Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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Green Douglas firs where the waters cut through

Down her wild mountains and canyon she flew

Canadian Northwest to the ocean so blue

Let's roll on, Columbia roll on

Your power is turning our darkness to dawn

Roll on, Columbia roll on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Travel with me to the place that we now know as the Pacific Northwest, to the Columbia River, which flows for over 1,200 miles from the Canadian Rockies through Idaho, into Washington, and then Oregon, before emptying into the Pacific.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Before white settlers, and missionaries, before boats, barges, and dams, and before broken promises, the Columbia River was brimming with life. Indigenous tribes fished the Columbia's plentiful waters. If you stuck your hand in the water, you might just catch a fish. No, seriously. Every year, tens of millions of salmon made the pilgrimage back to their birthplace, to the spawning grounds of the Columbia River to carry on the survival of the species.

Randy Settler: You could go out on this river and set one net, and you harvested enough fish that you didn't need to set a second net. I swam in this river when there was hundreds of thousands of salmon. It's a different feeling when you have so much life that's using this river as ways to get to their final destination.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's Randy Settler, a Yakama Tribal fisherman. Now, the salmon were so bountiful along the Columbia River. They were in many ways the foundation of life for Indigenous tribes like the Yakama, who have lived in these ancestral lands for thousands of years.

Katie Campbell: The Columbia River is home to several Native American tribes that refer to themselves as the Salmon People. My name is Katie Campbell. I'm a documentary filmmaker with ProPublica, and I'm the director of the documentary film Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family's Fight to Preserve a Way of Life. The Yakama people have been fishing for salmon since time immemorial. It's been the bedrock of their economy. It's not just food that they eat, it is a major source of their diet, but it is also the basis of their cultural practices and their religious and spiritual practices.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Salmon People highlights the story of Randy Settler and his family.

Randy Settler: My connection to this land, knowing that if I look west, if I look north, if I look south, if I look east, that our families are buried all along this river. Our ancestors are buried here in that there was great civilizations here of people who were able to do great things. We drank the river water, we bathe in the river water. We lived on the banks of the river year-round.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Columbia River is not what it once was. Today, the river is a major source of hydroelectric power, but the salmon are disappearing. Along with them, the Salmon People who are fighting to preserve their way of life.

Randy Settler: On the Yakama Reservation, I caught my first big fish when I was two or three years old.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Takeaway spoke with Randy Settler, who vividly recalls the first fish he ever caught.

Randy Settler: I was fishing with all my family, my brother, other families that were all around us. We were all related, and got that fish up that was probably as big as me, I mean, In terms of length. The oldest of the boys that was there, he told me that I had to give that fish to an elder, that was a custom and tradition, and so carried that fish up, past our home, gave it to his grandmother. Her name was Mary. She prayed for me and thanked me for the catch in our traditional language, our Yakama Nation language. My whole life has been about fishing

Melissa Harris-Perry: The number of salmon on the Columbia River has dwindled from tens of millions per year to just over a million. There are many reasons for that. Extensive damming, overfishing, habitat loss, and now climate change. In order to understand the present and future of the Columbia River, it's important to understand its past. The declining health of the river, and it's salmon populations are inextricably linked to a legacy of oppression that the Columbia River's Indigenous tribes have endured. Here, again, is Katie Campbell.

Katie Campbell: A lot of the Pacific Northwest tribes were forced to sign treaties under the threat of violence in the 1800s, but those treaties guaranteed that the tribes would have salmon forever. In the years since then, the US government broke those agreements in several ways. First, immediately after signing the treaties, the US government let commercial fishers deplete the salmon runs to the point that the salmon runs were collapsing. Overfishing was the first blow.

Then the federal government started building dams in the 1930s. Today, there are more than 400 dams that have been built in the Columbia River Basin. Those dams have drastically altered the river, blocking salmon from spawning habitat and destroying tribal fishing sites and villages. That is a direct violation of the treaty language signed by the US government with the tribes that reserved the right for the tribes to fish in all of their "Usual and accustomed places".

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Melissa Harris-Perry: That legacy is personal to Randy, which he can trace back directly to his ancestor, Tuekakas, also known as Old Chief Joseph.

Randy Settler: It's been a struggle, not just for my family, but thousands of families to maintain that connection to the salmon.

Melissa Harris-Perry: More on that when we come back on The Takeaway.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. We're continuing our look at the Salmon People of the Pacific Northwest. We've been talking with Randy Settler, a Yakama tribal fisherman. His great-great-great-grandfather, Old Chief Joseph, advocated for peace with white occupiers and signed an early treaty with the US government in 1855.

Only a few years later, the government betrayed the treaty, seizing almost all of the tribes' remaining land. Throughout the next 100 years, stretching into the 1940s and '50s, the Yakama people were repeatedly and forcefully removed from their land to make way for dams and even nuclear weapons facilities. Here's what Randy Settler said.

