Like many Northwest Native Americans, Ellie Kinley’s life changed dramatically in 1974. Kinley and her family were living in Seattle, where her father was an ironworker. But when a judge ruled that Washington tribes had a right to half of the state’s commercial fishing catch, Kinley’s family knew it was time to go home and return to the water.
Home was the Lummi Nation, a peninsula in far northwest Washington. The Lummis were signatories to the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, in which numerous Northwest tribes exchanged land to the United States for, among other things, the right to hunt and fish in their “usual and accustomed grounds.” That area includes much of the Salish Sea, the transboundary waters comprised of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, and Strait of Georgia. These three channels converge on the San Juan Islands, an archipelago near the Lummi Nation.
“We didn’t get conquered; we entered a peace treaty,” said Jeremiah Julius, chairman of the Lummi Indian Business Council, the tribe’s elected leadership. “[Native Americans] ceded every inch of Washington state. We gave up these lands, but we never gave up the water.”
For 120 years after the treaty was signed, those rights were routinely violated. Washington was regulating the methods by which Indians could fish — by banning gillnets, for instance — and was allocating tribes tiny shares of the state’s commercial catch, depriving many Indians of a potential income as well. Some Native people continued to fish despite the regulations, routinely facing arrest and violence.
But in 1974, U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt ruled that, per the 1855 treaty, tribes were co-managers of fishing along with states, and they had rights to half the commercial harvest. The Boldt decision immediately opened up a cultural and economic lifeline for Native Americans that had long subsisted on fishing. Kinley’s father was among the many who returned to the tribe’s traditional industry; today, she is part of the largest tribal fishing fleet in the country. Her son runs the family’s 61-foot purse seiner — called Salish Sea — which is one of 650-plus boats captained by Lummi fishers. Three years ago, Kinley and her husband established a reef net, a near-shore fishing technique used by Coast Salish tribes for millennia.
“There hasn’t been a generation in my family that hasn’t fished,” Kinley said. “Just at some point, we turned from subsistence fishing to where we started doing it for a living. My dad’s dad owned purse seiners. My husband’s dad owned a purse seiner. I married a fisherman. I’ve fished from San Francisco to Togiak, Alaska.”
Kinley is also a member of the tribe’s Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office, a four-person team tasked with a huge job: protecting the rights enshrined in that 1855 treaty. Many of the office’s battles have centered around salmon and the Lummi Nation’s access to the fish, but its latest challenge is perhaps the most complex yet: saving the region’s dying orcas.
The southern resident orcas, a subspecies that frequents the Salish Sea, eat almost exclusively chinook, the largest and fattiest salmon that can top 50 pounds when mature. In the Lummi language, orcas are qwe ‘lhol mechen, which translates roughly to relatives under the waves.
Their relatives aren’t doing well. Once numbering in the hundreds, just 76 southern residents are left, 13 fewer than when they received Endangered Species Act protection in 2005. So, on a cold, rainy morning this April, a collection of Lummi elders and government representatives set out for the San Juan Islands to conduct a ceremonial feeding, the intent of which was spiritual: for the Lummi to communicate support for the orcas, and to seek guidance from their ancestors on how best to help the whales. After a ceremony on the shore of Henry Island (the journalists that tagged along were asked not to disclose details), we motored offshore, where Julius slipped one live chinook into the water with a blessing by hereditary Chief Bill James.
Southern resident orcas persisted for millennia on the planet’s largest runs of chinook salmon. European settlement has, over the past three centuries, decimated that once monumental food source.
The ceremonial act was also the start of something more tangible. In June, the tribe unveiled a pilot project in which fishers such as Kinley will attempt to ferry live salmon they catch into the orcas’ vicinity, if the whales are nearby. Later, the Lummis hope to establish a forage pen, perhaps multiple, in the San Juans. In these pens, they would raise and release hatchery fish that, in theory, can give orcas access to extra food. The goal is to have a budget and location for the pens finalized by the end of 2019.
The forage pens, those in the Lummi sovereignty office believe, could prevent individual whales from dying in the near future. But they could also be a segue to a larger-scale campaign to improve the health of orcas, salmon, and the broader sea. If the Salish Sea is too unhealthy to support orcas, they reason, then it’s too unhealthy to support the fishing people who live off the sea, too.
“When we’re trying to save the killer whale, qwe ‘lhol mechen, we’re saving ourselves,” Kinley said. “There’s not a distinction. It’s saving both of us.”
