Decision to close Columbia has tribe fishing for answers

The closure came after the spring salmon run turned out to be much smaller than predicted. As a result, salmon fishing on the Columbia River has ended, and that includes tribal scaffold fishing.

It's the first time scaffold fishing had been closed on the Columbia River because of a slim run in roughly a decade.

Meanwhile, sports anglers below Bonneville Dam are being allowed to fish for shad, a non-native member of the herring family originally from the East Coast that were introduced into the Columbia River in 1885 and have since thrived.

Now, tribal fishermen and river chiefs plan to meet with the Yakama Nation Tribal Council to dispute the closure of their traditional fisheries, said Johnny Jackson, a Yakama fisherman and chief of the Cascade band.

"We're not going to allow these things to happen," he vowed.
"We are going to make noise about them shutting down our scaffold fishing. The scaffold fishing never does affect the upper runs of the salmon. We mostly catch steelhead."

Traditionally, Native Amer-icans along the river dipped hand-held nets from wooden scaffolds or platforms anchored to the jagged basalt walls of the Columbia River Gorge.

Today, tribal members mostly use large gill nets to fish, a practice that is regulated each season. But the traditional scaffold fishing usually is open year-round.

Jackson, who lives along the Columbia River at his family's traditional fishing site, said he understands the regulation of tribal gill net fishing, which is mostly done for commercial purposes. But he doesn't get the restrictions on scaffold fishing, which is primarily for family subsistence.

"The only time they shut down scaffold fishing was for a funeral," he said. "The chiefs would shut it down for a while, and then open it up again."

But now Yakama fishermen will have to wait until the opening of the summer season, which begins June 16, before returning to their scaffolds. Jackson said they've lost more than a month's worth of fishing.

"I look at a lot of my fishermen here on the river, and they're struggling -- they've got to put food on the table for their families," Jackson said. "We're just getting taken for a ride."

Not so, said Steve Parker, with the tribe's fisheries department. Since the downgrade of the spring run, tribal fishermen have actually overfished their season allotment by about 4,000 fish, while sportsmen surpassed their total amount by about 8,000 fish, he said.

Fish biologists expected more than 260,000 salmon to return this year, but later the run was downgraded to about 180,000 returning fish. Originally, tribal members were allowed to harvest about 27,000 while sports anglers were allotted about 26,000, Parker said.

But after the downgrade, the total catch dropped to about 16,000 fish each for tribal and nontribal fisheries, he said.

Also, tribal commercial fisheries took about 4,500 more fish than expected during the one week commercial fishing for spring salmon was open,
he said.

"The thing that killed us was the run just wasn't materializing," he said. "This is not an example of bad management, it's an example of bad forecasting."

But that doesn't seem to be helping tribal fishermen waiting to go back work, said Jackson, who accuses tribal leaders of lacking understanding of traditional fishing.

"I remember when councilmen used to come around and talk to us on the river," he said. "They don't do that anymore."

* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 577-7749 or pferolito@yakimaherald.com.