Come join us for a rare opportunity to explore the Snake River through the eyes and voices of Native American leaders from the tribes that intimately understand the land, the river, and the importance of the salmon.

Ride the rapids and float through this dramatic landscape that connects the past to the present, all while having a great time on the river.

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

The Snake River is the 10th largest river in the United States and the 13th longest river in North America.

This river provides 40% of the water for the Columbia River Basin and it flows through six Western states.

And so part of the agreement was these rivers have to have salmon in them.

And what America did is they came and they built dams.

We had almost 18 million salmon that returned to the river.

And here in this river in particular, we're facing extinction of these spring Chinook salmon populations in the next 20 years.

And imagine that ability for us to be salmon people, because that's who we are.

If you look at the migration of salmon, they come as adults back up through the Columbia.

They have to go through four dams.

As part of this territory here, of course this is the Nez Perce Nimiipuu territory.

And we're here with our good friend, Nakia Williamson, who's Nez Perce, and actually comes from this area.

His family, his village sites are from here.

If you go all the way down below, that's where my band, where my villages are at.

All the way up, there's a continuum of our people who lived here for thousands and thousands of years.

And these village sites are still here.

Down, if you go to the lower part of the river, there's dams and they've inundated our village sites.

So the connection to the river, the connection to the land has been severed.

But also those dams are affecting our salmon.

Salmon that came right to our front doorstep of our village, provided all of our food throughout the whole year.

And so part of the work that we're doing is to restore salmon to this river.

There's four lower Snake River dams that have been killing salmon for since they've been there in the sixties.

If you look at the migration of salmon, they come as adults back up through the Columbia.

And those last four dams create such mortality on the salmon, both as adults and as juveniles.

These dams basically have created reservoirs.

But what you see here is a free flowing river.

The water is cold.

It's clean.

We have the incredible opportunity to have leaders from the Native American tribes that call this place home, who intimately know this place and are one with the river and one with the fish, and doing things to help maintain the ecosystem that is just barely hanging on by a thread here.

The Snake River begins its journey to the Pacific Ocean high in the mountains of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

As the longest western river, it flows through six states, once teeming with wildlife, salmon and rapids, most of the Snake River█s flows have been cut off by dams.

Luckily, the stretch through Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area is still floatable by raft and jet boats.

There's many different ways to experience the Snake River.

You can drive along it.

You can hop on a jet boat.

You can float along in a kayak.

Or you can do a multi-day river trip through Hells Canyon.

Our goal is to get you down the river safely and keep you in the raft.

That's plenty.

Sometimes you might find yourself unintentionally swimming in the rapids.

That means that you have fallen out of the raft in a rapid and you're in the white water.

I want to talk about what you do if you find yourself having an out of raft experience.

Okay.

Rule number one is don't panic.

There's not that many people that can come down through here, 5 to 6000 total people.

The Snake River is about 1200 miles long from where it starts over close to Yellowstone National Park is just a little trickle over there to here is about a thousand miles.

And then this is about the last 200 mile stretch of it.

And of that 1200 mile stretch, you know, there's probably about 150 miles of it that you could actually float on and move in the current.

The rest of it's dammed up.

And, you know, it's a big system of hydroelectric dams out through southern Idaho that create power.

Yes.

But they're also creating irrigation and water out there in southern Idaho.

We just passed the area where Oregon, Idaho, Washington come together.

But really, these lands are where the Nez Perce and other tribes and other Native Americans have been since time immemorial.

You can see the evidence of that from this trail on the Nez Perce trail, where they would come down from the mountains to the river for the winter.

We're in this extremely black volcanic rock.

And at one point in time, there would have been huge explosions of volcanoes and lava flowing across the land.

It's fascinating to me to watch everybody's different connection to this river and to water.

And whether it's somebody who's in a jet boat and powering through for the day or whether it's a fisherman that█s standing in the water fishing or whether it's somebody from one of the Native American tribes who understands this river in a completely different way.

What you got?

A heart rock.

Everybody's connected to the water.

And it's in part because it makes people feel a certain way.

People feel good along the water and feelings of joy and peace and calm.

And so there's something more than just the uses of the river and what it can give us as humans in our industrialized world.

But also what it gives us individually and on a cellular and spiritual level, just a feeling of peace and coming home and happiness.

I started running the river as a teenager and have been involved in the outfitting and guiding community here all my adult life.

I've spent thousands of days on the river guiding fishermen and running the water here.

And this is my church.

I mean, this means everything to me.

And I can't think of anywhere I would rather be than up here in Hell's Canyon and honestly feel super blessed just to be a part of this.

Like when you say that this is your church, it's almost because it's that it inspires that sense of awe and wonder.

Certainly does.

Yeah.

And a lot of it over the time, you have to talk to yourself and say, don't take this for granted because you don't just go everywhere and see the magnificence and the beauty like you do here, just anywhere.