Orcas are some of the most versatile predators on the planet. They occupy every ocean and use myriad hunting methods. In the Arctic, a pod will charge an ice floe, creating a wave that pushes seals off the ice. Orcas have been filmed in New Zealand using a series of tail-fluke slaps to flip sharks onto their backs, thus immobilizing them. Bigg’s, or transient, orcas range along the West Coast, feeding on a variety of marine mammals — seals, sea lions, dolphins, and other whales.
The three pods — J, K, and L — that make up the southern residents persisted for millennia on some of the planet’s largest runs of chinook salmon. The orcas could more or less move from north to south, following chinook runs throughout the year, from rivers and sounds in British Columbia to California. Virtually every river in the region had robust chinook runs.
European settlement has, over the past three centuries, decimated that once monumental food source. Enormous dams were erected along the Columbia in the mid-1900s for flood control and hydropower, in the process blocking salmon migration (the fish spawn in freshwater, and then grow to maturity at sea). The Sacramento and San Joaquin are two of the most heavily plumbed rivers in the world. Huge amounts of their water is shipped to farms and Southern California cities. Only one Puget Sound river — the Skagit — still supports runs of all five salmon species.
Salmon runs have declined precipitously as a result. On the Columbia, for instance, it’s estimated that between 11 million and 16 million salmon and steelhead would return each year before Europeans settled the area. In 2018, 1.15 million salmon returned — about one-quarter of the estimated Native American harvest before settlers showed up. Chinook that spawn in the Sacramento in the winter and the Columbia in the spring are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act; seven other runs are listed as threatened.
Lack of salmon is just one issue harming the orcas. A major dent in their population took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when amusement parks and aquariums began capturing the southern residents, which were easy to find in their routine Puget Sound waters. At least 50 whales were captured and taken to aquariums and theme parks; a dozen more died in the process. Lummi leaders for the past two years have called for one of these whales, an orca at the Miami Seaquarium called Lolita and dubbed Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut by the Lummis, to be returned to the Salish Sea, where they propose she be held in a sanctuary pen. (The Seaquarium maintains that the whale, captured in 1970, is unfit for survival outside the aquarium.)
The remaining orcas live in an increasingly urban zone. Pollution from Vancouver, Seattle, and other coastal metros has contaminated the water, and since orcas sit atop the food chain, they digest a pollution distillate by eating toxic fish that eat toxic plants and invertebrates. The high concentration of long-lasting polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) found in orcas led researchers in 2018 to conclude that half of orca populations around the globe are at risk of dying out.
The region’s urbanization also means a bevy of ship traffic in the orcas’ home waters. Cruise ships, container ships, commercial fishing vessels, Navy submarines, oil tankers, and passenger ferries bombard the Salish’s narrow channels with noise — a nightmare for animals that rely on echolocation to hunt and communicate. In the near future, it appears this issue will only get worse. The expansion of Canada’s Trans-Mountain Pipeline, approved by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in June, could alone result in a sixfold increase in tanker traffic at the Port of Vancouver. According to environmental group Friends of the San Juans, approval of all proposed terminal expansions would mean a 34 percent bump in Salish Sea vessel traffic over 2018 levels.
“We’re all fishermen. I don’t have a boat, but my father and brother all had boats. Every family is like that. It’s part of our total being.”
All this leaves the orcas with a trifecta of problems. There are few salmon, and vessel noise makes it harder for orcas to hunt them. When the whales go hungry, they metabolize blubber laden with toxins that weaken their immune system and reduce reproductive success. As a result, the population has no clear path to recovery. Optimism ran high following a 2015 “baby boom” year in which six calves were born. Four years later, half of those calves are dead.
“The southern residents have not met recovery goals that we set for them,” said Lynne Barre, who oversees orca recovery efforts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Their population has continued to decline in recent years. We’re seeing reduced reproduction and increased mortality. These are not good signs.”
Last summer, public awareness of the orcas’ plight reached a level unseen since the captures in the 1970s. On July 28, 2018, a calf died shortly after it was born. The death was a familiar blow in J Pod, where birth rates have plummeted, but the response by the calf’s mother was something the world hadn’t seen.
For 17 days, J35, a 20-year-old orca nicknamed Tahlequah, pushed her dead calf through the water. She covered more than 1,000 miles, diving to retrieve the calf’s carcass when it slipped to the depths. Her act, pumped into international consciousness through social media and news reports, moved millions. Even some scientists found themselves affected beyond impartial observation.
“It’s real, and it’s raw,” Deborah Giles, a researcher with the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology, told the Washington Post at the time. “It’s obvious what’s happening. You cannot interpret it any other way. This is an animal that is grieving for its dead baby, and she doesn’t want to let it go. She’s not ready.”
