On Lamprey, Reparations, and Restoring Biological Potential

This past weekend, I attended the Annual North American Rewilding Conference in Portland, Oregon. It was a wonderful and thought-provoking event, but one image presented by the keynote speaker David Lewis, PhD, really stuck with me. David is the principal consultant at Ethnohistory, LLC, and is well versed in the natural and cultural history of the Willamette Valley. His keynote address began with the Missoula floods, and included a fragment of Kalapuya oral history referring to the event, highlighting the 8,000 + year history of indigenous people in this landscape. The address moved towards the present day, documenting the scale and extent of ecosystem management, as well as the horrors and injustices of colonization and displacement of indigenous people from their traditional homes. 

Path of the Missoula Floods

(Image from www.radicalbotany.com) 

    The stories David shared about forced relocations, unfulfilled treaties, inhumane treatment, and degradation of indigenous people's sovereign rights in Oregon are hauntingly similar to stories that unfortunately make up the very fabric of what is today known as the United States of America (and Canada, and Australia, and Central America, and South America, and nearly every country on the African continent, and so many other places). Most non-indigenous people alive today live on stolen land, and figuring out how to acknowledge and make reparations for this fact is one of the great issues needing to be addressed to create a just and equitable future for all.

Nez Perce Woman with Camas (Camassia quamash) Harvest

(Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, Nez Perce National Historical Park,        Spalding, ID. Photo Number NEPE-HI-0773)

Modern Camas Harvest

(Photo from Haliburton Community Farm, Vancouver Island, BC)

    As David wove the thread of indigenous land management through to modern times, he related a story from the place that I call home, a story about lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus or Lampetra tridentata).

Adult Pacific Lamprey 

(Photo from wikimediacommons.com)

   David's story centered on Chief Halotish (or Halo), a Kalapuya chief who lived, along with 100 or so village members, east of Cottage Grove along the Row River. Chief Halo provided assistance to and befriended members of the Applegate family - one of the first white settler families in the region. Halo had become such an important part of the Applegate's lives that in 1856, when forced "resettlement" of indigenous people was underway throughout Oregon, Robert Applegate defended Halo's right to remain on his land by placing himself in front of the Indian Agent's gun. Though Halo didn't have any legal land claim (unlike white settlers, indigenous people were not considered American citizens and therefore were not eligible for land claims through the Homestead Act and other similar legislation designed to populate nascent states with white settlers), he was able to stay in the area by creating mutually beneficial financial relationships with settlers by helping out on their farms and homesteads. For more information on this history of settlement and displacement in Oregon's Willamette Valley, please check out Dr. Lewis' blog post - Chief Halotish Village on the Row River.

Chief Halotish

(Image from https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2017/03/15/chief-halotish-village-on-the-row-river/)

   One of the arrangements that Halo made concerned gaining access to lamprey, which are an important food source for people throughout the larger Columbia basin. Lamprey are an anadromous eel-like fish species who, like salmon, spend much of their adult lives in the ocean before returning to their natal rivers to spawn. Halo and a white settler named Walker came up with an agreement to build a fish weir on the Row River just east of Cottage Grove in order to harvest a portion of the seasonally abundant cutthroat trout, steelhead, Chinook salmon, and lamprey that made their way upstream throughout the year. Walker took the fish one day, Halo took the fish the next day. Halo also took all of the lamprey that were caught in the weir as Walker didn't want them. Lamprey weren't widely appreciated by white settlers (the state of Oregon even poisoned lamprey and other "trash fish" until the 1980's in a misguided attempt to improve habitat for salmon and trout), but for indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest, they are an important food resource and ecological indicator of riparian health.

Lamprey Cluster

(Photo by David Herasimtschuk/Freshwaters Illustrated-USFWS from "Defenders of the Forgetten Fish" by Ben Goldfarb in Hakai Magazine).

     Lamprey are a rich source of Vitamin A, Vitamin K2, protein, and fat, nutrients that are relatively hard to come by in non-industrialized food systems. These nutrients have been prioritized by people all over the world for millennia, and traditional food cultures from the icy Arctic Circle to equatorial Sudan have focused their food procurement strategies around providing ample supplies of these health-giving compounds. 

   Lamprey also play a key role in aquatic ecosystems by providing food to predators like sea lions, which takes predation pressure off of other species including salmon and steelhead. With large lamprey populations intact, everyone gets plenty to eat.

   Lampreys have been around on the planet for 400-450 million years. Today, 10 out of 34 species of lamprey living in the Northern hemisphere are endangered, 9 are vulnerable to becoming endangered, and 1 is already extinct. The reasons for their decline are many, but chief among them is the construction of dams along their historic migratory pathways that they are unable to navigate. Unlike salmon, lamprey aren't strong swimmers - they rely on unique suction organs in their mouths to help them move up and over rocks. But dams like those at Bonneville and the Dalles on the Columbia River, and even smaller ones like those at Dorena Lake and Cottage Grove Lake near my home, are impassable obstacles for lamprey. Some dams are equipped with fish ladders, but even with these in place, approximately 50% of lamprey make it beyond structures like the one below:

Fish ladder at Bonneville Dam

    And, most dams in the Pacific lampreys historic home range don't have fish ladders. Many were built before fish populations were considered important (to the folks who were in charge of their design - which at that time did not include many indigenous people by design). Dams like the ones near where I live and throughout the Willamette Valley were designed with flood control in mind, making the flat valley areas more suitable for annual agriculture and urban development. Most of them don't have fish ladders, and those that do are not very effective at passing fish. According to NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Office, "The Willamette Project has adversely affected those fish [salmonids and other anadromous fish...like lamprey] by blocking access to a large amount of their historic habitat upstream of the dams, and contributing to degradation of their remaining downstream habitat."

