NPR · 5 hours ago

To Save salmon, a Tribe Near Seattle Is Flooding Farmland

After decades of dispossession, the Stillaguamish Tribe is buying back land along their ancestral river-not to keep, but to give away to the water. Over the past 15 years, they've purchased 2,000 acres of farmland and removed miles of levees, welcoming the tides back onto earth that hasn't flooded in 140 years, all to save the Chinook salmon that once sustained their people and now teeter on extinction. "It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow to buy back the land that we essentially traded for the resource, the fish," says fisheries manager Scott Boyd, whose tribe was allowed to catch just 26 salmon last year. The restored marshes offer something beyond salmon: by giving floodwaters room to spread, they protect downstream farms and towns, proving that making space for the wild can also mean making space for human life to endure. Boyd dreams his four young children might one day fish these waters as their great-great-grandfather did-a hope that requires not reclaiming the past, but remaking the future.