Tahlequah’s tour galvanized a sense among some that enough research had been done — it was time to take action. Just a month later, J50, a whale called Scarlet that was part of the baby-boom 2015 births, was sick. Together with researchers from NOAA, Lummi tribal leaders and fishery staff boated ahead of J50 and tried to slip her a medication-filled salmon to eat. The goal was to see whether fish could be a useful vessel to deliver medication to the whales. There was no evidence J50 ate the fish, and the young orca was confirmed dead a month later. But for the Lummis involved, the experiment inspired something larger.
Raynell Morris, director of the Lummi Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office, has spent her professional life linking tribal self-governance with economic wellbeing. She started off in banking, and then led economic development offices for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The latter gig catapulted her to the Clinton White House, where she served as an associate director of intergovernmental affairs. She retains a political edge honed in D.C. I spoke with her the day after Trudeau approved the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, and she was livid.
“I’m completely appalled that Trudeau and his cabinet are so two-faced that they can say they consult with Indigenous peoples, and they care about climate change and the environment, but they make this decision on [Trans-Mountain] based on — he said — economy and environment,” Morris said. “Really? For who?”
In leading the Lummi sovereignty office, Morris follows her mother and sister, who advised the tribal council on sovereignty and treaty matters in the 1980s, when the Internal Revenue Service was trying to levy a tax on tribes’ fishing revenue. Morris has led campaigns that give her office, relative to its size, a disproportionate amount of clout.
For more than 20 years the Lummi fought a shipping terminal north of their reservation that would have become a thoroughfare for sending Montana and Wyoming coal to Asia. The terminal was to be located in a Lummi fishing village that was hundreds of years old and laden with artifacts. But the tribe, leveraging its 1855 treaty rights, argued the terminal would have decimated its fishing grounds, and the Army Corps of Engineers denied the permit in 2016.
One year later, the tribe achieved a much quicker win when a fish farm near the San Juans failed, spilling an estimated 150,000 nonnative Atlantic salmon into the Salish Sea. While state and federal regulators debated the best course of action, Lummi, worried the Atlantic salmon would snap up forage fish necessary for chinook, responded immediately with an emergency fishery. Tribal fishers caught more than 43,500 Atlantic salmon — 90 percent of all the nonnative fish that were recovered. Once the emergency fishery ended, the tribe lobbied the Washington state government to shut down Atlantic salmon net pens. The following session, lawmakers passed a bill to phase out the fish farms by 2025.
Unlike most contemporary environmental crusaders, many Lummi people still live off the land, giving them a visceral understanding of current conditions and a strong desire to preserve a way of life for their children and grandchildren. They are keenly aware of the environmental decline because of traditional knowledge passed down over generations — they don’t need a quantitative study to know that salmon runs are a fraction of what they once were, or that it’s extremely difficult to find cedars big enough to carve out an ocean-worthy canoe.
That gives the tribe a nuanced and pragmatic approach to these issues. One reason Lummis know the orcas need more salmon is that they, too, need more salmon. In 1985, according to tribal figures, Lummi fishers made an average of $54,000 per year in today’s dollars, much of that coming from commercial salmon harvest. By 1993, that figure had fallen to about $9,800. The tribal fishing fleet today is about the same size as it was in 1985, “but the harvest has dropped by more than 60 percent,” Morris said. She declined to provide statistics on the Lummi Nation’s current fishing economy, but it’s clear that a living wage is harder to come by for fishers.
“To think that wild salmon are going to come back in the next decade in the numbers that are needed to stop the extinction of orcas is foolish.”
Nonetheless, many families maintain deep connections to fishing. Julius, who fishes for salmon and crab, was on a boat as an infant; he told me with obvious pride his son started piloting the family vessel in his early teens. Kinley’s two sons fish; one of them took over the family seiner after her husband died last year.
“We’re all fishermen,” Morris said. “I don’t have a boat, but my father and brother all had boats. Every family is like that. It’s who we have always been. It’s part of our total being.”
That’s one reason the sovereignty office wants to use its hallmark speed to go after the orca issue. “These animals are being permitted into extinction … at some point, common sense should weigh in,” said Kurt Russo, a policy analyst with the Lummi treaty protection office. “It’s a fossilized process that cannot respond to emergencies.”
Orca proponents have a well defined wish list: Drastically improving the quality and amount of salmon habitat. Breaching four dams on the lower Snake River that restrict salmon passage. Stricter pollution controls around Salish Sea cities. Establishing reserves where commercial fishing and shipping isn’t allowed. A reduction in overall ship traffic, or advances in quiet-motor technology.
