The Nez Perce Tribe noted the article on U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley’s tour of the proposed reconstruction of Wallowa Lake Dam. We were pleased that fish passage was on the senator’s mind as a required part of reconstruction. It is certainly on ours.

Most of Northeast Oregon, and all of Wallowa County, is the homeland of the Nez Perce Tribe and our people, Nimiipuu. In our Treaty of June 11, 1855 with the United States, we reserved rights exercised since time immemorial, including the right to take fish at all usual and accustomed places, and rights of hunting, gathering, and pasturing animals on all open and unclaimed lands. The tribe’s reserved rights are continually exercised by members to this day.

The importance of Wallowa Lake within our homeland cannot be overstated. Wallowa Lake simply is a sacred place to our people. Its cultural, spiritual, and biological significance is unique. Our Tribal Nation has stepped forward repeatedly over many decades to defend the lake and its environs from harm.

Biologically, Wallowa Lake was one of the great sockeye salmon lakes of North America. In 1916, a grave injustice was done when Wallowa Lake Dam was built without fish passage. Earlier downstream dams, now gone, also blocked sockeye migration, but what was done to Wallowa Lake remains a concrete barrier to this day. As the dam was used to store and divert water to irrigate the valley, salmon were blocked from their lake and their own immemorial lifecycle, leaving once abundant fishing grounds barren.

Fast-forward 100 years. Today the Nez Perce Tribe and salmon are facing a proposal to merely continue the same injustice: a proposal to rebuild the dam without a fish ladder, in the service of time and cost savings. Have we learned nothing over the past century?

But under today’s laws, dam reconstruction requires fish passage that allows salmon to pass “volitionally” (of their own power). The irrigation district dam owner is proposing a “trap and haul” program where salmon would be captured below the dam, loaded into a truck, and released above the dam. It makes no sense that for the next 100 years salmon would swim 600 miles upstream from the ocean to within yards of the lake, all to be captured for a truck ride through Joseph and around the dam.

Trap and haul can be biologically useful in an initial restorative stage, and the production of fish, with trap and haul, will be an interim component of fish restoration at Wallowa Lake. But it is not a permanent substitute for volitional passage. That is unacceptable for our tribal nation, the fish, and Wallowa Lake. The irrigation district may think trap and haul is the cheapest option, but that is myopic. Who would pay for trap and haul (hundreds of thousand dollars per year) for the next 100 years? The district? The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife?

True volitional passage can be developed through independent engineering that questions all assumptions to date. And in the long run, volitional passage will be much less expensive than hauling salmon around the dam for the next 100 years. (Though cost is no excuse under the fish-passage law.)

No one expects the irrigation district to pay for a fish ladder. Our tribal nation will work with national conservation groups and state and federal agencies to secure funding to engineer and build volitional passage into reconstruction, at no cost to the district.

We remind them that the Nez Perce Tribe helped them to secure the Oregon funding and congressional funding they have already been given. We did that not to rebuild a private dam with public funding, but to address the 100-year injustice caused by blockage of Wallowa Lake, and the historic opportunity to provide true fish passage.

The article quotes the irrigators saying that fish ladders “are not part of the conversation anymore.” We put them and Oregon elected leaders on notice that a fish ladder will be a key part of the effort going forward. The 100-year moment to ensure long-term volitional passage is now — there will be no “just do it later” opportunity.

Further discussion of trap and haul alone as “good enough” will only serve to delay the start of reconstruction. A grave mistake was made 100 years ago. We will not repeat it, or cut corners, or kick it down the road. We will do what is right — completely and diligently right — at a moment that deserves nothing less for our descendants, the fish, and Wallowa Lake itself.