(tribe chanting in foreign language) - So, yeah, Atlantic salmon have been a huge part of the Penobscot culture.

They've fed our ancestors since the beginning of time, and culturally, one of the most important species to the tribe.

- You know, it's hundreds of generations of that connection to the fish and to the river, and I felt that presence.

- Atlantic salmon made up around a third of our diet, traditionally, very important to the tribe.

That's kind of why we have a fishing village here, and that's why we're located where we are at Indian Island.

- Here at Indian Island, just below Indian Island, is where the Milford Dam is now.

Historically, that was a big set of falls there, Ledge falls, a perfect place to harvest salmon during the spring runs.

- Building of the dams 200 years ago or so, when those dams went up and all these animals had to change, they couldn't get up the river, the farm, the water warmed up, there was pollution in the river, there was Bach in the river.

They had to change their lifestyle in order to survive, and we did, too.

I was on the river as a teenager in the '50s.

There was no salmon in the river.

I never saw a salmon until I was fully grown.

I saw the river at its very worst, but I also can remember the changes that came about.

- So I started working with salmon in 1994 When I first started working here, water resources for Penobscot Nation, you know, instantly fell in love with the work, instantly became my favorite fish.

So here we are 29 years later, So it's been really a highlight of my career to be able to work with restoration Salmon.

- Well, salmon is probably the most challenging fish to recover.

Our juvenile salmon require the cleanest, coldest water you could imagine, So they had to get to the furthest reaches of the headwaters where they would live for two years.

The adults would eventually make their way back out to the ocean And so salmon needing this massive wide range of habitats and way upstream, they were the first ones to be impacted by the building of dams and the deforestation of the woods here in the Penobscot drainage.

The east branches had every bit of log and rock and everything dredged out of it, so we could flush logs down to bangore The ecosystem is trying to heal itself.

- Our rivers have so few salmon coming back to them that there's a lot of habitat, a lot of river miles, that have either no salmon or very few salmon, And for the last several decades, we've used hatcheries to raise salmon to either an egg or a fry or a par or a smolt and put them in the rivers to grow the rest of, you know, spend the rest of the time in the rivers and go to the ocean and hopefully survive the really high mortality rates at sea and come back to the rivers to spawn.

So the Salmon for Maine's Rivers project is an effort to get more salmon spawning directly in the rivers.

The biggest salmon that spend most of their life in the river do better in the ocean, so the more salmon we can have growing up in our rivers, the more salmon we can have coming back home, even if marine survival stays really low.

(people chatter) (water splashing) - [Fisher 1] 605?

- [Fisher 2] Yeah.

- [Fisher 1] 218-3?

(water splashing) (trailer engine revving) (birds chirping) - [Fisher 3] You ready down there?

- [Fisher 1] You guys ready?

- [Fisher 2] Guys ready?

All right.

(water splashing) (fishers cheering) - I think having the Atlantic salmon come back to our waters in greater numbers, hopefully, like through this project, that would be a really amazing experience, hopefully for us to experience or even future generations And just to see where these salmon go, like there's trackers in them So to see where they're going to breed and when they're going to sea and just kind of learning more about their lifestyle and especially as climate change is happening and hopefully they come back to some of the Penobscot headwaters and hopefully we'll still see them, see them back at Matagamon stream.

- Not only is this kind of providing a method for some of us and our coworkers here to be able to kind of interact with salmon and get in the water with them and be in their presence, but also to just work towards the greater goal of salmon restoration is something that's really important to us and something that holds a lot of meaning to all of us here.

(birds chirping) (tribe chanting in foreign language) - Seeing the big fish swim away into the river to see everyone so excited.

There were so many people there And the thing that I remember are the smiles, everyone was smiling It was just a really special day I don't think I've ever experienced anything quite like that in restoration.

- Putting adult egg bearing salmon, releasing them into our streams is, to me that was really something I was up in Matagamon gathering back last fall and I came outta the woods and a pickup truck pulled out and it was our water quality specialist and another guy works in the woods and I said, "What are you guys doing here?"

He said, "They're gonna release salmon.

Man was caught stream adult salmon" I said, "Really?"

He said, "Yeah," I said, "I gotta see this."

So I went up and a whole bunch of people were there.

