Backbone is supporting the upcoming All Our Relations Journey, to bring attention and support indigenous leadership calling for the urgent need to remove the four lower Snake River dams.

Please read on for info about the Journey and its upcoming stops in Olympia, Portland, Pasco, Spokane, the Lower Snake River, and Seattle. Register for each event.

• We are doing a big push to prepare a giant floating banner for the Lower Snake River stop, where there will be a flotilla, Saturday, Sept 30.  If you’re on Vashon Island and can help with creating the banner this week, please let us know you can be there!
• If you want to be part of the kayaktivism team for the flotilla, please sign up here.

Looking Ahead:

• To learn more about the indigenous-led work to restore salmon, mark your calendar for the October 3rd film screening on Vashon Island of Covenant of the Salmon People, a documentary made in collaboration with the Nez Perce Tribe.
• Backbone is constructing another giant inflatable salmon – a chinook! Its creation will happen in Olympia. Can you help out?  We need people who can sew as well as help guide fabric, cut, construct, etc.  Please sign up for a work party shift!
• Lastly, we just had a Technical Retreat in Eastern Washington to refine our “Trains Can Save Salmon Plan,” a visionary plan to shift the transportation of wheat off the river and onto rail.  Our short line rail-focused plan can usher in a rural rail renaissance.  As Bill said in his intro at the retreat, when you present a critique, it should include a proposal. (See Bill’s Letter “Winning is More Fun!” on Grand Strategy that was sent out this summer.) We are eager to share our SE Washington Rail Plan with you as we complete the details; more coming soon.
• If you appreciate the solidarity work that Backbone is doing, please pitch in to keep it going.  And if you’re already part of the Lumbar Club, people who make a monthly tax-deductible donation, we are grateful for your ongoing support – you help make this happen!

*ABOUT THE UPCOMING “ALL OUR RELATIONS JOURNEY”:

For millennia, salmon and the Snake and Columbia Rivers they call home sustained Indigenous peoples and cultures throughout the Northwest. Today, salmon returns are dismal, and several Northwest Tribal Nations are calling on the federal government to uphold their treaties and restore abundant salmon.

The All Our Relations Snake River Campaign is a two-week, Indigenous-led campaign that aims to bring attention to the urgent need to remove the four lower Snake River dams as part of a comprehensive solution to save salmon from extinction, to honor treaty rights, and help Southern Resident killer whales.

WHY?

We are at a critical moment in the struggle to restore the Snake River, bring salmon back to abundance, honor the promises made to Tribal Nations, and help endangered orca who rely on the salmon for food. We need elected officials to work with Tribes, the principal dialogue partners, as well as other impacted communities and sectors to develop and implement a comprehensive plan now, before it’s too late for salmon and the orca, ecosystems, and communities that depend on them.

Each stop of this campaign demonstrates the overwhelming regional support for a comprehensive solution to recover threatened and endangered salmon populations that also works for communities, Tribes, energy, and agricultural interests. Events will feature an 8-foot in diameter steel sculpture, hand crafted for the journey by Lummi Nation members A. Cyaltsa Finkbonner and Master Carver Jewell James that represents a vision of ‘All Our Relations’.