Parksville, BC, Canada / The Lounge 99.9
Jan 22, 2021 10:39 AM
Tribal biologists have confirmed that chinook and steelhead salmon are spawning in the upper-Columbia River system in Washington state for the first time in 80 years. The discovery of 36 “redds” (where a female salmon deposits her eggs) along a prime eight-mile spawning stretch of a tributary of the Columbia called the Sanpoil River confirmed the Colville Tribe’s suspicions. It’s the culmination of decades of dreaming, and years of work, which one can hear in the words of Crystal Conant, a Colville tribal member of the Arrow Lakes and SanPoil bands, when she spoke to Eli Francovich at Spokesman. “I was shocked at first, then I was just overcome with complete joy…I don’t know that I have the right words to even explain the happiness and the healing,” she said. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville System have been planning and researching how it would be possible to restore salmon populations to the riv