Welcome, and thanks for tuning in to a special Tribal
Journey edition of CoreCast. I'm Jennifer LaVista.
This is the final day of the 2008 Coast Salish Tribal
Journey and over 100 canoes are landing here in Quw'utsun,
British Colombia. Five of which are carrying water-quality
probes as part of the US Geological Survey and Coast Salish
Nation Partnership. Let's check out what has happened over
the past few days.
It was an amazing journey. Six days on the water paddling
through different types of water bodies, beautiful islands.
Got to witness the kids looking out of their environment, it was great.
The Tribal Journey is an event that is held every year and
it travels to different locations throughout the Salish Sea.
We come together once a year to celebrate and to work on
things that we think are important to the environtment.
We live in an amazing eco-region and interestingly enough it
has one aboriginal group that inhabits that area and that is
the Coast Salish people. Their cultures rely on the
resources of the Salish Sea. And those resources are
diminishing and are threatened.
The Salmon Dancer is the canoe that we purchased this year and it carries approximately 14
paddlers fully
loaded. We are salmon people. We have for thousands of years been able to sustain ourselves
on salmon and we were
able to do that year-round. Unfortunately, there has been a rapid decline in the salmon
over the last 30, 40, or 50 years.
The Coast Salish gathering in Tulalip we unanimously voted
to team up with USGS and allow them to participate in our
canoe journey this year.
So, before the journey we trained five technicians to take
this water-quality probes on the canoes and that entailed
teaching them how to calibrate and audit the probes, set up
files, make sure that the equipment is functioning properly
and was maintained along the way.
We are just hopeful that during the first year we would
get the logistics ironed out, the equipment working, test
the idea of having multiple probes on different canoes or
cross such a large area in operation and collecting data
and that seem to work pretty well.
During the journey I would take the technicians to their
respective families and see them off in the morning, and
welcome them back in the evening, download the data,
process it a little bit and send it off to Ray Julich
from the Tacoma office to send it on to the website.
What is phenomenal about this is that the readings that
we are getting out of this equipment is possible because
it's being pulled behind canoes where there is no engine
prop or gas or this or anything distributing the equipment.
And we have this partnership that was created that is
allowing us not only to have information that we need but
the whole world needs to see. This will be information that
people around the world will say, "Wow cool, let's do that too!"
It's a little early to talk too much in detail about the
results but we did look at some of the first few days of
the journey up through the Southern Puget Sound and Hood
Canal, and across the San Juan Islands. And there is a few
interesting preliminary results. Hood Canal was quite warm.
We measured water temperatures upwards of 71 degrees fairly
early in the morning, 8:30 in the morning after several days
of gloomy cloudy weather like this.
That points to an interest to examine that further. I did
also a lot of jellyfish in Hood Canal relative to the other
areas that we paddled through. Often, but not always, a lot
of jellyfish are indicative of poor water quality conditions.
They're the last ones to thrive in those kind of conditions.
Trying to engage some of the local folks in terms of what
they've known about the environment to compare what we're
finding in this trip. A group of us will get together
possibly with members of different Coast Salish groups
and look at the results, talk about them, compare them
to what they understand the system to be.
These people have been here for literally 10,000 years.
If you talk to some of the elders they will tell you,
"We know what this place is, but you never ask us about it."
And so, i think this is an opportunity to blend those two
traditions and to really put the spotlight on the issues
in the Salish Sea and the value of the traditional
people who live here.
It's a great partnership that we have created and I hope
we continue to do it year after year, after year.
Funding has really come from several sources. USGS has
provided not only technical assistance, but funding for
the equipment. The Northwest Straits Commision provided
funding for the technicians. The Potlatch Foundation
provided a small amount of disretionary money. And then
the Swinomish Tribe of course has provided a lot of
resources, time and equipment et cetera to the effort.
We know what has happened in the last 150 years and you
just look around you and you see that everything has
been degraded and so our goal it to try to make the
Salish Sea something that our children and grandchildren
and seven generations down the way will be proud of it and
something hopefully that we will leave them in better
shape than what we have received then.
Log on usgs.gov/coastsalish for upcoming reports and
analysis over the next few months.
CoreCast is a product of the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior. Until
next time, I'm Jennifer LaVista.