After lunch, a crew from the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s (ONA) kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ hatchery in Penticton, B.C., arrives with 1,500 sockeye fry in oxygenated tanks. ONA fisheries biologist Tyson Marsel tells Mongabay they loaded the truck at 5 a.m., before setting off on the seven-hour journey.
As the crew transfer the finger-length fry to buckets, Thomas brushes the assembled crowd with the sweet-smelling smoke, inviting each person to cleanse. After a few short words from some speakers on the importance of restoring salmon to the watershed, drummers from the Shuswap Band, a member of the Secwépemc Nation, start up again. To the sound of a traditional song, community members — elders, knowledge holders, youths, biologists, fisheries technicians, and others, Indigenous and non-Indigenous — line up to receive fry in plastic cups and, with a prayer, send them on their way.
“It’s all about reconnection, it’s all about advocacy … and understanding the importance of salmon to us as people and to the ecology,” Thomas, who is also a Shuswap Band councilor, tells Mongabay in a follow-up phone call.
This year, the Shuswap Band hosted ceremonial fry releases in two communities, reaching 300 students in addition to community members, while the Syilx-Okanagan Nation hosted fry releases in three communities within blocked areas in the Upper Columbia Basin. The Syilx-Okanagan also hosts fry releases in the Okanagan sub-basin, which the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams have not blocked.
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Salmon reintroduction is feasible, Scott Cope, a recently retired biologist with the Shuswap Band, tells Mongabay, and has been demonstrated by technical studies undertaken by the Bringing the Salmon Home initiative.
Experimental releases by the initiative of tagged sockeye juveniles in the Upper Columbia Basin have shown smolts navigating downstream, past some dams, to the ocean.
Last summer, in another milestone, two tagged sockeye, released as juveniles in the Upper Columbia, returned to spawn. They were detected swimming back upriver near the Wells Dam in Washington state, just downstream of the Chief Joseph Dam.
The team has also tracked a small number of adult chinook moving into Canada, after being released upstream of Grand Coulee Dam by tribes, with some swimming as far as the first major dam. They have also translocated some Okanagan-origin adult sockeye to Arrow Lakes on the Upper Columbia River in Canada, with one seen moving into spawning grounds in 2024.
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/68030
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