Bill Green Interview – Sturgeon

Bill Green, director of the Canadian Columbia River Inter-tribal Fisheries Commission, discusses the declining sturgeon population along the Columbia.

Title Screen: Circular logo on a black backdrop. Logo is an image of four waves turning into wheat on the left end. The title “Stories Beneath the Surface” is circled around the image in capital letters.

Interview with Bill Green – a bald white man with short grey beard. Wearing a red plaid shirt. He is sitting in a chair in front of the corner of a room. There are black and white photos on the wall.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Transcript of Narration:

Sturgeon used to go all the way up to Columbia to – at least to the mouth of the Spillimacheen River.

Now we have, only have sturgeon left in the Canadian section of Columbia we have sturgeon in Arrow Lakes but a very small number 50 to 80, uh and we have sturgeon downstream [points with finger] at Keenleyside Dam, so between Castlegar, Trail, and into the US that probably in the order of 1500 uh sturgeon there.

And then sturgeon in the Kootenay river system, in Kootenay Lake, and-and going up to Bonners Ferry um but the losses of sturgeon were, you know, definitely linked to the construction, not so much of Grand Coulee or Chief Joseph Dam, but to the construction of the Columbia River Treaty dams, the Keenleyside Dam, Mica Dam, and then on the US side, um the Libby Dam.

[Raises hands, elbows out to the side, with his fingers tips touching. He mimics something coming down.]

And so we’re not-it’s not saying that just simply the fact of putting a uh dam there, blocking sturgeon is what caused the loss of the sturgeon, it was the – there’s a bunch of hypotheses, but one is that the dams [gestures with hand] interrupted the sediments normally moving down the river and interfered with those sediments [gestures with two hands] getting down to where sturgeon used to spawn, and so now we have this problem of less capable sturgeon spawning grounds.

You know, fortunately the sturgeon populations have been temporarily rescued through hatchery programs, but the hatcheries aren’t a long-term solution.

We have to find a way to – so that sturgeon can spawn in the wild, and survive in the wild, and -and support their populations, and support harvest, and support all the different species that rely on sturgeon long term.