For 85 years, no salmon has completed the journey up the Columbia River past Grand Coulee Dam. Built between 1938 and 1941 without fish passage, Grand Coulee — followed by Chief Joseph Dam in 1955 — cut off more than half of the river’s historic mainstem habitat, ending runs that once brought millions of sockeye and chinook into the Canadian portion of the watershed each year. Now a cross-border coalition of Indigenous nations is running the tagging, hatchery and translocation science needed to answer a hard question: can salmon actually come home to the Upper Columbia, and what would it take to get them there.
On the Canadian side, the Syilx-Okanagan, Secwepemc and Ktunaxa nations are leading the research through the Bringing the Salmon Home initiative, launched in 2019 in partnership with the government of British Columbia and Canadian federal agencies. The Okanagan Nation Alliance operates the kł cpəlḵ stim̱ hatchery in Penticton, B.C., which released 1,500 sockeye fry in May 2026, while the Shuswap Band — part of the Secwepemc Nation — hosts ceremonial fry releases that this year involved more than 300 students.
What the tagging data actually shows
The research base for reintroduction is still built one tagged fish at a time. According to reporting by Mongabay, tagged sockeye released as juveniles in the Upper Columbia Basin have successfully navigated downstream past several dams to reach the ocean, and last summer two of those tagged fish returned as adults, detected near Wells Dam in Washington State. Separately, a small number of tracked adult chinook released upstream have moved into Canada, with some reaching the first major dam in their path. Okanagan-origin adult sockeye translocated to Arrow Lakes have also been monitored, including one fish observed on spawning grounds in 2024. Each of these data points — juvenile outmigration survival, adult return detection, upstream movement past a specific structure — is a discrete variable in the feasibility models that will eventually inform decisions about fish passage infrastructure at dams including Grand Coulee, Chief Joseph, and Canada’s Hugh Keenleyside, Mica and Revelstoke dams.
The cross-border funding and data-sharing architecture
The research effort is explicitly binational. In 2023, the Biden administration committed US$200 million to the Upper Columbia United Tribes to fund Phase 2 of a feasibility implementation plan testing reintroduction on the US side of the border — the companion effort to the tagging and hatchery science that Syilx-Okanagan, Secwepemc and Ktunaxa researchers are running upstream in Canada. That pairing matters administratively as much as ecologically: a species that migrates across an international boundary generates a research programme that has to as well, with data on tagged-fish movement, dam passage, and hatchery outcomes needing to be interpreted consistently on both sides of the border even though the funding, permitting and governance structures on each side are entirely separate.
That is also why this is a case study worth watching for research-administration audiences beyond fisheries science specifically. Indigenous-led programmes like Bringing the Salmon Home operate under governance frameworks — consistent with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) — that sit alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the federal grant-reporting and data-sharing terms attached to funding such as the US$200 million Upper Columbia United Tribes commitment. Reconciling tribal and First Nations data sovereignty with the reporting obligations of a binational, multi-agency funding relationship is exactly the kind of research-data-governance problem that cross-border conservation science increasingly has to solve alongside the biology itself.
A multi-decade programme, not a single milestone
Researchers and community leaders involved describe this as generational work rather than a near-term fix. Mark Thomas, a Bringing the Salmon Home leader quoted by Mongabay, frames the effort as reconnection and advocacy as much as biology, while fisheries scientist Scott Cope has said the programme needs to scale from releasing tens of thousands of fish to releasing millions before reintroduction can be judged successful. No fish passage has yet been built at Grand Coulee or Chief Joseph dams, and any such infrastructure decision remains years away. What exists now is the evidence base — tagged-fish detections, hatchery release data, translocation monitoring — that Indigenous-led science on both sides of the border is assembling to make that eventual decision possible.
Source: Mongabay, “First Nations lead the return of salmon to Canada’s Upper Columbia River” (July 29, 2026).
