Healthy Traditions
December Minus Tide Harvesting
Minus tides provide access to delicious indigenous foods like clams,
mussels, seaweed, sea rose, urchins, and more.
The Healthy Traditions project has been working closely with the Natural Resources Department to
continue planning and implementing projects that will provide increased opportunities for Tribal
members to gather cultural resources. Many of these projects are in the form of habitat restoration, which
works to restore a damaged or destroyed ecosystem through restoring the natural processes (such as
removing a dike to reintroduce tidal influence to a site), or through the reintroduction of plants and
habitat structures (such as planting native species in a meadow).
The Tribe is surveying for salmon spawning habitat to include in a larger model determining what
part of the habitat is most critical to spawning salmon. Ultimately these hydrological models will describe
60 miles of the Siletz River and identify key areas where conservation and habitat enhancement should
occur to support salmon stocks through future climate change scenarios. By conserving salmon habitat,
the Tribe hopes to enhance the number of salmon in the Siletz River.
Healthy Traditions and Natural Resources are also working to increase Tribal access to Wapato
tubers and Camas bulbs for cultural events. Staff collected over 200 bulbs of Wapato and 400 bulbs of
Camas from the Willamette Valley, with the intent to plant them out at the Hatchery property. Also in the
Willamette Valley, staff have been continuing to work with private land owners interested in restoring
native habitats on their property. The restoration of these sites, which focus on oak savannah habitats,
would increase access to traditional Tribal food resources such as camas and acorns.
Another project that Healthy Traditions and Natural Resources Department are collaborating on is
the restoration of native Olympia oysters to the Yaquina Bay. Staff worked with Oregon Oyster Farms to
place 900 bags of oyster shell in the Yaquina Bay with the hope that native Olympia oysters will settle on
these shells and provide a source population for the Bay. Native oysters have been decimated over the
past century, so the initiation of a source population is the first step to restoring Yaquina Bay Olympia
oyster populations.
Through habitat restoration, not only are we able to work towards healing the land, but work to
develop and maintain important traditional and cultural resources for the future.
Laura Brown, CTSI Shellfish Biologist
Mission Statement
The CTSI Healthy Traditions project
seeks to improve the health of
Siletz Tribal members through
educational activities which promote
the use of traditional foods through
hunting, gathering, gardening, cooking,
food preservation and protecting our
natural resources.
December 2017
•
Siletz News
•
7