Broken Promises

Dams have blocked salmon's passage, driving them toward extinction and violating tribal fishing rights. The money will fully fund Native tribes’ plans to bring fish back to the region.

Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum means the Salmon People in the language of Native Americans who have lived along the Columbia River since time immemorial. We follow the lives of three Columbia River tribal people confronting the collapse of salmon populations.

Citing a ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting investigation into toxic contamination in salmon, the Oregon senator and others across the Pacific Northwest are calling for policy changes and more funding but are lacking details on next steps.

Native tribes in the Columbia River Basin face a disproportionate risk of toxic exposure through their most important food. While tribes have pushed the government to pay closer attention to dangerous chemicals and metals in fish, that hasn’t happened. So, we did our own testing. What we found was alarming for tribes.

OPB investigative journalist Tony Schick shares this reporter's notebook. "Salmon have been endangered my entire life," he writes. "Here’s what I didn’t realize until I started reporting."

Damming the powerful waters of the Columbia River was a boon for cheap, clean electricity. But the fish that swam those waters are dying out. And the agency in charge isn’t stopping that.

Data reporter Irena Hwang thought counting fish to evaluate the hatchery system in the Pacific Northwest sounded like a fun project. That was before she started asking biologists about what the publicly available data could really tell us.

The U.S. government promised Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest that they could keep fishing as they’d always done. But instead of preserving wild salmon, it propped up a failing system of hatcheries. Now, that system is falling apart.