NELSON, British Columbia — For thousands of years, the stretch of the Columbia River that passed through Kettle Falls, Washington, was so full of life that it was said you could cross it on the backs of salmon.

But in the early 20th century, major dam construction — most significantly the Grand Coulee Dam — blocked salmon from migrating upstream to spawn. From then on, a way of life that had lasted millennia ended abruptly.

“My grandmother’s earliest childhood memory was going to Kettle Falls,” says Aaron Fitzpatrick, a registered member of the Colville Confederated Tribes (CCT) and Sinixt Confederacy.

Kettle Falls was once one of the Pacific Northwest’s most significant salmon fishing grounds with historical reports of Indigenous fishers catching from 400-1,700 large salmon a day. Two centuries ago, at least 10 million salmon, like the chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and sockeye (O. nerka), swam the river. Today, that number is 1 million.

“When the salmon used to run before the dam, [my grandmother] went out into the center of the river and watched her father net salmon,” Fitzpatrick tells Monagaby. “Salmon was our lifeblood before the dams.”

Now, after decades of advocating to bring salmon back to Kettle Falls and the Upper Columbia River (shwan-etk-qwa in the Sinixt language), Fitzpatrick and other Sinixt are beginning to have some hope. In September 2023, the federal U.S. government signed a $200 million agreement with a coalition of tribes to reintroduce salmon above the Grand Coulee Dam into the Upper Columbia River system over 20 years. Almost a year later, the project is now in full swing.

“For us Sinixt, we’re not going to be whole as a community and as a people until the salmon are returned to the Upper Columbia,” he says.

For many, it’s also an effort to address a legacy that led to their peoples’ extinction status.

Salmon reintroduction to right a historical wrong

For around 10,000 years, the Sinixt, or Lakes peoples, lived in the mountains and along the waterways in the upper reaches of the Columbia River. All once a large connected territory, it is today bisected by the U.S.-Canada border.

Along this mighty shwan-etk-qwa, the Lakes peoples both consumed and revered the bountiful salmon that would pass through. However, in 1956, after waves of smallpox and displacement by settlers and miners pushed the Sinixt south to live on the Colville Reservation in Washington, the Canadian government wrongfully declared the Sinixt extinct.

This extinction declaration meant the Sinixt no longer had a claim to their traditional territory. Their land was handed over to the province of British Columbia, which, within a few years, built more dams along the Canadian and northernmost stretches of the Columbia. Villages, burial sites and fishing grounds that the Sinixt and their ancestors had frequented for thousands of years were swallowed up by reservoirs and lost.

It wasn’t until 2021, after decades of attempts to gain recognition as a people and access to their traditional territory in Canada, that the Supreme Court of Canada reversed their extinction status and officially recognized the Sinixt as Aboriginal Peoples of Canada.

Jarred Michael Erickson, a Sinixt member and chair of the CCT— which represents 12 tribes, including the Sinixt, in the U.S. — says that funding and implementing this salmon reintroduction program is an important step in righting this historical wrong.

“The push has never stopped. All of our life evolved around the river and the return of the salmon,” Erickson tells Mongabay. “It’s taken this long to get here, but I’m glad we’re actually getting some groundwork done because it’s going to take a lot of work and money to get it done.”

A cold-water refuge in Canada

Catching and consuming salmon in their traditional territory in Canada is a dream many Sinixt south of the border have. And although salmon are being reintroduced on the U.S. side of the border only — hatchery chinook are released in Northport, Washington, and swim up the Columbia River into Canada — the Sinixt are hopeful they will be part of salmon reintroduction programs north of the border, in Canada, and work collaboratively to monitor and track the success of current and future efforts upstream.

There is another good reason why Canada’s share of the Upper Columbia River system stands out: Other river systems may struggle to provide healthy fish habitats due to rising water temperatures from climate change.

“The waters are much colder in th[at] Upper Columbia River system. These drainages have cedar trees; it’s the largest inland temperate rainforest in the world,” Fitzpatrick says.

In recent years, other nations in Canada also launched an Indigenous-led reintroduction program in the Upper Columbia River. While Sinixt people like Erickson applaud anyone working to bring the salmon home, he hopes Canadian officials will take reconciliation seriously and include the Sinixt in reintroduction efforts.