And the the bighorn sheep and the steelhead and the salmon that come up this way, the beautiful scenery and the water.

It's undescribable in a lot of ways.

We█ll put that on Instagram.

I just said, We're here at (indistinct).

That's a name for this area.

All of our life is centered around these rivers.

Even today.

It emanated out from the Winter Village sites that were here in the fall and winter time and it all emanated out here from these points out to the mountains and then return back here in the fall.

And they stay here Winter.

So all of our lives is is centered around these these rivers.

Our life is connected.

Our elders say that these rivers are just like the blood that that, you know, feeds our bodies.

Any body.

This is the blood that feeds the the body of this land.

And that's how important that is.

If you poison the blood, if you disrupt the flow of the blood, obviously there's going to be impacts.

And that's what we're experiencing now.

When it comes down to it, we all require the same things in life that we're not just trying to save ourselves, save our own culture, identity, language, although we are trying to do that.

But by doing that, we're going to save and preserve all of life.

The next generation recognizes the importance of restoring this ecosystem, and the youth from the tribe are the voice of the river.

In our language, we are Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum, Salmon people.

Wy-Kan-Ush, salmon, are important for our sacred life renewal ceremonies in our daily food and for our economy.

Four young ladies from the various tribes connected to the Snake River formed a youth council, and they have come together to raise awareness.

And they wrote a letter to the president of the United States that the dams need to come out now and that there isn't time to wait.

We're witnessing a mass extinction, and so none of what we have here will be around once they grow up.

I was raised and born in the longhouse.

I just have an automatic connection to the river.

Because of that reason, because I spent many days at the river swimming, helping my uncles cut up fish, catch fish, helping my uncles figure out what fish is, what, helping my grandpa figure out where to put the fish on the table because of the creation story.

The salmon set up first and then it was the meat and then it was the roots and the berries.

That's how we set food on the table.

The salmon will always go first.

With the river, it's a part of my family.

We call him Grandfather because he helps us and he gives us our food that we need to survive.

He gives us shelter when we come and stay here by the river.

It's more than just water.

It's life.

The river is like.

Like all water.

It's.

It's our way of life.

And it's our culture.

And it helps us with our daily essential needs.

Ever since the first person walking, our ancestors to this day and we can't just have it end unknowingly.

It's how we grow plants.

it█s how we refresh ourselves.

It█s how we eat.

Like she said, water is life.

All right, we're getting ready to go on to our first rapid.

What's this one?

Lamont Spring.

And it looks wet.

What's cool about this river.

Unique about it is it's it was actually the mountains were created before.

The river didn't create this gorge.

The mountains came up around the river.

So it's not carving its way down into it.

So on the river, right side, any time you're looking downstream, on the right side is Idaho, and on the left side is Oregon.

And what creates the gorge on the Idaho side are the Seven Devil Mountains.

And on the Oregon side, it's the Wallowa mountains.

This morning we're going to hit a few class twos and threes.

Good time for some kayaks to be in the water, probably right before or right after lunch.

You're going to hit one of the class fours down here.

Class four is the first one is Wild Sheep Rapids.

It's a big drop rapid.

It drops about 17 feet over the course of about 100 feet.

So it's yeah, it's a big, respectable rapid.

We'll stop and scout it before we go through.

I like being completely disconnected from from the world for days at a time and just being completely submersed and in the wilderness, on the water.

No other worries.

All I got to worry about is what I'm doing right now at this moment.

That's what I love about it.

In this rapid, the water all kind of pushes over towards the right hand bank, sort of into that cliff wall at the bottom.

And the goal would be to pull away from that wall and not get pushed into it.

And notice, she says, pull away from that wall.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I think I'm in the wet spot for this one.

Looking at the waves.

So hello, Snake River.

Oh, yeah.

Part of the joy of a river trip is exploring the forests and secrets of the riverbanks.

These are Ponderosa pine trees, and they come in different flavors.

They have vanilla, butterscotch, strawberry and chocolate.

And when you smell them, you can actually smell the different flavors.

I think you have to smell different places in butterscotch.

That's delicious.

We are reminded by the ancient rock art that we see on the side of the river that we are not the first to visit.

The rock writings we call (Niimiipuu word).

(Niimiipuu word) are written on stone.

is marked or written.

Of course these ones are painted.

And then there's some further down the river that are actually incised into the rock and creates that you know, which they refer to as petroglyphs.

And so many of these have very deep spiritual meaning that is hard to interpret.

The individual that probably did this had their own revelation of of the deepest connection to to the land here and was manifested on this.

And for us, altering the environment is no small thing.

You know, rock cairns and these are probably the only ways in which our people change the environment.

We are going to stop at a few different homestead sites throughout our way down the river on this trip, and some of them are in varying degrees of decay.

I suppose.

