Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
by Oregon Public Broadcasting
Salmon are essential to Columbia River tribal people. These fish represent not only a food source but a way of life. As a white kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Tony Schick heard a lot about salmon — how important they are to this region, and how much trouble they’re in now. But the history he learned was not the whole story. As an investigative reporter for OPB and ProPublica, he’s been working to uncover and understand a more sinister version of events. And along the way, he connected with a guy named Randy Settler and his family. “Salmon Wars,” a production from OPB and ProPublica, tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before – through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations. We’ll dive into hidden history. We’ll investigate who’s to blame for the salmon vanishing, and what can be done before it’s too late. <strong id="docs-internal-guid-7408e841-7
Episodes
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Season 3: Trojan Wars ... coming in 2027
The scramble to meet the energy demands of AI and data centers is leading to what some are calling a "Nuclear Renaissance," and the Pacific Northwest is at the heart of it. Yet Oregon has a constitutional amendment banning new nuclear projects. Why? "Trojan Wars" tells the story of how our grand...
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Bonus Episode: Celilo Memories
We hear the voices of tribal elders who remember Celilo Falls before The Dalles Dam silenced this sacred fishing spot. Many of the voices you hear in this episode were shared, with permission, by Confluence. Confluence is a nonprofit focused on the Columbia River system. The organization has...
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Ep 6: The Future
Salmon hatcheries set up by the federal government prioritized ocean fishermen over river tribes and created genetically inferior fish. In this final episode, we visit a tribal hatchery to see how they’re doing things differently. And we’ll hear from 11-year-old Aiyana about how she thinks about...
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Ep 5: The Crime
Salmon have been on the decline for more than 100 years. The federal government knows why. It knows who killed the salmon. And how. But for decades it’s been telling a tale of progress, and obscuring the ugliest truth. We’re going to uncover it.
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Ep 4: The Salmon’s Struggle
Salmon used to be plentiful and they’ve been a staple of tribal diets for centuries. Since the early 1900s, salmon populations in the Columbia River have steadily declined thanks to overfishing, dams, habitat loss and warming waters. Hatcheries are one way the U.S. government has tried to make up...
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Bonus Episode: LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot
You heard from Randy Settler’s cousin, LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot, in the most recent episode of Salmon Wars. She’s the one who was fearless in the face of a blockade of boats trying to block Native people from accessing fishing sites. She worked closely with Randy’s mom in the family fishing...
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Ep 3: The Court Battles
Federal officials took away a way of life that had sustained Pacific Northwest tribes for centuries. So some tribal members became outlaws. During the 1960s and beyond, Native activists fought back against state and federal restrictions on their fishing rights – a period known as the “fish wars”....
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Ep 2: The Treaties
To understand the war over salmon, we have to go back to 1855. That’s when chiefs from the Yakama Nation and other Pacific Northwest tribes signed treaties that are still used as the basis for laws and policies around salmon fishing. Some tribal members believe the Yakama signed a treaty under...
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Ep 1: The Family
Host Tony Schick introduces us to Randy Settler and his family. The Settlers, members of the Yakama Nation, have been deeply affected by the Northwest’s salmon policies for generations. They lost their home, their primary food source, their ancestral fishing grounds. Randy and his parents went to...
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Season 2: Salmon Wars ... coming soon
“Salmon Wars” tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before – through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations. We dig in to uncover who is to blame for the salmon vanishing, what can be done before it’s too late and…
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Bonus Ep: Suzanne Simard and the Social World of Trees
What if, instead of competing with each other, trees work together? What if they even communicate? Renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has spent her life digging into the "wood wide web"—the mycorrhizal network of fungi and roots through which trees share resources and information. Her work...
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Bonus Ep: Wildfire
In 2020, wildfires swept across the West, consuming millions of acres of forest and destroying thousands of homes and even whole communities. And sadly, this is just the beginning. Fire is the future here in the West. But what we often forget is that fire is also the past. It’s what our landscape...
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Guest Ep: How to Save a Planet
In the final months of the Trump administration, there were a flurry of environmental rollbacks that hearkened back to the Timber Wars, including changes that would make it easier to log old trees and a huge reduction in the area protected for the northern spotted owl. So we wanted to bring you…
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Guest Ep: Grouse
If you’ve been enjoying Timber Wars, there’s a new show you should check out. It’s about a weird and wonderful bird: the greater sage-grouse. You’ll find these creatures in wide open sagebrush country, trying to hang on alongside oil and gas drilling, recreational activity, development and...
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Bonus Ep: Big Money Bought the Forest
In 'Timber Wars,' we've talked about how the northern spotted owl took the blame for a lot of other things that cost jobs and hurt timber-dependent towns, like automation and international competition. Well, there was another huge thing the owl took the fall for—something that cost timber towns...
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Ep 7: A Way Forward
Is the Northwest fatally divided, or can we overcome our differences and work together? We tell the story of one group of loggers and environmentalists who have found some semblance of common ground. But it didn’t come easy. And no one knows how long it’ll last. If you want to learn more about…
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Ep 6: The Backlash
Before the Northwest Forest Plan had a chance to succeed, Congress seized upon the threat of wildfires to create a loophole and throw the plan out the window. With old growth once again being logged, the fight to defend it grew both more mainstream and more violent, seeding the tactics for many...
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Ep 5: The Plan
The Timber Wars grew so hot that one of President Clinton’s first acts in office was to fly half his cabinet to Portland to resolve the conflict. The result was the Northwest Forest Plan, the most sweeping conservation plan in U.S. history. But it might never have happened if not for some...
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Ep 4: Mill City
Mill City was one of dozens of flourishing timber towns, where a job in the woods or at the local sawmill could support a good life. But protests and court cases upended that, leaving locals to ask: are owls more endangered than loggers?
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Ep 3: The Owl
Throughout the 80s, environmentalists lost in the woods and in the courtrooms. There just weren’t many laws that protected trees. But there were laws that protected animals. And the idea started to percolate: what if they could protect the old growth by protecting an animal that depended on it....
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Ep 2: The Ancient Forest
For most of America’s history, trees were seen as crops, and the plan was to log the country’s last virgin forests and make them de facto tree farms. We see forests very differently today. How did things change so quickly?
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Ep 1: The Last Stand
When loggers headed into the forest on Easter Sunday in 1989, they found a line of protesters blocking the road. The ensuing battle would help catapult old-growth forests into a national issue, and become known as the “Easter Massacre.”
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Timber Wars Trailer
It’s the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. A march of chainsaws clear-cuts the country’s last available ancient forests. Protesters bury themselves in front of bulldozers and spend months sitting in the tallest trees in the world. And at the center, the northern spotted owl becomes the most...
About this show
Salmon are essential to Columbia River tribal people. These fish represent not only a food source but a way of life. As a white kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Tony Schick heard a lot about salmon — how important they are to this region, and how much trouble they’re in now. But the history he learned was not the whole story. As an investigative reporter for OPB and ProPublica, he’s been working to uncover and understand a more sinister version of events. And along the way, he connected with a guy named Randy Settler and his family.
“Salmon Wars,” a production from OPB and ProPublica, tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before – through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations. We’ll dive into hidden history. We’ll investigate who’s to blame for the salmon vanishing, and what can be done before it’s too late.
<strong id="docs-internal-guid-7408e841-7
Hosted by
Oregon Public Broadcasting