Air Date: Week of February 28, 2025

In January 2025, a $1.56 million grant was given to the Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians. This may help bring sea otters back to the coasts of Oregon and Northern California. (Photo: Karney Lee, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Sea otters were hunted out from Oregon and Northern California more than a century ago amid the fur trade, but the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians and conservation partners are now working to bring them back. Robert Kentta, treasurer of the Siletz tribe, talks with Host Paloma Beltran about how reintroducing sea otters can help revive the kelp ecosystem and restore a vital cultural connection for Native people.

Transcript

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

[SOUNDS OF OTTER PUPS]

BELTRAN: Those tiny squeaks of sea otter pups may soon return to the coasts of Oregon and Northern California, thanks to the efforts of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians.
Sea otters were hunted out more than a century ago for their thick fur, leading to devastating consequences for the kelp forests that relied on them. To help revive the kelp ecosystem and restore a vital cultural connection with sea otters, the Siletz tribe and conservation partners at the Elakha Alliance are working to reintroduce otters to the area. And to help with that goal they’ve received a one and a half million-dollar grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Joining me now is Robert Kentta, treasurer of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and member of the Elakha Alliance. Robert, welcome to Living on Earth!

KENTTA: Thanks for having me.

BELTRAN: From what I understand, sea otters are considered a keystone species, meaning that they are vital in maintaining their ecosystem. What role do otters play in keeping their habitat healthy?

KENTTA: Sea otters are sometimes even referred to as an ultra keystone species, because they don't just maintain a habitat or become an important component of that ecosystem. They actually create and maintain that kelp forest habitat, which leads to diversity and abundance in that near shore ecosystem, because kelp forest is a nursery for juvenile fish species, both ocean fish and anadromous fish like salmon and sea otters, one of their main foods is urchin, which grazes on kelp, and that's why they're so important to that ecosystem, because without a voracious predator of sea urchin, you have sea urchin population overrun, and they will completely graze out at kelp forest to where it's at urchin barren. And then those Urchins don't die, they just become like a zombie state, kind of a hibernation, until they detect that there's food available again, when the kelp, if it has survived that severe grazing, comes back, then they wake up and start grazing on it again, leading to the same problem.

BELTRAN: Why have sea otters disappeared from Oregon and Northern California's coast?

KENTTA: They were very quickly hunted to total absence in most of their original range. There were just remnant populations in Southern California. I think there were only about 50 animals in that southern California population when they were first discovered and then protected and allowed to expand and thrive. The Alaska population has always been more robust, but they were really a small remnant population compared to their historic numbers as well. And then from basically the Aleutians to Central or Southern California coast, they were just totally absent until those reintroductions happened in the late 60s and 70s.

BELTRAN: So the Siletz Tribe just received this $1.56 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to help bring sea otters back to Oregon and Northern California's coast. How will these funds help the tribe reintroduce otters?

KENTTA: There are several objectives to the grant, and one of them is to build tribal capacity for several coastal tribes, both here in Oregon and Northern California, so that our biology staff are up to speed on the issues around sea otter presence and reintroduction. And hopefully we can, that way, be much more proactive and active in the planning for the reintroduction and eventually for the reintroduction themselves. Part of the grant also, I believe there's about $100,000 a year that goes to the Elakha Alliance from the grant. It's a three-year grant, and it's to assist with that coordination and public outreach for meetings that will be held, lots of public education around the essential nature of that near shore kelp forest habitat. And then there will be a contractor identified and hired to work with US Fish and Wildlife in the development of the actual reintroduction plan.

BELTRAN: So in addition to their importance in the kelp forest, how can reintroducing sea otters to Oregon help other otter populations to the north and south?

KENTTA: Yeah, currently we have those widely separated populations, and US Fish and Wildlife basically treats them as sub populations or sub species when they used to have contiguous contact with each other and there was genetic exchange. An artifact of them almost being completely hunted to extinction, is the fact that we have those northern and southern very small remnant populations with a very shrunk genetic pool, or gene pool, and so the longer that those two populations are left in the current state of no genetic exchange, we have the, especially with the southern sea otter, a real risk of genetic bottlenecking to where they start having dangerous or harmful mutations that are then passed on through the generations and eventually have total population collapse. The remedy to that is reconnecting those two populations, genetically.

BELTRAN: Fascinating. And you know Robert, beyond their ecological role, I understand that sea otters are culturally significant to the Siletz Tribe. Can you tell me more about what they represent?

KENTTA: Yeah, sea otters are the densest fur on a mammal in the world, and so a very warm, very comfortable, very fuzzy undercoat, and it was very prized as a clothing item. Our people really prized those pelts. And therefore it was really only chiefly people with wealth and status that were allowed to wear sea otter pelts, and so to us, they represent prosperity. They represent the abundance that sea otters create in that near shore ecosystem. And our traditional stories really relate to that, including stories of a girl marrying a sea otter and the sea otter then leaving presents on the beach for her family.

BELTRAN: You know, this effort to bring back sea otters to Oregon's coast was a collaboration between non profits and conservation researchers, all with the guidance of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Why are indigenous partnerships and leadership so important in conservation and restoration planning?

KENTTA: I think part of the answer to that is we have 1000s of years of experience with our local ecosystems. We understand not just from stories of our elders, but our own lifetime experience how things have changed. A lot of federal agencies, state agencies and researchers and others are looking to the body of information that has been gleaned from our tribal communities by anthropologists. Anthropologists would come and ask our ancestors questions about resource abundance and use, and so those notes are in university and national anthropological archives, and people could gain access to that. But our position is that unless you talk with us about those notes, there's lots of information that's missing from those notes, and you are not going to get the complete picture and maybe even be misled if you don't understand what the elder was saying, because a lot of them didn't speak English, or speak English very well, and the linguist is trying to understand and then write down in English a lot of times what he thought he was hearing. And so we have to run that information through our filters and add supplementary information to help others understand what our elders were talking about.

BELTRAN: You know, some may argue that things are looking bleak in the world of conservation. What message do you hope listeners take away from the Tribe's work?

KENTTA: Well, I think the collaboration that we have in re-establishing the Elakha Alliance and working with Rogue Native Plant Partnership, all sorts of partners, federal, state and NGOs, nongovernmental organizations. To me, we're not in a hopeless situation, but we're in a very concerning situation with a lot of our landscapes and resources and sustainability of life as we know it today. Those kinds of partnerships are essential to moving forward, getting enhancement and restoration and resilience built in our ecosystems. Every little nudge we get, like this three-year grant, pushes us towards that finish line and adds to our level of hope. So we're quite excited to get the work going and move it on to that next step of getting the reintroduction plan established, having all of our coastal communities engaged in that conversation, and move on to the actual reintroduction and start seeing those benefits again.

BELTRAN: Robert Kentta is a member and treasurer of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and is part of the Elakha Alliance. Thank you so much for joining us.

KENTTA: Absolutely, thank you for having me.

 

Links

Read more about the Elakha Alliance and their work to return otters to Oregon

Read more about the Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians

The Oregonian | “The Push Is On to Return Sea Otters to Oregon, Northern California Coasts”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | “Sea Otters Are Unlikely Helpers in Our Fight Against Climate Change”