Some of the cabins are kept up by the Forest Service in actually some of them even have caretakers that are still living there.

So we're here at the McGaffee cabin where some homesteaders lived in the early 1900s.

We're just about 100 yards away from the pictographs that we just saw.

And the people that lived here actually were really prominent in the in Hell's Canyon amongst the homesteaders.

And a lot of the homesteaders that lived here came to them for advice in how to succeed down here.

And actually, they installed a phone line.

The women wanted to talk while their husbands without herding sheep, and they installed a phone line.

(telephone rings) People can understand a house.

They can understand what they deem a home and civilization.

But for us, this this land is our home.

We don't need a cabin to to give us that sense of home.

It's it's this land that speaks to us.

(Niimiipuu word) in the written rock, is again, another powerful reminder of our people.

But if it wasn't for those people would just call this an empty landscape if this cabin wasn't here.

When in fact, for us, as generations of our people that lived here, died here, are buried here.

This place sustained the lives of our people.

And so today we don't live here no longer.

You know, even though part of my family came from the area just below this point on the river.

It█s a point in time for for us to reconnect with these places, because we don't often get to visit these places.

This is is Kouse.

It says it's a biscuit root in bloom in early spring.

This is what I dig.

I was not expecting to see that.

Days just to dig it.

And it tastes so good too.

Like you can eat it as a biscuit root.

It could be a cookie, it could be anything.

It█s even in soap.

People make it for soap.

In some of the grinders we had were longer than this.

But this might be like a smaller personal grinder, they grind that root, and it becomes kind of a corn meal and then you wet it down again and then you make a we call it (Niimiipuu word), which is a little root biscuit.

But the milkweed yarrow is medicine... hackberry, mock orange.

This is like the old school way of hunting, but they still used it pretty accurate, you know, 100 yard shot.

These last couple of days.

I kind of really felt like I was at home.

Everybody was calling me a river rat and a otter.

Because I was basically raised in a river.

I was always brought to the river as a little girl.

So I just feel really connected to the water today and yesterday.

And I'm learning a lot of new things from all of the guides here.

A lot of, not only indigenous people, other people understand the importance of water.

Our people have always recognized water as being number one.

Before we taste our traditional foods, we drink water to signify that as the source of life.

And so that's something that we do as a part of our just our normal feast and our normal dinners.

And our people here, are river people, our our lives even today, are connected and centered around around these rivers.

It's not a man written law.

It's the Creator's law.

We call it (Niimiipuu word).

And we have to follow that law.

So that's the importance of what we're doing.

And other tribes up the river, we share that same common belief.

And so now we're finally coming together.

We're united, and we hope that we stay that way for the river and for the salmon.

And that's the importance.

Even this land is listening to what I say.

It can hear what I say.

This river is listening to me, so I have to speak the truth.

And when I speak in my own language, it understands who I am.

When I come up into these mountains, we sing these songs.

This land hears and knows who I am.

It acknowledges me and I acknowledge it.

This trip definitely was not just like any ordinary trip.

I had to kind of switch gears from being... typically I'm the educator out here and to now being educated, I guess.

Having natives with us and talking about their connection to this land and this is their home and to have them share that with us, I now have new view of this area and just it's been really special.

We have guys who make really good arrowheads like these.

You can't really understand a river without being there and experiencing it.

Just as we were able to float through Hell█s Canyon.

It's just as important to visit these spots where the water no longer flows.

It's hard to imagine that we're standing at the site of one of the biggest waterfalls along the entire Columbia River.

This was the greatest Native American fishery site before the dams, and there was a 40 foot waterfall that would span the river.

And this is one of the richest fisheries along the entire stretch of river.

And now it's it's underneath these windy waves of the reservoir.

We're here where the Snake meets the Columbia River, what the Native American tribes referred to as the big river.

What once was two mighty rivers meeting are now two mighty reservoirs meeting.

Thanks to all of the dams along each of these rivers.

Lewis and Clark on their expedition arrived here in this very spot about 216 years ago to the date.

Their experience was much different than ours.

They came down a wild river of the Snake into this massive river, the Columbia River.

And here they were able to make at least 30 miles a day going on the swift water down to the Pacific Ocean.

If they were to come here today, they should probably have a motor on their boat in order to make any miles across the reservoir.

Could be considered the end of the journey for the Snake or with all of the changes coming, it could just be the beginning.

What you got?

A heart rock.

It was hard to pick up.

I found it out by the big rocks.

Very cool.

Thank you!

I found a heart rock!

The Living Peace Foundation is honored to provide funding support for Wild Rivers with Tillie supporting people and projects that creatively and courageously advance collaboration, compassion and living peace.

This series shares the passion that the Living Peace Foundation has for the health and connectedness of our planet and all who inhabit it.

I invite you to visit us at wildriverswithtillie dot org Or wildriverswithtillie dot com