The Blackfeet Tribe’s Fish and Game Department
wants to remove a 95-year-old dam on its reservation that backs
water up three miles into Glacier National
Park.
Getting rid of aging Sherburne Dam, says
Blackfeet biologist Ira New Breast, would eliminate the biggest
threat to the St. Mary River’s bull trout, a population recently
added to the federal endangered species list.
“We
have hard data on what the dam does to bull trout,” he says. “One
(radio-collared) fish spent the entire season under the dam, and
two died below.”
Taking out the dam would affect
more than fish. The Bureau of Reclamation owns and operates the
earthen structure on the reservation, and water behind it is stored
for irrigators in Canada and eastern Montana. Through a complicated
system of ditches and channels, the water makes its way into Canada
and then back down into Montana, where it’s used by wheat growers
near Havre.
New Breast acknowledges that dumping
the dam would precipitate a messy water-rights scramble. But it’s
one that could potentially benefit the tribe, which now gets no
water from the dam on its land. An international treaty, drafted in
the 1900s, still regulates where the stored water
goes.
“There was across-the-board discrimination
and we were left out of that treaty,” says New Breast. “We’d like
it to be revisited.”
The BuRec hasn’t considered
dam removal, says the agency’s Rick Blaskovitch, but is studying
ways to improve the dam’s fish-friendliness. Installing new gates
on the dam, for example, would help to ensure adequate winter water
flow for trout living downstream from the
dam.
Lynn Kaeding, a federal biologist, adds that
delivering water to irrigators gets tricky without the dam to store
water. It could mean pumping water directly out of the river, even
in dry months when the water levels are already low. If the dam is
removed, says Kaeding, there’s the potential to “end up with
something that’s more damaging to bull trout than the current
situation.”
Copyright © 2000 HCN and Ali Macalady
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Tribe calls dam a trout trap.
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