Tony Schick, a reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) joins the Exchange.
OPB, in partnership with ProPublica, produced a story on the Trump administration backing out of a deal with indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest that would've enables the removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River which are considered harmful to salmon.
ARTICLE EXCERPT
Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.
It was a remarkable step following repeated failures by the government to uphold the tribal fishing rights it swore in treaties to preserve.
The agreement is now just another of those broken promises.
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday pulling the federal government out of the deal. Trump’s decision halted a government-wide initiative to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake rivers and signaled an end to the government’s willingness to consider removing dams that blocked their free flow.