But those are goals that will take decades to accomplish; short-term solutions are also critical. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, created an orca task force and signed five bills into law this year that, among other things, increased the distance ships must maintain from orcas and expanded the range of the Salish Sea where tugs are required to transport oil tankers. But these measures don’t address the primary issue: too little food.
That’s where the Lummi Nation’s treaty rights, fishing fleet, and role as steward of area waterways come together in the form of their hatchery proposal. Tribal leaders are working with guidance from scientists at the Whale Sanctuary Project on what’s called a “head-start” hatchery, in which salmon smolt would be reared in a saltwater net pen for over a year, and then released into waters the southern residents frequent. By keeping them in the pens, the fish acclimate to the area and are more mature upon release, thus making it likelier they will stay nearby and boosting their odds of survival to adulthood.
“The orcas eat hatchery fish. We eat hatchery fish. Not because it’s what we wanted — it’s something we’re forced into,” Julius said. “To think that wild salmon are going to come back in the next decade in the numbers that are needed to stop the extinction of orcas is foolish.”
Morris said the project has been communicated with NOAA; Barre, who oversees the orca recovery there, declined to comment on the proposal.
It’s not the first attempt at this. Since 2017, a privately funded net pen operated by the South Vancouver Island Angler’s Coalition in Sooke, British Columbia, has been allowing smolt to mature in much the same fashion, and releasing them in hopes they’ll provide enough fish for orcas and anglers alike. This year, the project is permitted to release 500,000 juvenile salmon; the goal is to eventually release 2 million a year.
“Orcas are so joyful. When they’re connecting with one another and roaming and feeding, they’re happy.”
“If there’s lots of fish out there, we’re not going to be fighting who gets the fish between commercial, recreational, and First Nations. And if we put more fish out there, there will be enough food for the killer whales to survive and thrive,” said Christopher Bos, president of the South Vancouver Island Anglers Coalition. “It was a proactive approach.”
According to Jeff Foster, a rehabilitation coordinator with the Whale Sanctuary Project, these pens aren’t a perfect, long-term solution. “This is a band-aid for the time being until we can restore habitat so wild runs can start coming back,” Foster said.
However, more groups are considering salmon-based approaches to helping the orcas. Giles, the University of Washington scientist who also works for the nonprofit Wild Orca, is among a group of conservationists who wants a portion of the annual commercial salmon harvest reserved for orcas. The latest research from NOAA is pinning down where and when southern resident orcas eat throughout the year. That data, Giles said, could be used to adjust fishery quotas and leave more salmon for the orcas.
“If we want to increase the population of whales, we need to increase the amount of fish in the system,” Giles said. “We’ve been saying these whales were the original harvesters. Having them factored in as a line item in the salmon budget, if you will — that’s what we’re asking for.”
The rain eventually subsided on the April morning of the ceremonial feeding. A calm settled over the west side of San Juan Island, where we had moored for lunch. By boat, the archipelago’s 172 islands that are central to the Lummis’ traditional territory emerge from the mist like bison on a flat prairie. Kingfishers and osprey perch on shoreside madrones; sea lions lounge on rocky beaches. Kinley would later tell me that, even though her father never pointed out old Lummi fishing villages in the islands or explained to her that generations of Lummi plied the same waters they did, she always felt a strong sense of home when she was in the islands.
Morris, that morning, seemed refreshed. “This work rejuvenates your spirit,” she said. The water was glass; a bald eagle perched overhead. “It gives you the vision that where we’re going is the right way, and you’re not alone.”
Despite Morris’ contentment, there were many reasons to worry about the Lummis’ relatives under the sea. There was the expectation of a dramatic rise in ship traffic. The 2019 chinook run was expected to be a poor one. J17, Tahlequah’s mother, was in deteriorating health.
But the relationship Morris feels to the whales helps her stay focused. Citing Tahlequah, Morris explained the connection. “When you’re carrying a dead baby — I feel it. I’m a mama,” she said. “The age of the orcas, the grandmas, I mean, what they have to witness in their pod, their people, is heartbreaking. But yet, if you watch them, they’re so joyful. When they’re connecting with one another and roaming and feeding, they’re happy.”
Weeks later, after Morris announced the net-pen project, she explained that ancestors appeared during their ceremony, and urged today’s Lummis to act with a sense of urgency for the orcas. For the sovereignty office, that means long hours of intergovernmental communications and poring through thousands of pages of environmental impact statements — conditions that aren’t conducive to speedy progress. But, Morris knows that the net pen could be just the thing to kickstart a solution, finally, to a problem deeply impacting her nation.
“If they thrive,” Morris said of the orcas, “we thrive.”
