At about 450 million years old, lamprey evolved when the first dinosaurs didn’t yet exist and Pangaea wouldn’t form for about another 150 million years.
But within a couple hundred years of Euro-American settlers arriving in the Columbia River Basin and building industrial infrastructure like dams, everything has changed. Pacific lamprey populations are now threatened and at what members of the Yakama Nation hope is the near rock-bottom before a comeback.
With that as a backdrop, about a thousand people from around the Pacific Northwest gathered along the Willamette River in Oregon City in late June for an event hosted by Yakama Nation celebrating Pacific lamprey.
Jeremy Takala is a Yakama tribal councilor and helped organize the celebration. He reflected on the event while standing at a viewpoint above Willamette Falls, where tribes including Yakama Nation have gathered lamprey for countless generations.
“We’re trying to come back to the area where our people once were thriving,” he said. “And we’re here, and so we’re honoring that way — not only the lamprey in particular but this land here — with the songs, and knowing that this land is happy that we were back and that we didn’t forget, regardless if all this development, construction has occurred.”
Attendees learned about the history of the prized, eel-like fish from elders, danced and heard from speakers including former Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, president of Willamette Falls Trust, which is trying to return partial public access to the falls.
For many, though, the highlight of the event was eating a meal Yakama Nation chefs prepared of salmon, salad, potatoes, cookies and lamprey that tribal members harvested the day before at the falls. The high-spirited and hungry line stretched longer than a football field.
Willamette Falls has been a major intertribal fishery and trade location since time immemorial. Many tribes lived nearby, and even more came to fish, trade and visit. It was home to the Charcowah village of the Clowewalla (Willamette band of Tumwaters) and the Kosh-huk-shix Village of Clackamas people.
But the site, along with much of the rest of the Willamette Valley, was ceded to the United States government under the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855. After that, the U.S. army forcibly removed and relocated tribal members to the Grand Ronde Reservation.
On the rocks, under the water, in the spray
“You’ll see them on the rocks climbing,” said Dave’y Lumley, standing at Willamette Falls the day before the festival.
Lumley is a Yakama Nation member and biologist with the nation’s Pacific Lamprey Project.
“I’ll probably swim right under there and feel around,” she said, gesturing towards a torrent of water gushing over one section of the roughly 2,300-foot-long, horseshoe-shaped waterfall. Then she climbed into the water and swam over in search of the wriggling fish.
Willamette Falls is the U.S.’s second largest waterfall by flow volume, behind only Niagara Falls.
A few dozen other people spread out at the base of the falls alongside Lumley. Many of them were children and young adults from Yakama Nation whose families have gathered there as far back as family histories can extend.
“I’m not a big fan of the cold,” said Tom Farley. “I like the heat, like to lay around on a rock all day.”
That didn’t stop the 19-year-old from diving in. Beyond the fun of scrambling around the fall’s rocks and swimming through its pools with his community, Farley said his goal was to keep coming back and bringing lamprey home for his family and others. Lamprey are also known as eels, Asúm, k’súyas, hé·su and other names, depending on the language.
Farley’s mom, Lottie Sam, does education and outreach for Yakama Nation Fisheries.
“We are a gathering family,” she said. “We fish, hunt, forage for roots and berries and plants that our parents have taught us for many years. We have a lot of young people here today because we want them to learn this way of harvesting lamprey, so this traditional practice does not stop.”
Passing those traditions down is part of the celebration. Sitting on the rocks of the falls with a colleague while keeping an eye on the children, she said lamprey returns used to be seemingly endless when her dad and uncles harvested.
She gestured to the boats that had taken everyone to the falls, “There was a time where — how we got the boats to this area here — they could scoop them out of the water.”
Her family would fill up large trash cans with the fish, take them back to the Yakima Valley to clean and give the fish out to half a dozen other families. Pacific lamprey can be grilled, baked, cooked, canned, smoked or wind dried.
The lamprey life cycle starts when they hatch in gravelly streambeds and head to slower moving water.
The small fish then spend the next three to 10 years burrowed in the sand and silt, filter and deposit feeding. After that, juveniles go through a metamorphosis and swim to the ocean, where they spend the next one to seven years using their hallmark sucking disk mouths to attach to and feed on larger host fish.
From there, between May and July, they head back to rivers and streams like the ones where they were born, spending up to three years there before mating and dying. The nutrient-packed ecological architects are good eats whether you’re a person, salmon, predator or riverbank.
The lamprey gathered that day were headed back on that exact journey. But even if they hadn’t been pulled from the water, many of those bagged fish would have soon died on the rocks.
Systematically blocked passage
That’s because Portland General Electric — who owns much of the site and has a hydropower project there — puts up wood boards each year at the top of the falls, raising the pool behind the falls by a few feet.
Andrea Platt is a spokesperson for PGE. She said in an email statement they put up the boards in late spring or early summer each year, and they stay up “until the water pressure naturally degrades and dislodges them.”
“They help get the most power from our hydroelectric facility,” she wrote.
She added that some flashboards have ramps to help lamprey scale them. Takala said many lamprey were stranded at sections near the top of the falls and he did not see any lamprey use the ramps on the morning before the lamprey celebration.
