High-level U.S. Interior Department officials
came to Klamath on Tuesday to sign an
agreement with the Yurok Tribe to
cooperatively manage one of the West's most
troubled rivers.
Yurok Tribal Council members met with the
interior secretary's acting director of
policy, Larry Finfer, and the counselors to
the secretary and the U.S. Solicitor Bob
Laidlaw and Larry Jensen. Area managers for
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Bureau of
Indian Affairs were also on hand for the
ceremony, lunch and a boat trip up the Klamath
River.
The Interior Department and the tribe
recently announced that the two would work
together on the thorny environmental issues
facing the Klamath Basin. The arrangement
comes during a year when tribal, commercial
and sport fishing has been slashed to protect
a run of salmon expected to be poor. Warm, low
water, toxic algae blooms and other water
quality problems are believed behind diseases
that have in recent years killed tens of
thousands of adult chinook salmon and hundreds
of thousands of young salmon.
Yurok Tribal Chairman Howard McConnell said
that the river's resources are paramount for
the tribe.
”The Yurok Tribe has invested a tremendous
amount of our scarce financial and human
resources over Klamath Basin issues,”
McConnell said in a statement. “Our people and
their needs have always been put last. There
must be a new way of looking at issues that
account for everyone's needs while not
forfeiting our birthright or a healthy river.”
The agreement will mesh efforts of the
tribe and federal agencies in monitoring river
conditions, collecting information, planning,
land acquisition and recovery and other
resource tasks. |