The Endangered Species Act

The Point No Point Treaty Area, which includes Hood Canal and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, is home to two federally protected salmon stocks – Hood Canal / Eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca summer chum, Puget Sound bull trout and Puget Sound chinook. The fish were added  to the list of species threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act in 1999.

The listings didn’t come to a surprise to the tribes, who have been actively working for years to strengthen weak stocks and to protect and restore their habitats.

The Treaty Council has been the lead agency in developing various components of a comprehensive recovery plan for summer chum salmon. Included in the plan, which is expected to be completed at year’s end, are recommended strategies for dealing with habitat restoration, harvest issues, and supplementation issues.

Several steps have already been taken to reduce impacts to weak summer chum and chinook salmon stocks and enhance stock restoration efforts. These include:

– Eliminating fisheries directed at summer chum, and adjusting fisheries for healthy coho stocks, whose run timing overlaps that of summer chum stocks, to avoid incidental harvests;

– Participating since its inception in 1992 in a supplementation program based at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Quilcene National Fish Hatchery. Point No Point treaty tribal fishermen were key in getting the live summer chum necessary to begin the project by using beach seines to provide adult fish for spawning.

Habitat restoration efforts have been extensive, and are expected to intensify in the coming years.

The tribes and Point No Point Treaty Council staff are working with all interested groups – from federal, state, and county agencies, to local grassroots efforts – to develop salmon habitat restoration plans for listed and non-listed species. These efforts run from small culvert replacement projects that open up existing high-quality spawning habitat to returning salmon, to major mapping projects that specify where crucial marine habitat has been lost and how best to recover it.

The tribes believe that only through an integrated, holistic recovery plan for species listed under the ESA will populations be restored to levels that provide meaningful harvests for Indian and non-Indian fishermen in generations to come.