First Salmon Ceremony honors Chinook while recovery efforts persist.
Updated May 16, 2025
Lummi Nation’s First Salmon Ceremony returns to Lummi Nation School tomorrow (May 15) from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., celebrating the arrival of the spring Chinook salmon to the Nooksack River.
The most recent numbers for the South Fork Chinook spring salmon run, the 2022 season, show a run of 4,009, including natural origin, hatchery origin and pre-spawn mortality numbers. This is the largest run since the most recent recovery effort in the South Fork, and locals recall the not-too-distant history when there was hardly a run at all.
“When the old people did it, (First Salmon Ceremony) was just a way of honoring the salmon and giving thanks,” said Lummi Councilmember Dana Wilson, “and now we do it in honor of the salmon, hoping they’re going to come back.”
Chinook salmon are the most prized of the five Puget Sound species for their size and nutritional value.
While once a longtime annual tradition, the First Salmon Ceremony went away when commercial and recreational fishing drew too heavily on the Chinook population, causing it to crash, said Mike MacKay, a retired Lummi Nation fisheries biologist who took part in the chinook recovery effort.
Wilson credits Dora Lee Solomon, a prominent Lummi fisherwoman, with bringing the ceremony back before her passing near the turn of the last century. This year’s ceremony honors Lummi fisherwomen especially — Solomon took her red gillnetter everywhere across the Salish Sea.
But the return of the salmon took a collaboration, MacKay said, between biologists and field technicians of Lummi and Nooksack Natural Resources, and much trial and error between 2006 and 2012.
Return of the South Fork chinook run
MacKay began working as a fisheries biologist for Lummi Nation in 1977, just three years after the landmark Boldt Decision that affirmed the treaty rights of tribes to fish on their “usual and accustomed” grounds, including off-reservation areas, called for equal share of the harvestable salmon and required the state to work with tribes in managing salmon resources.
The South Fork Chinook project kicked off as the Puget Sound Recovery Plan listed the South Fork Chinook stock — one of 22 distinct Chinook populations in Puget Sound — as threatened in 2007, a response to the federal register first proposing the listing of Puget Sound Chinook as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1988. Biologists like MacKay knew the effort would be extensive but worth it — the population in 2007 was so low that modifying habitat wouldn’t be enough to prevent their extinction.
During the early days of MacKay working for the tribe, “there was no celebration and no first fish ceremony,” he said. “It was pretty lean.”
The Puget Sound Recovery Plan listing launched a supplementation program, using a captive brood approach where MacKay caught juvenile Chinook with seines — nets — before they were reared in a hatchery until adulthood.
“In some ways we had the easiest job,” he said, “because the hatchery folks had to rear those fish their whole life, and that was a very arduous path. The tribal and state hatcheries are to be commended for their persistence in doing that.”
The South Fork work was more challenging compared to other sections of the Nooksack River, MacKay said. The South Fork is warmer than the middle and north forks, and Chinook are the salmon species most susceptible to unfavorable conditions.
“It’s so difficult to restore any endangered species back to any level of recovery,” he said. “With a Chinook salmon, because salmon have such a diverse life history, they’re subject to all these problems from their spawning grounds down the river, to the ocean, to the offshore, all these different environments.”
In the fall of 2007, biologists captured salmon by the Skookum Creek Fish Hatchery near Acme, resulting in 20 native South Fork Chinook. These were moved to the Kendall Creek Hatchery in Deming to be reared, starting the captive brood supplementation program.
MacKay transferred the salmon to the hatcheries by truck. [Ed.: A previous version referred to helicopter transfer employed in another project.] Then, biologists used a DNA microsatellite test, taking a small tissue sample from the tail fin, to confirm which stock the fish belonged to.
The idea was to spawn the adult salmon, collect fertilized eggs, incubate through the winter and release the fry in the spring.
In the clear summer river water, MacKay donned a mask and snorkel and conducted spawner surveys, counting adult salmon.
Results took time. For the first two years, biologists yielded just four viable females.
Many involved in salmon recovery didn’t have faith in the project at the time, MacKay said. It was long, expensive and high-risk. Despite this pushback, efforts expanded in 2008, where biologists captured over 400 South Fork Chinook.
