When the willows turn a certain color, the old people tell us, “it’s time to go fish” — when it turns a little yellower, “the summer run’s coming.” We don’t see that anymore. Once you put the dams in, those willows are gone — that identify the time to go fishing. It’s the whole river system — the gravels, the sage — it all adds up.
Fort Hall tribal member quoted in “Tribal Circumstances and Perspective Analysis of Impacts of the Lower Snake River Project on the Nez Perce, Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Shoshone Bannock Tribes,” Army Corps of Engineers, 1999.
Most northern Shoshone and Bannock peoples have lived at the Fort Hall Reservation since the 1860s. Others live close by at the Duck Valley reservation in southern Idaho and northern Nevada. The Shoshone-Bannock people fished from the Snake and Owyhee rivers and smaller tributaries. On the Snake, salmon could not pass Shoshone Falls, a native fishery in league with Celilo and Kettle falls in its importance. The Shoshone commonly conducted cooperative fish drives, a practice that mirrored their buffalo drives.
The Fort Hall Shoshone Bannock tribes prepared a successful petition for federal protection of Snake River sockeye salmon in 1989. More recently, they have supported the calls to breach the four lower Snake River dams (Lower Granite, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Ice Harbor) as a way to enhance salmon survival in the region.
