Although Seattle City Light advertised itself as a “green” utility, the dams that supplied electricity to Seattleites had wreaked havoc on Skagit River fisheries since their construction in the early twentieth century. Built over four decades between the late 1910s and the early 1950s, none of Seattle’s three Skagit River dams—Gorge, Diablo, and Ross—included fish passageways. The dams not only prevented upstream migration of anadromous species but also limited downstream transport of regenerative nutrients into the river, thereby contributing to the Skagit Basin’s declining salmon populations.
Seattle’s need to relicense its three dams with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) before their existing licenses expire in 2025 provided Tribal leaders throughout the basin a new opportunity to protect and restore the Skagit River’s fisheries. While the Swinomish and Upper Skagit Tribes primarily pressured the city by engaging in the FERC relicensing process, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe took a different tack. In a series of lawsuits filed in state, federal, and Tribal courts in 2021 and 2022, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe alleged both that the city had engaged in greenwashing and that its hydropower dams violated the rights of the salmon on which Tribal members traditionally relied to sustain their culture, religion, and physical bodies.
In its greenwashing suit, the Tribe outlined various ways in which the city’s claim that it was the “Nation’s Greenest Utility” was both insincere and harmful to Tribal members and the public. Unlike most other hydroelectric dams in the region, the Gorge, Diablo, and Ross Dams lacked passages for fish to move around them. In addition to halting upstream migration of salmon and other anadromous species, the dams also limited water flows and lessened the distribution of life-giving nutrients into the stream. Meanwhile, the Tribe argued that, despite obtaining a green energy certification from the Low Impact Hydropower Institute (LIHI) in the early 2000s, the city had never actually met LIHI’s criteria and had consistently misled the public and the Tribe by claiming that its operations had allegedly improved the Skagit Basin’s fisheries and ecosystem.
For its rights-of-nature claims, the Tribe looked to prior litigation filed by the White Earth Nation in 2021 against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline as a model. In that suit, the White Earth Nation sought to uphold a recently enacted Tribal law that granted legal status to wild rice, or “manoomin” in the Ojibwe language, arguing that this plant—which was central to the Tribe’s traditional culture, spirituality, and subsistence—had inherent rights to flourish in the waters on and surrounding the White Earth Nation’s lands, including protection from potential oil spills by Enbridge’s pipeline. Rights-of-nature amendments to constitutions in countries like Ecuador, Columbia, New Zealand, Spain, and India, and by several Native Nations in the United States, further buttressed the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s rights-of-salmon suit against the city.
Filed in Tribal court, the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s rights-of-nature case asserted that salmon held fundamental legal status akin to human rights, with “inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” Commenting on the lawsuit in March 2022, the Tribe’s attorney, Jack Fiander, who is a citizen of the Yakama Nation, told journalists that, since childhood, his elders had told him that “certain animals in nature are connected to us and are sentient beings.” In addition to protecting salmon, Fiander argued that, if successful, the Tribe’s series of suits against the city would foster ecosystem-wide improvements, including enhancing river habitat for two other fish species—steelhead and bull trout—that were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and increasing food supplies for the region’s endangered orcas and other marine animals and birds that feed on Skagit River fish populations.
The city initially fought against the Tribe’s greenwashing and rights-of-nature claims in court. Citing research suggesting that salmon rarely migrated upstream of its dams prior to the twentieth century—an assertion the Tribe and independent scientists disputed as “outdated and biased”—city officials argued that the Skagit River maintained “one of the healthiest runs of chinook left in Puget Sound” in the stretch of river lying below their dams. According to the city, this evidence supported its long-held opposition to installing fish passageways and ongoing proposals to remove the Skagit River dams.
Following several procedural disputes over whether the Tribe’s cases should proceed in Tribal, federal, or state court, the parties ultimately agreed to a settlement under which the city promised to incorporate fish passage facilities into its FERC relicensing application for its three Skagit River dams. In addition to applauding the positive impacts this settlement will have on salmon populations and the river’s overall health, Fiander also underscored the instrumental role the Tribe’s lawsuits served to educate the public about Indigenous perspectives on the vital importance of salmon and other non-human species to Native people and cultures.
Others, meanwhile, view the Sauk-Suiattle’s settlement with the city as both a model for Tribes and the public to fight against corporate greenwashing tactics and as an example that will help legitimize rights-of-nature claims into the future. Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights Executive Director Mari Margil expressed hope that this settlement would be “the first of many rights of nature cases that results in real, practical steps towards protecting the rights of ecosystems and species,” noting that it “sets a framework for other campaigns to follow.”
Frank Bibeau, the Tribal attorney who led the White Earth Nation’s efforts to assert legal rights for wild rice in Minnesota, agreed, anticipating that the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s lawsuits against Seattle “will become the real template for most of the Indian tribes because everybody knows that a fish needs clean water.” As Bibeau put it in a March 2022 article, “Everybody knows what a thousand dead fish look like, and they immediately jump to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with that water.”
Images of fish kills along the Klamath River in Oregon and California in the early 2000s similarly opened the public’s eyes to the negative impacts of three hydropower dams along that river, playing a key role in their demolition this year. The breaching of the Klamath River dams—the largest dam-removal project in history—occurred after decades of advocacy and protests by the Yurok and Karuk Tribes, both of whom have relied on the river’s salmon runs to sustain their cultures and livelihoods for millennia, in ways that are analogous to the Skagit Basin Tribes in Washington State.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s agreement to work with Tribes to restore salmon runs in the Columbia River Basin has resulted in, among other efforts, the Interior Department’s June 2024 report titled Historic and Ongoing Impacts of Federal Dams on the Columbia River Basin Tribes. The report—which acknowledges “the historic, ongoing, and cumulative impacts” of federally built Columbia River dams on Tribes in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—may provide further support for ongoing efforts to challenge the allegedly “green” nature of hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest. The report unequivocally indicates that federal dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries “disproportionately harmed” Native people, cultures, and livelihoods and led to “the devastation of once-abundant salmon, steelhead, and other species” throughout the basin.
The Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s settlement with the City of Seattle, coupled with the Interior Department’s report on the impacts of its Columbia River dams and the Yurok and Karuk Tribes’ successful efforts to breach the hydropower dams along the Klamath River, mark a significant step toward acknowledging the importance of protecting non-human species and ecosystems. The rights of animals and plants, such as salmon and wild rice, need more than the often-hollow corporate claims of green-energy development to keep them healthy and viable and to enable them to flourish in the climate change era.