Randy Settler: The United States government removed people from the Columbia River forcefully to reservations, and those that wouldn't remove, they were killed and sold into slavery. That relocation happened into the 1940s when the government was building the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where they built the atomic bombs. Those people that lived in those areas, bands of the acclimation were removed. Bands of other tribes besides the acclimation were removed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Throughout this history, the tribes of the Columbia River sought to have the treaties enforced through the courts.

Randy Settler: We, as tribal people, had to litigate even into the early 1900s. Throughout the 1900s, tribal people were trying to exercise their treaty rights to provide their ceremonial food and any kind of commercial opportunity that they had. It's been a struggle, not just for my family, but thousands of families to maintain that connection to the salmon.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Even as commercial fishing grew, so too did activism. Here, again, is filmmaker Katie Campbell.

Katie Campbell: State Governments, Washington, Oregon spent several decades adapting laws that cut Native Americans out of the salmon harvest. As an act of civil disobedience, Native Americans would fish without a state permit, and they would hold fish-ins as public protests. Tribal people would often get harassed, or threatened with violence for fishing. When Randy was eight years old, he saw his parents being arrested for the first time, dragged into a police car for fishing.

They were arguing that they didn't need to have the state's permission because they had these treaties with the federal government that guaranteed them the right to fish for salmon. Some of those arrests became the basis for lawsuits that challenge those state laws, and then some of those lawsuits went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped reclaim the treaty rights, securing the right to half of the harvest of the fish and establishing the tribes' right to regulate their own salmon harvest, and even have a say in managing the river and the salmon.

Melissa Harris-Perry: While there were some victories for the Salmon People, the fight has now shifted to a new front.

Katie Campbell: It's interesting, as Randy has grown up, the fight and the work has changed. It became more about making sure that there's actually fish to catch. By the time the tribes reclaimed their access to salmon, more than 100 different populations had been driven extinct, and many more were on the brink. Tribes began the work of resuscitating salmon runs with habitat improvements and hatcheries that they themselves had specifically designed to aid wild fish.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There are over 60 major dams in the Columbia River Basin, and once they were built, salmon habitats were lost. Additionally, the explosion of commercial fishing that followed after the dams were constructed, and the overfishing that resulted, has further decimated salmon populations. Indigenous tribes of the Columbia River Basin are waging a multi-front fight to restore salmon populations and preserve their way of life. After fighting for the right to fish their ancestral land, they're now up against another threat, climate change. Here again is Katie Campbell, filmmaker and director of the ProPublica film, Salmon People.

Katie Campbell: As temperatures rise in rivers and oceans, salmon struggled to survive. They are cold-water fish, so if the river water is too warm, salmon stop migrating upstream. Then it also contributes to things like algal blooms and parasites and diseases can thrive. Salmon can't reproduce, and they end up dying from stress and disease. Tribal people have seen these die-offs.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the spring of 2022, the tribal catch for the early season of Chinook, a species of salmon, was just over 1 million pounds. It was the worst spring season in 22 years. Randy also says that the fish have gotten smaller.

Randy Settler: The majority of our fish are all smaller. Even in the larger runs where we had the largest salmon, the summer Chinook, we're fortunate if we see a 26, 27 pounder, when back in the early '60s, we could catch salmon and they would be well over 30 pounds and bigger, 40 pounds, 45 pounds.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Months into President Biden's administration, the White House met directly with leaders of the Columbia River tribes.

Katie Campbell: The Biden administration acknowledged that what is happening on the Columbia River is an environmental justice crisis. Over the next year, the administration says it will decide whether to take what is considered an unprecedented step of removing some of the dams within the Columbia River Basin system, and reintroducing salmon to areas of the Columbia where they'd been extinct for nearly a century.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Despite the US government's history of broken promises to the Yakama people and other Columbia River tribes, Randy Settler is hopeful, but also acknowledges the realities of the continuing struggle.

Randy Settler: The President did more for tribal people in a short two-year time period than we've ever witnessed in our life. I, for one, applaud him, but it's just a short period of time. The amount of degradation, the amount of environmental changes that have occurred, not one administration, not two administrations are going to benefit the changing environment we're in.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For the tribes of the Columbia River Basin, the fight continues.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: As we finish our conversation with him, he summoned the perseverance of salmon as a source of inspiration to carry on the fight of the Salmon People.

Randy Settler: There's this thinking that fish don't have no feelings. Now, I've been on those banks, on those rocks, looking down in the water, and I've seen these fish jumping up those falls. It's truly amazing. Once in a while, you'll see a salmon that jumps and gets hit by a different cascade of water, and it forces that salmon to the bank. You're looking at that salmon and it's flopping, it can't get back into the water.

I've seen those males come out of the water and bite onto those fins of that female and dragged her back into the water. It's truly remarkable. You talk about Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit, the spirit of the salmon. These living things that we value so much and we've been linked to so long, to see their journey, it's remarkable. No matter what I can say, until you see it, you can't really believe how these salmon care for each other, so that's what I'd like to share.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks to both Katie and Randy for sharing their insights and experiences with us here at The Takeaway. If you want to know more, you can watch the ProPublica film by Katie Campbell called Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family's fight to Preserve a Way of Life. It's available for free at propublica.org.

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