Day 10


July 17th

Today we met with Ray Entz, Director of Wildlife and Terrestrial Resources for the Kalispel Tribe. We met him at the beautiful Camas Wellness Center in Cusick, WA. Ray shared a little bit about his educational pathway and he has a BA and MBA in Biology. Ray believes that environmental justice is the biggest problem that he see’s the Kalispel Tribe facing today. Polluters are not being held accountable for the consequences of their actions. The Kalispel tribe is about 4700 acres. Later we met with Jason, Fish Program Manager for the Kalispel Tribe. He shared that the Kalispel Tribe is working on a study attractins of fish to fish ladders. He said that so far they have noticed that fish have been attracted to certain cool temperature and that they want to go into more research to develop a method to alter the water temperature to attract fish. We viewed  Cut throat trout and some of the fully grown adults were only 7 inches long. And again Norther Pike were discussed and the Kalispel Tribe has been aggressively netting in their spawning grounds to reduce the population of northern pike on the reservation. He also shared that apex predators such as northern pike are more carcinogenic than is acceptable for human consumption. He said salmon are cleaner but do still have some negative aspects because of what we have done to the environment. Later we went to ‘The Caves’ and enjoyed and tour down to the docks where we viewed native plants and water and surrounding mountains. Lastly we went to the Kalispel Language Program where they spoke a Salish Dialect and we all learned signing and learned a few salish words. I really appreciated the Kalispel Language program and all the hard work they are doing to preserve an endangered language that belongs to their people. Hearing about their salish science and math books that are used in their immersion school was very impressive. 

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