Living Landscapes: Plateau

The changes witnessed by today's Salish and Pend d'Oreille elders over their lifetimes have been, by any measure, astonishing. Our elders grew up fishing alongside parents and grandparents who fished in the same way that their parents and grandparents fished.

The streams they knew as children and young adults teemed with native fish, with breath-takingly large bull trout, abundant westslope cutthroat trout, mountain whitefish, northern pikeminnow, and Arctic grayling. During spawning seasons, they traveled in family groups to the same places their ancestors had camped and fished for millennia. They caught fish and watched aunts and grandmothers split and dry them. During winter, they opened the parfleches that held the dried fish, and they enjoyed the abundance.

But the all species the Tribes fished for for thousands of years, especially bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout, depend on very cold water and are therefore vulnerable to warming temperatures. As a member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, University of Montana’s Dr. Steve Running served as one of the authors of the UN’s report on the state of climate change and was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC. Dr. Running and others have projected, in coming decades, dramatic reductions in the region’s snowpack. As a result, streams will become drier and warmer in late summer and early fall.

In these interviews, which you can watch by clicking on any of the images at right, Tribal elders reflect on the changes they have seen in streams and lakes over the last 70 to 80 years and the tragic toll our modern society have taken on our native fish.

After watching the videos, reflect on how a changing climate will affect tribal cultures that have fished for bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout for thousands of years and whose cultural traditions are based in part on a tradition of fishing for native trout.