Tag Archives: Yakama Nation
Could Columbia River sturgeon become a source of high-end caviar? The Yakama Nation is counting on it
Ancestors of the Columbia sturgeon first emerged more than 200 million years ago, during the Triassic Period. One reason they’ve stuck around so long is they’re built like tanks. In lieu of scales, sturgeon have rows of armored plates called scutes, which run along their body. A long, flat snout conceals a mouth nearer their belly, from which they siphon up prey fish, like shad, lamprey, salmon and smelt. They can live 100 years and grow to 20 feet; big ones tip the scales at 1,500 pounds. One sturgeon could feed an entire village, and for centuries they did. >click to read< 10:50
Pacific Northwest Tribes Want Columbia River Dams Razed
Two Pacific Northwest tribes on Monday demanded the removal of three major hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River to save migrating salmon and starving orcas and restore fishing sites that were guaranteed to the tribes in a treaty more than 150 years ago.,, Proposals to merely curtail operations, let alone remove the structures, are controversial, and the prospects of the Columbia dams being demolished any time soon appear nonexistent. But tribal leaders said at a news conference along the Columbia River that the Treaty of 1855, in which 14 tribes and bands ceded 11.5 million acres to the United States, was based on the inaccurate belief that the United States had a right to take the land. >click to read< 10:18
Yakama Nation Treaty Rights: 1917 illegal-fishing conviction is finally overturned
Justice can come slowly. In this case it has taken nearly a century. It is the story of treaty rights, Washington’s belated efforts to correct wrongs and an 81-year-old Yakama man who sought for years to vacate his great-uncle’s 1917 conviction for illegally fishing. George Meninock was 77 when he told a court it’s his right to fish his family’s traditional site near the just-built Prosser Dam. That right, he argued through a translator, was protected by the Yakama Nation’s 1855 treaty that he had watched 14 chiefs, including his father, sign with Washington Territory Gov. Issac Stevens. Read the rest here 11:24