Flood Control Dams in the Willamette Basin

(Photo from http://southtownerotary.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Willamette-basin.jpeg)

   Ironically, the dam at Dorena Reservoir just east of Cottage Grove is likely very close to the site of the fish weir that Chief Halo set up to ensure a steady supply of lamprey. Today, lamprey are critically endangered in this part of the Willamette River watershed. What was once a productive fishery featuring numerous species of nutritious fish throughout the year has been functionally destroyed. The Dorena dam was completed in 1949, but prior to that logging and mining for gold and mercury depleted and poisoned the sediment beds that lamprey and other anadromous fish use for spawning. Today the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife discourages the consumption of fish from Dorena Reservoir because of potential mercury toxicity. 

Champion Mercury Mine East of Dorena Lake 

     The multilayered effects of displacement of indigenous people, disregard for their land and resource management strategies, imposition of narrowly focused and ecologically destructive design and construction projects has led to a loss of biological potential in most ecosystems, although these transformations have led to other opportunities. The area where Cottage Grove and other cities in the Willamette Valley now doesn't flood every winter. There is more farmland that is accessible throughout the year. There are trade-offs with every set of decisions, costs and benefits to be weighed. 

  The concept of biological potential and what we get used to as normal is also clearly exemplified by industrial forest management in western Oregon. Looking out at the hillsides surrounding the Willamette Valley, a patchwork of clearcut and replanted forest patches fill the view. This pattern is far from normal forest succession, and the ecological ramifications are many. So-called "forest management" is more aptly described as timber management, as intact forest ecosystems are cut down and replaced with monocultures of Douglas fir. All understory species are removed either by bulldozing or herbicide (or both), and all of the species and functional relationships that once existed in the forest are gone. What remains is a fragment, biologically speaking, of what it once was, and yet the dominant narrative about these "forestry" practices reiterates how these practices are necessary for economic health and social welfare. I would argue that these biologically impoverished ecosystems are taking more of a toll on our collective well-being - economic, social, and spiritual - than traditional economists would like, or perhaps are even able to, acknowledge. What does it mean that we see ruined ecosystems everywhere we look? What does it teach our children about how we treat the non-human world? How are those relationships perpetuated over time? At what point will we be able to say this isn't right?

Clearcut and log skidding scars in Western Oregon

(Photo by skypilot originally posted in "Shooting Aerial Wilderness Landscapes to Help Save the Planet")

    As we look back on historic and current decision-making and the resultant environmental effects,  the concept of biological potential is an important one to consider as a framework for guiding future management actions. The idea of biological potential gives an understanding of what has been lost, as well as fostering a sense of possibility for what can be restored. What are all the niches that can be filled in this particular ecosystem? How have they been filled historically? What decisions have been made that diminished this biological potential? What steps can be taken to regenerate it? Are we willing as a society to take these steps and sacrifice some of what we've come to accept and expect as normal?

  (Illustration by Greg Harlin, Wood Ronsaville Harlin, Inc.)

   We can't put the mercury back in the mine, but we can consider dam removal or retrofitting. We can't put the old growth trees back in the forest, but we can engage in sustained yield forestry that values intact forest ecosystems as well as modest timber yields. Would this change the nature of the industrial economy? Yes. Is this necessary for the future of all life on earth? Yes. 

  But what a legacy we create by designing for other species in our every consideration. We have the ability to meet our needs while leaving space for other species to thrive.

Looking downstream on the Elwha River in Washington after removal of the Glines Dam in 2014 - populations of Chinook salmon, steelhead, and lamprey are rebounding since removal of two dams on the river

(Photo from Joel Rogers / joelrogers.com)

   The time has come for a full scale accounting for the historical wrongs that have been done to people and ecosystems in the name of capitalist progress and nation-building to create what is known as the United States of America. What have we gained, and what have we lost, and is it worth it?

   Restoration and regeneration of ecosystems should also go hand in hand with reparations for the people who were unjustly dispossessed of their land and way of life. On a government level, conversations about reparations for stolen land and livelihoods for indigenous people (as well as payments for descendants of enslaved people whose unpaid forced labor contributed to the early economic prosperity of white slave and property owners in the nascent United States and other countries) are ongoing, and a UN report recently found that the history of slavery in the US justifies reparations for African Americans. For indigenous people whose land was stolen or where treaties were broken or never upheld, reparations often take the form of lengthy court battles with federal and state governments to recognize Tribal sovereignty and honor basic tenets of historic agreements.

   Novel initiatives including Real Rent Duwamish in Seattle are providing concrete ways for people to participate in reparations outside of government-mediated methods. Real Rent Duwamish offers residents of Seattle (and elsewhere) the opportunity to choose an amount they'd like to donate to Duwamish Tribal Services, who provide social, educational, health, and cultural services. They operate the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, which is a free museum, event space, and community center.

  Hopefully this and other similar platforms will continue to gain traction and participation as the intertwined nature our current economic and social context and the cultural and natural history of the land where we live are seen as mirrors of each other. And in order to do better in the future, the injustice and degradation that is a part of settler colonial history has to be acknowledged by those who benefit from it, and efforts made to rebuild relationships of trust, stewardship, interdependence, and mutual aid. Here's to hoping that the story of the lamprey continues on a regenerative path, and all that they touch and inform and mean to people will be considered important and valid.