The first year of maturing Chinook in 2010 brought two females and eight males that were spawned in October at the Skookum Creek Fish Hatchery, producing about 2,100 fry that were released into the South Fork the following May. The next year yielded 15 females and 14 males, producing about 35,000 fertilized eggs.
By the program’s conclusion in December of 2012, biologists captured 20,894 juvenile Chinook, identifying 4,401 as the South Fork stock which became candidates for the captive brood program.
When the human efforts ceased, and the run returned on its own in the spring of 2014, it was 33 members strong. MacKay recalled the return of the First Salmon Ceremony being relatively small, just a few fish for the ceremonial community.
While the run has fluctuated in the decade that followed, it generally persisted at a steep upward trend, resulting in the thousands of Chinook that have returned in recent years without any assistance.
“This is kind of a happy story,” MacKay said. “This is an example of a recovery effort that was very complex, very expensive, involved a lot of different people, a lot of different agencies working together with one laser focus on recovering South Fork Chinook. And it shows how when people get their minds together on one goal representing many different diverse groups and many different agencies and so forth, they can make a difference.”
In the decade since, habitat recovery efforts such as engineered log jams have taken place on the South Fork to assist in Chinook’s long term viability.
Chinook today
According to the 2024 Puget Sound Recovery Plan addendum, much has changed since the plan was first published in 2007. The effects of climate change are more pronounced. Human population has increased, putting more pressure on ecosystems and resources. Research has grown and improved. Salmon recovery funding has increased.
Despite a rapidly warming climate and growing development in Puget Sound, Chinook have largely maintained their numbers over the last two decades. Many populations had 1%–2% average increases in abundance per year since being listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but wide year-to-year variability doesn’t trend toward recovery.
Puget Sound Chinook salmon populations are not collectively improving, but there are differences among the 22 populations. The Suiattle spring Chinook population is close to achieving its recovery goal. The Upper Sauk River spring Chinook and upper Skagit River summer Chinook salmon populations are at 45% and 36% of their goals, respectively. However, nine populations remain at less than 5% of their recovery goals.
Five factors contribute to the lack of population growth despite habitat restoration efforts, according to the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Council’s salmon science advisory group: not enough restoration is being done, restoration programs do not address the key factors hindering salmon, restoration is not offsetting the rapid habitat degradation, not enough time has gone by for the restoration to make a real impact and not enough monitoring is being conducted.
Brooding continues
Captive brooding programs like the one of the South Fork still have a role in the future of Chinook across Puget Sound, according to the addendum.
Mortality is high for juvenile Chinook just entering saltwater, which is known as the early marine phase. Since 2014, the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, a cross-border, multi-partner collaborative research effort, concluded that food supply and predation are the largest contributors to juvenile decline, an overall large limiting factor in Chinook recovery.
Among the list of strategies proposed to address this problem is experimenting with hatchery rearing and release strategies like the South Fork method and assessing which ones are most beneficial and what impact they have in different watersheds.
First Salmon Ceremony
Lummi Nation preaches sustainable harvesting through restraint, respect and reciprocity, being cognizant of where and how to fish, Wilson said. Lummi Natural Resources has implemented restrictions on Chinook fishing and even harsher restrictions on the South Fork.
“We just show respect so the salmon will always come back,” Wilson said. “Salmon are resilient, and with climate change banging up the habitat, we have to use our old ways to hopefully help salmon survive.”
The ceremony is held at the Lummi Nation School to emphasize generational knowledge, he said, to teach kids about the importance of salmon and keep them involved in recovery efforts.
“(The ceremony) went away for a while and now it’s back, and as a fisherman it feels really important,” he said. “I’m sure all the Lummi fishermen feel this way, that we’re doing our part and honoring the salmon.”
— By Sam Fletcher
Also read in Salish Current:
• “‘It’s our identity, our culture, our everything‘,” Nov. 6, 2024
• “50 years after Boldt Decision: new and lingering challenges to salmon recovery,” Feb. 2, 2024
• “Tribe, feds, state face off on stream water temperature in the Skagit,” April 24, 2024
• “Samish Nation protects ‘breathtaking’ kelp forests, nearshore habitat,” Nov. 14, 2023