem’s have since the Shasta Dam’s creation, may allow irreparable damage to endangered habitats. This will bleed into the cultures of those closest to the salmon and the rivers, then into the economies and industries that profit off of their destruction most.

Two centuries of commercialized fishing and federal fisheries have driven Pacific salmon to critical levels of endangerment. The most recent five-year report by NMFS (2024) on the Chinook salmon of the Sacramento River still classifies the population as endangered; while the threat of population decline has lowered, recovery attempts have increased its dependence on hatcheries and reduced its ability to adapt to environmental changes induced by climate change and ocean acidification. Similar concerns have been observed in reports on the Central Californian and Oregon Coast populations of Coho salmon and the Snake River population of Chinook salmon: all state that hatchery nurturing can be harmful in the long-term, and alternatives should be pursued to avoid it. One’s mind returns to the agreements made by the Klamath Basin, the demands of the Winnemem people, and finally to the FSA’s rulings on fisheries and wild fishing. To the latter, Kobayashi (2024) argues indigenous peoples should be addressed directly and offered individualized support, without generalization of indigenous peoples or comparisons to nation-based criteria that lies outside their control and ignores their positions within those nations. Though this essay analyzes specific populations of a species in a region and the people within that region, the WTO’s attempt to include them proves the framework of this scenario is a global one. A solution seems just as global, though it must be individualized: the people most affected by dangers to resources which comprise their livelihoods and cultures must be given a voice as well as power to protect them. Over two centuries, the West Coast regions in this essay have erected dams, irrigation systems, and fishing policies which have harmed endangered habitats without consulting the Natives who have known and cared for them for far longer. Tribal sovereignty is a start, but not enough; additional political power should be in Native peoples’ hands to protect the ecosystems of their habitats and the resources many rely on. And non-tribal parties on the West Coast must respect the sovereignty of these people and collaborate alongside them to promote an efficient, knowledgeable solution to the conservation of aquatic wildlife.

The newly-formed first Indigenous Marine Stewardship Area (IMSA) is attempting this now. In September 2023, Resighini Yurok, Tolowa Dee-ni’, and people of the Trinidad Rancheria formed an IMSA to protect the Northwest, North-Central, and Central coasts of California through express tribal sovereignty and cultural knowledge of the coastal wildlife. While they are still developing their jurisdiction and claim to the coasts, the state government has shown interest in cooperating and protecting the same coasts (Crepelle, 2023). One can see this as the beginning of acknowledgement and respect for Native knowledge of the Pacific aquatic wildlife, but one should not see it as the end. Still, it shows hope for the protection of Pacific wildlife. As another example of progressive Native action and active respect for its existence, a necessary act in protecting the salmon of the Pacific, it should be the first of many steps towards conserving critical wildlife, Native culture, and animal and human lives.