Tribe tries to resuscitate canal

HOOD CANAL — It's a small harvest, but a prized one: fewer than a dozen or so Dungeness crabs, hoisted fresh from the steel-gray water onto the deck of the Grey Whisper.

Into the cooler they go, scrabbling with futility against its slick sides, destined for people who count on Skokomish tribal fisherman Tim LeClair to keep this traditional food on their tables.

It's a sacred obligation that's getting harder to fulfill: Hood Canal is dying. And that threatens not only this once-lucrative fishery. It threatens the tribe's very way of life.

Low oxygen levels in the canal, caused in part by pollution, have been a problem here for years. But recently it has been worse than ever, especially in the southern end of the canal, homeland of the Skokomish people who have depended on the abundance of this place for countless generations. And while crab catches have also fluctuated, tribal fishermen are concerned by the steep drop in the catch last summer.

At the bottom of the canal, within the tribe's treaty-protected fishing area, tribal staff members have found blackened, crumbling crab carcasses in an underwater dead zone blanketed with white mats of bacterial goo.

On its worst days, the canal becomes an upside-down world, with bottom fish gasping near the surface and tens of thousands of fish dead on the beaches.

The devastation has economically and spiritually wounded the Skokomish, whose very name in their native language — tuwa'duqhL si'dakW — means "our big salt water."

"Our connection to the canal is everything," said Tom Strong, deputy manager for this tribe of about 600 people, with a reservation on the southern end of Hood Canal in Mason County near Shelton.

"It's not just the right to fish and hunt. We are inheritors of something far more powerful and substantial. ... This little world is our homeland. We are tied at the hip. We are one and the same."

"On the tipping point"

Pelting rain dimpled the surface of Hood Canal as LeClair zipped along in the Grey Whisper, a scruffy, open fishing boat with a cooler for a seat. As he steered to check his crab pots, LeClair ticked off the year in food like a calendar: Clams and oysters year round. Geoducks and shrimp in the spring and into the summer. Crabs and salmon in the summer and fall and all the way into winter.

"For us, everything relates to right here, on this canal," LeClair said. "With what we have been able to get for the table, we are very lucky. We just want it to continue."

But the reality is that Hood Canal is both blessed and cursed by its natural gifts.

The 60-mile-long, glacially carved fiord is one of the most scenic places in Washington. Under the surface, the canal plunges to more than 600 feet deep but then steeply shallows as it proceeds north, where a sill at the gateway where it meets the rest of Puget Sound impedes vigorous exchange of water by the tides.

In the summer, algae growth explodes, stoked by high nitrogen loads and nurtured by the feeble tidal action. When the algae die and decompose, oxygen is gobbled from the water. When other conditions, such as the winds, are also just so, fish die in droves.

While a number of factors are degrading the water quality, the largest contributor is sewage. Old septic systems are partially to blame, but so are sewer systems that weren't designed to clean nitrogen.

"We are on the tipping point," said Duane Fagergren of the Puget Sound Action Team, one of many groups working on the problem. "Crabbing, shrimping, oystering, water skiing, sailing, all of those are things people use the canal for, and many of them are in jeopardy. With more and more people, we have reached that critical point."

Tribe helps lead efforts

The tribe is heavily involved in the fight to save the canal, from lobbying Congress and the state Legislature to diving the depths of the canal to assess its ailing health.

Three years ago the tribe developed a composting business to recycle salmon carcasses rather than dumping them in the canal. The tribal fisheries staff is working with universities and government agencies to sample and monitor water quality. Staff members are tagging crabs to track survival, and diving in the canal to document the dead zones.

But money is also needed.

About $24.5 million in state and federal money has been committed to build sewer and wastewater systems for Belfair, Potlatch, Hoodsport and the reservation. The tribe is helping to lobby for $18 million to $20 million more to get the job done.

"An empty feeling"

The scent of hot fat perfumes the kitchen as Winona Plant flips geoduck fritters for a Skokomish ceremonial feast in the smokehouse next door, her daughter watching as she cooks. Plant wants to pass on her traditions to the next generation, but the opportunities are narrowing.

"We can't do what we did as children with our children," Plant says.

In her youth, whole families would picnic right on the beach, digging clams and oysters and dip-net fishing for crabs in the eelgrass just offshore.

"And if you go to those places today there is nothing," Plant says. "Will my kids get to touch a starfish on the beach ever again?"

As Plant cooked, Kimberly Miller coordinated teenagers carrying plates of food to the smokehouse.

Gathering traditional foods is about more than just the harvest, Miller said. It is an exercise of inherited gathering rights, an expression of sacred knowledge passed down from elders and earned as a gift from spirit helpers.

When Miller finds what she has set out to gather, in the place she has been told it should be, and harvests it the way she has been taught, "all of a sudden I'll get this indescribable feeling," she said.

"It's a sensation I can't put into words. I know it's medicine. It's special."

The names of former village sites and of streams that lace the landscape reflect the tribe's ties to the natural world: Place of Herring, Skunk's Drinking Water, Bear's Drinking Water. But today, whether it's the marsh grass for baskets, or seaweed for steaming clams, the Skokomish must travel farther to find what used to be available right at home.

Or, they are doing without.

"You don't feel the same relationship with the place," said Delbert Miller, a Skokomish spiritual leader.

"When you realize what was here for thousands of years, and go there and find nothing today, it is an empty feeling. It feels like an extinction."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com