The Stillaguamish Tribe gives its river north of Seattle room to roam

S

cott Boyd is walking through deep mud near the mouth of the Stillaguamish River, on Puget Sound about 30 miles north of Seattle.

This landscape changed dramatically in October when the Stillaguamish Tribe removed two miles of earthen levee. The ridge of dirt kept the river and the tides from spreading onto nearby farmland. Once a giant excavator bit into the levee, the tribe welcomed tidewater onto the land for the first time in over a century.

“Before, it was a dairy operation. And now it's a big tidal marsh,” Boyd, a Stillaguamish tribal member and fisheries manager, says while looking out at the new 230-acre wetland.

His small tribe of about 400 people only gained federal recognition in 1976, more than a century after tribal leaders signed the Treaty of Point Elliott with the U.S. government.

“Our official reservation is pretty small—I want to say less than 100 acres,” Boyd says. “And it wasn't granted to us until maybe 10 years ago.”

Over the past 15 years, the Stillaguamish Tribe has purchased 2,000 acres of land for fish and wildlife habitat.

Under the 1855 treaty, the Stillaguamish and other Puget Sound tribes gave up almost all of their land but kept their rights to fish and hunt.

“It is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow to buy back the land that we essentially traded for the resource, the fish, but it's what we have to do to get things back on track,” Boyd says.

What the tribe wants back on track is salmon.

Chinook salmon is a federally threatened species in Puget Sound.

In 2025, so few Chinook came back to the Stillaguamish River that the entire tribe was only allowed to catch 26 fish.

Tidal marshes are crucial nurseries for young Chinook salmon and a focal point for efforts to bring the fish back from the brink of extinction. The Stillaguamish Tribe has been buying up riverfront land in its traditional territory and removing levees to turn farmland into wetland.

“The salmon, it has always been important to our people, to the tribe, to our way of life,” Boyd says. “These habitat projects are the best bang for our buck right now.”

Depending on the tide and the river level, traversing the new wetland can require anything from a small boat to tall boots.

Small water channels snake their way through the mudflats.

Flood-strewn trees lie on their sides.

A cloud of shorebirds erupts after probing the muddy ground for food. Hundreds, if not thousands, of birds called dunlins wheel and bank above the freshly remade landscape, moving in tight formation like a pulsing, living cloud.

“Watch these dunlins. It's a visual symphony,” biologist Jason Griffith with the Stillaguamish Tribe says.

Their numbers hint at the ecological benefits this brand-new wetland, known as "zis a ba 2," is bringing. Named for zis a ba, a 19th-century chief of a Stillaguamish village once located just south of the river mouth, zis a ba 2 is the second of three large tidal marshes the tribe is restoring in the area.

To help natural forces rework the area more quickly, restoration crews dug channels into the farmland before breaching the levee. They found old middens—piles of discarded, fire-charred clam shells—from up to 1,500 years ago, signs of long human occupation.

“It's really come alive in the past few weeks, and it was really tested during this latest flooding in Washington,” Boyd says.

The dynamic landscape morphed again in December, when floodwaters tore through the area, scouring some land away and delivering sediment and uprooted trees from upriver.

Powerful floodwaters can devastate infrastructure or ecosystems that they overtake. They can also create new habitats and bring new life to worn-out lands.

“The river, over the last several weeks of floods, has brought in dozens of log-truck loads of wood that, if we had to purchase on the open market and bring into the site, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Griffith says.

Now, when the Stillaguamish floods, some of its destructive energy can spread out and dissipate before it does harm.

“Now the river can connect to its floodplain like it hasn't in 140 years,” Griffith says.

Farther back from the river, the tribe built a new levee to keep farmland behind it protected from high waters.

“By giving the river more space, we are reducing the damage and the expense to society to maintain infrastructure. It's cheaper to maintain if you stay further away,” Griffith says.

There are always tradeoffs with changing land use. More acreage for salmon habitat invariably means less acreage for other things.

On the Stillaguamish, two different groups wanted to grow different types of food on the same land: wild salmon or farm crops.

“There’s only so much farmland,” Stanwood farmer Tyler Breum says. “The population of the country, of the world, it's still increasing, and they’ve got to get their food from somewhere.”

Breum farms potatoes and seed crops a few miles north of the zis a ba wetlands.

“The levees make life in the floodplain possible,” he says. “And you know, we wouldn't be able to farm or to live there without the levees.”

During the December floods, Breum spent an anxious night riding his all-terrain vehicle on a levee by his farm.

“I was just out there on my four-wheeler, just riding back and forth, back and forth, I think every hour during that night, just riding the dike up and down, making sure we're okay,” Breum says.

That century-old levee, the top of which is just 2 feet wide in places, sprang a leak during a flood in 2021. Luckily, a duck hunter noticed it, and repair crews were able to plug the hole before disaster struck.

“The city of Stanwood could have been underwater there if it hadn't been caught as quickly as it was,” Breum says.

Breum has been trying to get improvements made to that levee since 2010. He hopes to see construction begin on a beefier levee this summer.

Breum and his partners tried to buy the zis a ba 2 farmland, but they were outbid by the Stillaguamish Tribe.

“I don't hold anything against the tribe for buying land whatsoever,” Breum says.

He says he supports salmon-habitat projects, as long as farmers see some benefits too.

“It's really important that Chinook recover,” Breum says. “There are fields that are less productive than other fields that should probably be the first to go. I'm probably alone in that opinion when it comes to local farming.”

None of the farmers on the board of the Snohomish County Farm Bureau would comment for this story.

To benefit neighboring farms, the zis a ba 2 project built a new levee four feet taller than the one it tore down.

The idea is to make remaining farms more resilient in the face of the worsening floods expected with a changing climate.

RELATED: Northwest floods offer sneak peek of hotter climate's toll

The Stillaguamish Tribe has restored hundreds of acres of tidal habitat so far but aims for much more.

Scientists say it will take thousands of acres of restored habitat to help Puget Sound Chinook swim off the endangered-species list.

“My great-grandfather, he fished these waters, and he was able to eke out a moderate living, and that hasn't been the case for these past few generations,” Boyd, a father of four young children, says. “I'm not necessarily pushing them into fishing for a career, but it would be amazing if they could do what our ancestors used to be able to do, which was fish and live and work these waters.”