They had a drum so I joined them singing and drumming and then they started putting the fish in the stream and to me that was a very spiritual occasion for me, standing on the bridge, watching those salmon laying in that pool I was thinking about my ancestors again, that they went through so much when they had that food source taken away because of the dams and the salmon.

They couldn't make it up to their spawning grounds And they had to change their lifestyle as well.

And here was these adult salmon being placed in one of our streams, which hopefully they will spawn and their offspring will go out completing the circle.

(tribe chanting in foreign language) - And it's just been really moving to be able to see some of the younger staff actually get to handle the fish and be reconnected with that, with that ancestors that we haven't been connected to at all in some cases for many years.

- My part in the release into Matagamon salmons was I was actually in the water getting the net and putting the fish actually into the stream I had another person there helping me, but, 'cause they were just, they were so big I couldn't get them out myself really.

And it was really special to be able to be a part of that and to see them kind of take their first swim into the stream, into their natural habitat.

- Just to be able to, you know, feel their power Like as we were carrying them down in the nets to the stream, you could tell they were ready to be in their natural habitat after being in the tanks for so long And kind of to see them in their future habitat hopefully, hopefully they come back up to Matagamon stream and.

- You know, what I'd really like to see with Atlantic Salmon is that we would be able to bring the populations back to a point where tribal members would be able to exercise their treaty rights to be able to consume Atlantic salmon again and go out seasonally and harvest salmon.

(tribe chanting in foreign language) East branch of the Penobscot has some of the best habitat in the state, if not all of New England Beautiful riffle pools all the way down through some nice sets of falls down through there.

A lot of cold water in the East branch.

- And salmon really need cold water, especially as our river's warm they need to seek out pockets of just the right temperature to be able to thrive.

(water flowing) - The study area would be from the Matagamon Lake dam down to a confluence of the Wassataquoik stream.

We're gonna look at Matagamon dam assess fish passage there, come up with an alternatives analysis on the dam and figure out what we can do to make that, to make fish passage better there.

Look at any areas where habitat can be improved.

- So they're looking at the flows there to find optimal flows at Matagamon Dam, seeing if we need to adjust that to optimize it for salmon.

(water flowing) You know, we've collected a lot of data in the East Branch for as long as I've been working here for 29 years now.

For the most part, we have fortunately really clean water up there, the biggest pollutant we have up there now would be mercury in the fish, but by burning coal it creates methyl mercury goes up into the atmosphere and rain, snow event, that mercury is flushed down into our waterways, works its way up through the food chain.

We have consumption restrictions based on the mercury levels, short of that water quality looks really good in Matagamon and the East branch.

- The east branch has really great habitat.

It's one of the highest quality areas of rivers here, but it's still broken, there were still log drives, the sediments are impacted, the channels aren't quite right and that if we're working hard in some of these areas, we can enrich the river and kind of heal the river so that it can support the salmon and all the other Sierra fish.

(water flowing) - They raised the money and took out the dams and now we have a section of Penobscot that's free flowing like my ancestors saw it and the fish and the insects and the animals all now can enjoy the river like their ancestors did.

- The removal of the downstream dams brought back species that we haven't seen in hundreds of years.

- As of yesterday, we broke the threshold of 3 million river herring, which is a record for the Penobscot River It's a drop in the bucket to what the Penobscot could support, but it's amazing, amazing story and I hope people are paying attention.

Now we still have a lot of work to do, so salmon is the most challenging one to recover because there are still so many impediments to upstream passage, so much danger in downstream passage because we're not keeping these animals out of the turbines, the majority of the river is still clogged with these facilities, but the Penobscot restoration project, it said, "Hey look, look what can be done through compromise."

Big great things can happen through compromise if you're willing to put in the time and effort and to sit across the table with people that you would consider your adversaries almost any day.

This is an internationally renowned famous event and we did it right here, we did it on the home waters of the Penobscot Indian nation and we should be very proud of it, but it's a stepping stone, we need six more, seven more, but anyway.

- [Sam] And the two orange, the vest that I had.

- [Danielle] Are you ready?

- I am.

- We can go out and look for the redds and it tells us not only that at least two fish were there, but it tells us that they did spawn, that they did reproduce So it gives us a kind of an, it's not a complete count because we can't cover all of the ground and viewing conditions can be pretty hard so you can even miss a red that that's right there but it does give us an index of how many fish are spawning in the river in a given year Some of the smaller waters like Matagamon stream or or Sam air's, we can do it by foot, we hike through the woods and look for the redds - [Sam] Alright, I have a feeling our first salmon redds are right around the corner.

