Cindy Marchand says re-introducing salmon to the Columbia River above the U.S. dams is important to the Sinixt, and salmon are only one part of the water body's ecosystem.
"Sometimes we think about salmon in a cycle, and you think about just the fish in the water," she said after a ceremony Aug. 21 on the banks of the Columbia near Castlegar.
"But salmon also need those clean, cold waters. They need the habitat. They need areas to spawn. They need riparian zones. We also have the animals that feed off of them, bringing those bones into the forest that's nutrients for our trees. So it's that whole cycle."
Marchand is fisheries and natural resources chair at the Colville Confederated Tribes. The purpose of the ceremony, held at Kp’itl’els, otherwise knows as Brilliant Flats, was to honour the arrival of salmon that the tribes had released into the river.
In July and early August, the confederacy released approximately 280 adult sockeye salmon and 1,100 adult chinook salmon upstream of the Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee Dams in the U.S. This was done in partnership with tribes in Spokane, Wash., and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
She said salmon survival is more at risk than ever because of warming waters and climate change.
"That's why it's important for us to take care of all of this," she said, gesturing to the river and the surrounding landscape.
"It's all intertwined. Without the clean, fresh waters, the riparian zones, the habitat that salmon need to spawn, it's not going do any good placing them in the water."
The Grand Coulee Dam and the Chief Joseph Dam have blocked migrating fish from 1,200 kilometres of the Columbia River and many tributaries since their construction in the early 1940s.
Jared-Michael Erickson, chair of the Confederated Tribes, said there is evidence that some of the salmon have arrived at the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers.
"The salmon have been gone for 80 years ... We've been trying to figure out ways, not just using our traditional knowledge, but using modern science, to show how (re-introduction) could be possible."
He said they first released fish into the Columbia in 2021 and each year's release adds to their cumulative knowledge.
Erickson, who is a professional wildlife biologist, said the salmon introduced this summer are able to migrate up the Columbia River as far as the Hugh Keenleyside dam in Castlegar, and some are known to have already arrived there.
Many of the salmon were equipped with acoustic tags that can be recognized by receivers along the river on both sides of the border. On the Canadian side, this has involved using receivers owned by BC Hydro, in an agreement with the power utility. This tracking will monitor the distribution and behaviour of the salmon as well as their spawning locations and spawning timing.
The Sinixt Confederacy will partner with Selkirk College to conduct drone work to monitor the salmon in late September and October to refine this data.
This initiative is separate from another salmon re-introduction project run by an Indigenous-led collaboration of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, the Ktunaxa Nation, the Secwépemc Nation, along with the governments of Canada and British Columbia. This initiative is known as the Columbia River Salmon Reintroduction Initiative (CRSRI).
Erickson said CRSRI declined a Sinixt invitation to participate in this summer's Sinixt initiative.
This reflects the ambiguous status of the Sinixt in the political landscape of B.C. The province and the federal government treat the Sinixt as non-residents of Canada despite the Supreme Court of Canada's 2021 decision that the Sinixt are aboriginal people of Canada as defined by the Canadian constitution. In 2023 the Sinixt asserted their presence in Canada by opening an office in Nelson from which they plan to study, and intervene in, fish and wildlife issues in B.C.
Marchand said the location of the ceremony at Kp’itl’els is meaningful to her because it was the home of her great, great, great uncle Alex Christian, one of the last Sinixt people to leave the Arrow Lakes region for the United States more than a century ago, forced out by encroaching settlement and mining.
Christian is known for having written multiple letters to the provincial government protesting the loss of his land and livelihood, and asking for the preservation of a nearby burial ground.
"My family was here years ago," Marchand said. "We were kind of almost year round here. This was our base camp, if you want to call it that. And we would, of course, go to hunt and fish, but we always came back to this area."