On top of blocking passage, the dam extension also slows down and warms up the partly stagnant pool of water behind it. The warmer water that does make it over the falls can be disorienting to lamprey, Sam said.
Worsening that situation, snowfall in the Willamette River Basin this spring was at less than one-quarter of the usual amount, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data shows.
PGE’s boards aren’t the only blockage.
Dams on the river system — including 13 operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — block lamprey from nearly one-third of their historic Willamette Basin habitat of more than 20,000 stream miles, studies show.
The blocked areas tend to be far up in the basin and are some of the best habitat for the fish, said Laurie Porter, Lamprey Project lead for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
“If they’re not blocked,” Porter said about lamprey, “they tend to go all the way up as far as they can go to the cold water.”
The dams blocking them were built between the early 1940s and late 1960s, primarily with the goal of controlling the river system in the event of flood conditions. Biologists including Ralph Lampman of Yakama Nation Fisheries put pre-dam returns in the millions.
About 500,000 lamprey were harvested from the river in 1946, studies have found. But between when the last dam was finished and 1999, only about 16,000 were harvested on average each year. And that number plummeted to about 6,000 in the two decades that followed.
A spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers said the agency doesn’t have Willamette River passage data. And the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife doesn’t include how many lamprey pass the falls’ fish ladder alongside tallies of salmon. (Lamprey struggle with fish ladders, which are almost always designed for salmon.)
But Lampman said lamprey returns to the Willamette have gotten worse lately. And Corps’ data shows recent Pacific lamprey returns to Bonneville Dam on the mainstem Columbia River have been less than half the 10-year average of about 40,000 fish.
Back in the Willamette River Basin, the Corps recently finalized a move to modify dam operations to bring the river closer to how it originally ran. But the agency’s approach to fighting salmon extinction in the basin has been controversial, and largely neglected lamprey.
The agency’s efforts to reestablish lamprey above the dams are basically nonexistent because of limited funding — not limited will — a Corps biologist told Street Roots. Trapping lamprey is difficult and the infrastructure the agency uses to trap fish and haul them above the dams is designed for salmon, which have different needs.
Tribes take the lead
Willamette Falls Trust is one of the main groups working to enable public access to the falls.
The organization is steered by a four-person tribal leadership committee currently made up of leaders from the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation.
They hold seats on its 15-person board of directors, and the nonprofit also consults with tribes’ technical experts.
Former Gov. Brown, who is president of the trust, told Street Roots the organization is dedicated to restoring access to the falls, including for Native people for whom the site is one of the only places to gather lamprey in the region.
The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde bought the east side of the falls where a paper mill polluted the land. It is tearing down the ruins, cleaning up the site and building a mixed-use development and restored landscape.
Brown said her group is working to buy part of the island on the west side of the falls, which PGE owns.
“We are working to create a national heritage site park, something that would be respectful and reflective of the multiple histories that converge on the site,” she said. “It was a community gathering place. We want to recreate that. It was also on the east side. It was the first transmission of electricity in our nation’s history. We want to honor that, and, with the paper mills, it was very much part of Oregon’s early economic engine, not just for years, but for decades.”
Brown said the Trust’s development plan for the site includes the PGE hydropower plant remaining in operation “because we are using more electricity today than we did many years ago. This is also PGE’s origin story.”
In addition to feeding Yakama members and event attendees, Yakama Nation Fisheries and partners also released lamprey with trackers in blocked off habitat in the Willamette Basin.
“Last year, we brought in 250 adults that we brought in up there and released, so they can spawn,” Lampman told event attendees. “This year, we’re trying to get 500 lamprey. We’re just about 70 fish short, but we’re hoping we’re going to head out tomorrow again.”
Next year, the goal is 1,000 if runs permit, he said.
Lampman said translocation isn’t a long-term solution but allows them to bridge the gap and get lamprey back to those crucial sub-basins. Efforts like those have been successful around the broader Columbia River Basin, The Columbian reported in 2024.
Takala, who is the newest addition to the Trust’s tribal leadership council, said the easiest way to restore lamprey populations and the river’s ecology would be removing the last 150 years’ of industrial infrastructure from the ancient sacred site. More immediately, though, the late-June event built community, knowledge and political power.
Oregon City’s mayor announced a joint proclamation with West Linn to make June 25 this year “Love a lamprey day.” The proclamation also recognized the tribes’ goal for “1 million adult Pacific Lamprey to pass Willamette Falls annually by 2035.”
And Rob Wagner, Oregon’s state senate president, also voiced support for the regional Native nations’ work.
“Our commitment as an Oregon state legislature is beyond just the short term, in terms of one legislative session, in terms of investment and partnership with Willamette Falls Trust,” he told attendees, “but it is going to be session after session, cycle after cycle, and year after year.”
As the event drew to a close, Takala talked about the importance of bringing together such wide-ranging groups to build understanding and turn that into river restoration.
“It’s very important that we try to lean on each other to support what’s best for, not only our tribal community, but for the general public, our health, the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “Think about those things as you go home. If you’re driving along the river, maybe reimagine what it looked like back then.”
This article appears in July 1, 2026.
