{"id":15407,"date":"2021-10-19T21:57:20","date_gmt":"2021-10-19T21:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildsalmoncenter.org\/?p=15407"},"modified":"2021-10-19T21:57:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T21:57:20","slug":"lummi-island-reef-netting-eat-this-salmon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildsalmoncenter.org\/2021\/10\/19\/lummi-island-reef-netting-eat-this-salmon\/","title":{"rendered":"Lummi Island Reef Netting: Eat This Salmon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For fans of wild salmon, it\u2019s hard to know what\u2019s the right choice in a restaurant or at a store. Here\u2019s why sustainable seafood purveyors like Patagonia Provisions are stocking Lummi Island reef-netted salmon.<\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Lummi Island and other Salish Sea islands. (Map courtesy Evan Derickson, Wikipedia Commons.)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Most summers, Washington\u2019s Southern Resident orcas round Vancouver Island and follow the Haro Strait, just west of the San Juan Islands, chasing after home-migrating Fraser River salmon.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as hungry orcas hunt the western Salish Sea, some salmon runs flow east, through areas where the families of the Lummi Nation have fished for generations. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a heartbreaking fact that the Salish Sea\u2019s salmon runs aren\u2019t nearly as abundant as they once were, along with the orcas that eat them<\/a><\/strong>. For some, that prompts talk of simply shutting down commercial salmon fisheries. But according to Ellie Kinley, a lifelong fisher and Lummi Nation citizen, that sort of sweeping action helps neither salmon nor orcas.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of miscommunication out there when it comes to buying and eating salmon,\u201d says Kinley. \u201cWe\u2019re catching salmon in a terminal area. They\u2019ve already passed through where our Southern Residents can eat them.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, Kinley says, people should be celebrating the salmon that her family sells through brands like Lummi Island Wild and Salish Select. If you can find these salmon products at stores, she says, then you know that it comes from a fishery that is strictly managed to meet escapement goals. That means that before any fishing season opens for her family, several international agencies must first agree that enough spawning salmon have entered the Fraser River to maintain population targets.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pink salmon off the British Columbia coast north of Lummi Island. (Photo by Barrie Kovish.)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe beauty of fishing [like we do] is that we never get to fish unless enough fish go up the river,\u201d Kinley says.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But multi-agency sign-off is just one reason why Kinley feels that conscientious diners should seek out her salmon. There\u2019s also her family\u2019s leading role in helping to drive a resurgence, here near Lummi Island, of reef net fishing<\/strong>: a traditional selective fishing technique that the Kinleys and others are now using as a way to harvest more abundant returning sockeye and pink salmon runs without harming vulnerable stocks\u2014like the Fraser River Chinook that comprise a large part of the diet of Southern Residents orcas. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Reef nets illustrated. Top: a side view of an anchor boat above an artificial reef that directs fish up and over a submerged net. Bottom: an overhead view of the two anchor boats and reef net strung between them. (Graphic courtesy Lummi Island Wild.)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For millennia prior to Western contact, Coast Salish families fished river systems like the Fraser, Nooksack, and Skagit with <\/span>selective fishing techniques<\/span><\/a> like pound nets, weirs, wheels, and beach seines. Specific reef net sites, generally located near river mouths, were handed down through generations of families living on or near the San Juan Islands and north to the Saanich Peninsula. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Coast Salish people invented reef netting<\/a>,\u201d says Riley Starks, the founder of the 15-year-old seafood processor Lummi Island Wild and a lifelong crab and salmon fisher. \u201cIt’s a very humane and kind way to catch salmon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technique, Starks explains, is a simple one\u2014two boats anchored in the water, holding a large, submerged net between them at the lip of an artificial reef<\/strong>\u2014traditionally made of stinging nettle bush and wild grasses. The reef passively funnels fish up and over to the net, and into the view of the fishers in the boats. Once fish are spotted, the net is lifted to just below the water line, and fishers hand-sort the catch.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Riley Starks, founder of the 15-year-old seafood processor Lummi Island Wild and a lifelong crab and salmon fisher, scans the water for fish from the tower of his reef net gear.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs a fisherman, when you want fish for yourself, you only want the highest quality,\u201d says Starks. \u201cWith reef netting I could see how they handled the fish: you pick them up one at a time, you bleed them, you put them on ice right away. There’s very little trauma, there’s no unwanted mortality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the early 1990s, Starks had bought his own reef net. Soon after, he met Ellie Kinley\u2019s late husband Larry Kinley, a Lummi Nation elder with a vision for reconnecting his community with reef netting. Once the dominant fishing technique in these waters, traditional reef netting had been largely abandoned by Coast Salish families over the past several generations\u2014and not by choice<\/strong>. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s because back in 1897, California canning bosses convinced the Washington State Legislature to make reef nets illegal. These bosses quickly built canneries and pound nets near reef net sites managed by Coast Salish families for millennia, and zealously enforced the new reef net restrictions. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This pressure forced Indigenous communities to adopt different techniques to continue their fishing way of life. Today, for example, Ellie Kinley\u2019s sons and other relatives help crew a family purse seiner and gillnet boat; reef netting, for them, is a new practice, one that they\u2019re improving with modern fish tracking technology and other tools<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A line of reef net gear extends out into Legoe Bay off the shore of Lummi Island. Each gear consists of two anchored boats and, between then, a system of submerged nets. Operators watch for schools of fish to flow above the nets, which are then raised and drawn for selective harvest.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBefore he died three years ago, Larry Kinley said that \u2018reef netting is the center of our culture and we must reclaim it,\u2019\u201d Starks said. \u201cMy guess is that in the next 20 years we’ll see more and more reef nets pop up. It’ll happen in the very slow, methodical way that Indigenous communities work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helping to boost the use of reef nets are new fishing businesses that focus on revitalizing these traditional practices, including Lummi Island Wild and, now, Salish Select<\/strong>. Together, the companies work with about 12 reef nets\u2014one of them owned by the Kinleys\u2014and also partner with the Snohomish Tribe and Upper Skagit Tribe to source salmon selectively harvested via other traditional practices, like <\/span>beach seining<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n