Scott Boyd walks through deep mud where the Stillaguamish River meets Puget Sound north of Seattle. In October, the Stillaguamish Tribe removed two miles of an earthen levee that had kept tide and river water off nearby farmland for more than a century. When an excavator breached the ridge, tidewater spread across the land for the first time in generations, creating a new 230-acre tidal marsh.
“Before, it was a dairy operation, and now it’s a big tidal marsh,” says Boyd, a Stillaguamish tribal member and deputy fisheries manager. The marsh, known as zis a ba 2, is the second of three large wetlands the tribe is restoring at the river mouth. Tidal marshes are key nurseries for young Chinook salmon, the largest and most culturally important salmon in the region; Puget Sound Chinook are listed as a federally threatened species.
Over the past 15 years the tribe—about 400 people, with an official reservation of less than 100 acres—has purchased roughly 2,000 acres in its traditional territory to restore fish and wildlife habitat. Under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott the Stillaguamish and other tribes ceded most land but retained rights to fish and hunt. Boyd calls it “a bit of a bitter pill” to buy back land his people once gave up for access to fish, but says buying and restoring habitat is what the tribe can do now to help salmon rebound.
The tribe prepared the farmland before breaching the levee, digging channels to speed tidal flow and marsh formation. Workers uncovered old middens—heaps of fire-charred clam shells—dating back as much as 1,500 years, evidence of long human use of the estuary. Shorebirds like dunlins arrived in force after the breach, probing mudflats for food; Stillaguamish biologist Jason Griffith calls their flocking a “visual symphony.”
The timing coincided with a volatile flood season. In December, a series of storms scoured the area, uprooting trees and depositing sediment—materials that can help a newly forming wetland. The storms caused widespread flooding across Washington and Oregon; Washington’s governor called the December events the state’s costliest natural disaster. FEMA approved a major-disaster declaration for recovery, though it denied some requests for future flood mitigation funding.
Tribal officials argue that restoring floodplain wetlands helps people as well as salmon. By giving the river more space to spread out during high flows, surges can dissipate before reaching towns and infrastructure. The Stillaguamish built a new levee farther inland before removing the old riverfront berm; that new levee is four feet taller than the original and is intended to better protect farms and communities from increasingly large floods and rising seas.
But converting farmland back to marsh involves tradeoffs. Farmers along the Stillaguamish River depend on levees to keep fields dry. Fifth-generation farmer Tyler Breum farms potatoes and seed crops a few miles north of the new wetlands and says, “The levees make life in the floodplain possible.” He spent an anxious night riding his all-terrain vehicle along a levee during the December floods after a 2021 event left a hole in a century-old dike. A Snohomish County study found that if that levee failed, about 1,100 people could be displaced.
Some farmers tried to buy the land the tribe acquired, but were outbid. Breum says he doesn’t hold that against the tribe and supports levee removals that also benefit farmers, noting that those near the tribe’s project now have a “brand new, world-class dike.” City and tribal officials are seeking emergency permits to repair other aging levees before another winter of high tides and storms.
The Stillaguamish Tribe has restored hundreds of acres so far but aims to restore thousands—scientists say thousands of acres of tidal habitat will be needed to help Puget Sound Chinook recover. For tribal members, the effort is about culture and continuity as well as ecology. “My great-grandfather, he fished these waters, and he was able to eke out a moderate living,” Boyd says. “I have four young children. … 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.”