“We’re the most impacted, least mitigated of any tribe anywhere,” Erickson says. “The loss of salmon, the flooding of our village and grave sites — we were declared extinct. Our artifacts, our remains, our ancestors are exposed more and more, and we’re still not being consulted like we should up there.”

Passing a salmon through a dam

Federal funding for the Upper Columbia salmon reintroduction program will follow a phased approach overseen by the Upper Columbia United Tribes (UCUT), a coalition of five tribes based in Spokane, Washington. The CCT is a member and represents the Sinixt and other tribes in the area.

Casey Baldwin is a biologist and the senior manager for the CCT’s salmon reintroduction program. He has spent years working with UCUT members to make the project a reality.

“The first phase was to begin to understand what potential there might be if salmon were to be restored and reintroduced,” Baldwin tells Mongabay in an interview. “Then we spent a couple of years developing this detailed implementation plan called the P2IP or Phase 2 Implementation Plan.”

Phase 2 is the phase that received $200 million in federal funding and is expected to take at least 20 years to complete.

Currently underway, it involves examining salmon releases, testing assumptions about salmon survival in the reaches above the dam reservoirs and looking into possible designs for fish passages when the salmon encounter dams. Phase 3 will then include decision-making and what designs or solutions they should employ.

In Baldwin’s opinion, once they finished sketching the ideas for their plan, managers like him were able to get the support and funding opportunities required to make a project of this size and scale a reality.

It was their ceremonial and educational salmon releases that helped secure government funding, he says. They have always practiced these, but in 2019, some members of the Sinixt had an idea and got excited.

Managers changed protocols so that some of the adult salmon from hatcheries that were normally killed, put on ice and handed out to tribes for food were instead captured alive, tagged and released upstream above the dams. Colville tribes also released and tracked hundreds of juvenile hatchery salmon as an early test to see if reintroductions could be successful.

One release was particularly memorable — a juvenile salmon swam all the way down into the Pacific and two years later came all the way back up as an adult.

“When one adult chinook returned from the first release, we were very happy and encouraged,” Baldwin says. It was released above 14 dams, “so getting one fish back from a small release was quite an accomplishment. It showed that it was possible and gave folks hope.”

As a scientist, Baldwin acknowledges that these early releases fell short of what was needed regarding sample size and statistical rigor. But he stresses how they were crucial in moving the reintroduction project forward and getting funding.

“And it provided this proof of concept that if we put fish here, they can get out and they can come back,” he says.

Remembering the salmon

For the last 80 years, members of tribes, including the Sinixt, have been returning to Kettle Falls in a ceremony to remember the salmon and call them home.

Shelly Boyd, a Sinixt woman from Inchelium, Washington, has helped co-lead an annual salmon ceremony at the site for years.

“We call Kettle Falls sx̌ʷnítkʷ (swaneekt), the place of the noisy water,” Boyd says. “We hit rocks together, and we pray and sing songs that have been sung there for millennia. Sx̌ʷnítkʷ was the sound of the salmon, and they said you would hear them [the salmon] for miles. This is their language and we are calling them home.”

Fitzpatrick is also one of the Sinixt members who returns to the site each year.

“It’s hard not to tear up and cry because before the dams, there would be as many thousands of Indigenous people gathered there. … Now we’re not even allowed to camp there unless we have our archaeologists with us. We have to seek permission to be there,” Fitzpatrick says.

But for Fitzpatrick, the ceremony is also a deeply meaningful experience. He compares it to a pilgrimage.

“Coming to Kettle Falls, for us Indigenous people, is like going to the Mecca or the Vatican. It’s a symbolic and spiritual experience. We’re consuming the salmon, remembering the salmon,” he says.

While there is still work to do, with a $200 million agreement in place over the next 20 years, Erickson feels strongly that the journey to reintroduce salmon to the Upper Columbia is not just about fish but more about restoring an ecosystem and a culture that was connected to it for millennia. He also hopes Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who call the Columbia River home will see this effort pay off in their lifetime.

“I’m hoping everyone can see that we did a good thing here,” Erickson says, “that we tried to reestablish the system and make it whole again.”

 Shelly Boyd, a Sinixt woman, co-leads the annual salmon ceremony at Kettle Falls and keeps tradition alive by singing songs that have been sung there for millennia. Image courtesy of Inchelium Language & Culture Association, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and Sinixt Confederacy.