Drenched

by Mallory Clarke

Shining silver bodies arcing up into the air, they seem like giant scaled fingers reaching upstream, clawing over riffles and cascades, dying to reach their spawning grounds. Salmon are our region’s silver wealth. Body by single body, they hoist nutrients from the sea up the sides of mountains where bears, trees, and coyotes ingest and thrive. Even the tiny stream larvae and their winged parents all benefit from this wealth. The birds and bears transport that bounty deep into the forests carried gently in their bowels. And someday, from dragon flies to giant cedars, they die, enriching the forest floor. And us all.

+++ Before any of my people arrived here from Europe, the people who lived here, on waterways connected to the Salish Sea or on the Sea itself, made their lives from fishing. Not just fish, but fishing, the cultural backbone of taking and caring for fish. I don’t pretend to understand all of what that distinction might mean, but I’ve heard from elders of various tribes, speaking or writing of this on a number of occasions. I can try to imagine. I got my first glimpse of that backbone in the 70s and 80s, during the time leading up to and beyond the Boldt Decision on Indian fishing rights and the Supreme Court review of that decision. That was a time when Native fishing rights were being decided in courts, but also in ports around Puget Sound. Native fishers were denied the purchase of ice and turned away from canneries to watch their fish rot. Then photos of the disintegrating fish were shared publicly as proof of Indian mismanagement of the resource. Small silent groups of non-Native fishers burned Native boats in the night, threw engines overboard, and destroyed nets. I heard Native leaders and elders speak with devotion and suffering about the impact of the loss of salmon on whole peoples. I was given a glimpse of what fishing meant to tribal members. It’s easier for us people raised in and around white culture to understand the economic devastation of such a thing, also real, than it is for us to understand the cultural impact.

+++ Fish politics are still hideous. Today, and I mean this very day, January 13, 2020, Scott Schuyler, an Upper Skagit tribal elder and head of Resource Management for the tribe told me what the Skagit River Hydroelectric Project does to salmon and to the river that carries the name of his people. It’s not good. I knew about coal mining, timber harvesting, industrial pollutants, beaver extirpation. I knew about beach armoring, making it impossible for salmon food like sand lance and surf smelt to reproduce. It didn’t know about my city’s hydroelectric project. He also told me that a return of salmon to the Skagit would begin to “heal his people.”

+++ I’ve always felt a bit smug that my city gets so much of its electricity from environmentally clean hydroelectric power. Over my lifetime, I’ve come to know that some of my worldly benefits cause great harm to others. My city grew from a village to a place I love with movies, museums, jobs, and family because of decades of cheap energy. I work over and over at staying awake, but the knowledge of harm can leave my consciousness from time to time. I’m not particularly proud of that, but occasionally, something will shatter my willful ignorance. Today it was a photograph.

+++ It was snowing hard in the town of Sedro-Wolley. We were safe indoors at a conference table inside the offices of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe. I leaned over an unrolled poster-sized photograph that Scott was holding down across the table top with his hands. It showed hundreds of fish, bull trout, steelhead, dolly varden, and rainbow, lying dead on the exposed floor of the Skagit River, just at the edge of the Gorge Dam. The water from that section had been temporarily removed as part of the electricity making process at the Dam. The fish hadn’t been warned, I guess, but they had nowhere to go anyway. They languished in small shallow puddles until even those were emptied. From Gorge Dam, it’s almost three miles down mountain to Newhalem where the water is returned to the river. Is three miles of river dewatered? Are all three miles covered in fish carcasses? How often does this happen? While millions of dollars are spent, thousands of human hours contributed, and dozens of legislative bills introduced to save the salmon, Seattle City Light routinely, blithely, kills endangered thousands.

+++ What’s the opposite of drown? I don’t know the word for what a fish dies of, squirming limply on the rocky floor of an empty river. I need to find out. Every time dam workers draw down the water level, thousands die. How many? No one knows. No one is allowed know, to go look. Certainly no one is allowed to identify species, or count, or enter data onto a spreadsheet. You can’t send a drone over because Homeland Security forbids it. Trespassers have to fear arrest.

+++ There are three dams: Ross, Diablo, and Gorge. Seattle City Light’s website tells us what they think about water flow, “The three developments are hydraulically coordinated to act as a single project and supply approximately 20% of Seattle City Light’s power requirements, while providing instream flow conditions favorable to salmon and steelhead reproduction and rearing downstream of the Project.” Removing the river is not mentioned. Leaning over that giant photograph of the dewatered section of the river, I thought, this hurts, but still I have no idea what looking at this does to people who have a centuries old and centuries deep cultural relation to it. Rocky, muddy, drained, and full of dead fish. Does it look like the end of a lineage? Does this look like a lingering death for knowledge of fish and boat, now no longer possible to pass down? And a separate question for me personally, how long will I remain paying attention? How long can I keep this painful picture in my mind?

+++ On December 15, 2019, Janelle Anne Schuyler, a 19-year-old member of the Upper Skagit, wrote a letter to Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan. She explained the impact of the dam and asked for a meeting. At the date of this writing, she has not received a response. Can you join me in asking Mayor Durkan to read and answer Jannelle’s letter?  Mayor Durkan can be reached at 206-684-4000, and jenny.durkan@seattle.gov