On Thursday, the Biden administration announced its support for preparing to breach the four Lower Snake River Dams.
The Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, have been fighting for years to bring the dams down to restore #salmon runs.
Actually breaching the dams will require an act of Congress.
The initiative provides federal funding, and also commits the Department of Interior to analyze the dams’ impact on tribal treaty rights and provide “a comprehensive acknowledgement from the federal government of the dams’ profound negative effects on every aspect of these tribes’ ways of life.”
The tribes efforts are also supported by the states of #Washington and #Oregon.
Also a good time to mention that in my own reporting on dam removal in other river systems, tribal scientists have told me that the point isn't just saving salmon --- it's restoring whole watershed ecological health.
But non-Natives love salmon, so salmon are using their good name to educate people about the need for dam removal.
In March, the chairs of four #PNW tribes met in D.C. with a senior advisor to Biden. They invited him for an unprecedented visit the Columbia River Basin.
When he arrived in June, tribal leaders shared a traditional #Indigenous meal with him at the Yakama Nation longhouse, and presented him with their Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative.
“For us to be able to take him along to our village sites that were flooded by the dams, to take him to our fishing sites so he could see our continued connection to ceremony and to culture and salmon was really beneficial,” said Corinne Sams (Umatilla).
The result was a historic court filing last Thursday that paves the way for the breaching of the four dams in the Lower Snake River.
Additionally, federal grants and loans will go to tribally owned clean energy projects that aim to produce “at least one to three gigawatts” of clean energy over the next decade.
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