For thousands of years, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community has lived in and around north Puget Sound and its largest river, the Skagit. I have been blessed to fish these waters for 50 years. For generations, my family and our tribe were able to feed ourselves from the bounty of the waters we were careful to protect. In serving as the tribe’s chair, I know the hard work of preserving and restoring our salmon runs. I also know the Swinomish’s history of working collaboratively with the federal government, our trustee, to ensure adequate protections for our beautiful ancestral homelands and waters that salmon and many other species rely upon.
The federal Endangered Species Act prohibits “harm” to salmon and their habitat, as well as other endangered or threatened species and their habitats. Sadly, this federal administration is doing everything it can to kill the ESA, and as a result, the species it protects. If they are successful, Chinook salmon, killer whales and other species will lose a bedrock protection that federal law has provided for over a half-century. Swinomish is working with leaders of fellow sovereign tribal nations, along with many conservation partners, to fight back and protect the species which have always been — and always will be — intertwined with our tribe’s existence and way of life.
On Sept. 14, a new federal rule went into effect that redefines how the word “harm” is interpreted in the ESA. In essence, the new rule will now make it legal to kill and injure a protected species by degrading and destroying its habitat. The same day, the federal agencies responsible for enforcing the ESA doubled down by issuing memos that argue in order to violate the ESA, a person must affirmatively intend to directly kill a protected species.
In the agencies’ own example, if a protected species lives in a tree, it would be OK to cut down that tree and kill the animal so long as the purpose of cutting it down was something other than killing the animal. This view of ESA protection provides no protection at all.
During the rulemaking process over the past year, the federal agencies heard from conservation organizations, scientists, tribes and environmental stewards across the nation. We cited volumes of technical reports and peer-reviewed studies reflecting a scientific consensus that habitat degradation and destruction is the leading cause of species loss. Many of these papers were authored by the agencies themselves. Yet, the agencies tossed all of that aside. Instead, they chose to ignore over 50 years of precedent and the ESA’s 99% success rate of recovering endangered or threatened species. The Swinomish, along with tribal and conservation partners, are suing to stop them in the U.S. District Court for Western Washington.
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community are the People of the Salmon. A century of Western science validates our community’s traditional knowledge and practices for thousands of years in safeguarding the Skagit River watershed. We know that the habitat from the headwaters to the saltwater estuary is essential for salmon. And what harms salmon harms Swinomish. Our tribe’s sustenance, culture, identity, economy and spirituality are inseparably intertwined with salmon, especially king or Chinook salmon that was listed as threatened under the ESA in 1999.
As federal bureaucrats try to gut protections for the estuary and flood plain habitat that ESA-listed Skagit River Chinook salmon need, these reduced protections will be made even worse by rollbacks to the Clean Water Act and protections for roadless areas on national forests. Even though our request for government-to-government consultation was ignored, we will continue to work — and fight where necessary — to stop the erosion of protections for salmon and other species. Recovering Chinook salmon is too important to let a powerful few in Washington, D.C., destroy our collective inheritance.
The federal administration’s new interpretation of the ESA is the exact opposite of the ESA’s purpose and language, and violates our shared duty to steward habitat and wildlife for the next seven generations. It ignores both the science and success of the ESA and generations of knowledge and experience held by our tribe. Fortunately, we know that we do not stand alone in valuing the Skagit River and Puget Sound ecosystems that support the continued existence of our culturally important and iconic salmon and whale species. We will never relent in our efforts to fight any attempt to weaken the Endangered Species Act. We hope you will join us in this crucial effort.