- The female salmon does all the work digging the redd, she'll dig with her tail and it kind of creates this pressure that kicks the sediment all up and it creates a pit And once she's got the pit the way she likes it, she deposits her eggs, the male will be right next to her and release the sperm at the same time those eggs settle in and then she uses her tail to cover it over, and the way that she does it, it also, it helps with the water flow, kind of the water comes up through that pot and kind of moves through the gravel, the redd, so the eggs get the right amount of oxygen, they get the flow they need through the winter - [Danielle] There it is.

- There's the redd right there and there's this big pile of sand down here.

I'd say it's definitely a full redd.

- [Danielle] Yeah, I think so.

That's exciting.

So this A, this is upstream of a release site, B it's a good size redd.

- [Sam] It's massive.

Yeah, it's a beauty.

- It's a good size redd, which I've had conversations with people about how big they see the sea car fish redds are likely to be, and I'm glad to see it's a good size redd.

We put these fish in the river and even though they grew up in captivity, they were spawned, their parents were spawned in a hatchery.

They grew up their entire lives in a hatchery.

We put them in the river and they knew what to do, they knew how to find each other and spawn and I mean, we could probably think about there being some complex genetics of innate behaviors that are really highly conserved genetically and passed down, or it's just, it's some very deep way of knowing on the part of the fish.

(water flowing) - When you sit in your house, in whatever town in Maine you live in, there is a stream very close to you Maybe you don't know the name of that stream, but that stream connects to another stream, which connects to another stream, which connects to the river and eventually gets to the ocean.

You, no matter where you sit in your homestead here in the state of Maine, you are connected to the Atlantic Ocean, you are connected to the upstream habitat, and just because you don't care about that little stream that's in your backyard doesn't mean that that little stream isn't incredibly important to the resilience of that ecosystem.

But if you can cure one little piece of one little tributary and one little capillary that's in your backyard and take ownership and love it and feel pride in it and tell your neighbors and your children about it, you have done something to set this river up for success.

(water flowing) - Personally, I'm glad to see studies, intensive studies done on the east branch, looking at the flows, kind of putting everything under the microscope and hopefully coming up with a solution that everybody can be happy with and that will help the salmon in the long run, in the future, continuing to work with salmon, continuing to get tribal youth involved, very important for the tribe.

- Being like a young person from our community, it's an honor to learn alongside some of the elders in our community and hear about their stories and the knowledge that they know about the salmon and the history of salmon to Penobscots and Wabanaki people.

And honestly, for this to be our job to release salmon is quite special It's kind of like we're bringing our ancestors back in a way.

- Thinking about the ancestors, what they saw, the changes to their lifestyle and what we were doing to bring a portion of that back and then looking to the future that our grandchildren, what they would benefit from what we were doing today.

- I hope that our future generations are able to experience salmon in a way that I think I haven't, like I've never seen wild salmon in our rivers And so I hope that our future generations are able to see that and to live like how our ancestors used to.

Yeah, and I hope our ecosystems just keep getting healthier.

- My hope is that we can bring the salmon home, that the ecosystem will be functioning, that we'll see not just salmon, but all of the other sea run fish coming home, bringing nutrients with them from the ocean to enrich the river and reconnect the river and the ocean.

- When we think about the Penobscot River, when you think ecosystem health, you have to think Gulf of Maine and the forest and it's all connected, because a healthy forest means a healthy stream, means a healthy salmon, if they can get there and get back, you know.

- The connection between the Penobscots and the river and what it meant about our culture, not about just the salmon, all these other animals, insects, and everything that lived in on around the river would benefit.

I hope our children and grandchildren can thank us as their ancestors for looking forward for them and restoring that resource that had been taken away from our ancestors, if we accomplish nothing else I think that's one of their very important things is as native people restoring a damaged resource and it's only through caring for mother Earth that we can accomplish that.

(water flowing) - So historically salmon was a major part of our diet and our culture and so to lose that part over time has been, we're just losing like a piece of us, I guess in a way and so I think it's really important to try to restore that population again so that we can fully be who we are meant to be.

(tribe chanting in foreign language)