Bringing Salmon Home to the Columbia River – The Tyee

Aug. 15, 2024

An Indigenous-led, cross-border approach has seen great successes. But it needs BC and Canada’s ongoing financial support.

The Columbia River was once the source of the greatest salmon runs in the world. Millions of life-giving sockeye and giant chinook swam upriver to spawn each year.

The Columbia’s headwaters are in British Columbia. The upper 40 per cent of the river winds through the province before entering the U.S. in Washington state anAd emptying into the Pacific in Oregon.

An epic 2,000-kilometre journey.

But massive dams, beginning with Grand Coulee in Washington, have blocked salmon from returning to the headwaters of the Columbia River for almost a century. In the 1960s, under the Columbia River Treaty, more dams were built without consultation with our Indigenous nations on our unceded territories in B.C.