Scott Boyd walks through deep mud where the Stillaguamish River empties into Puget Sound. In October, the Stillaguamish Tribe removed two miles of an earthen levee that for more than a century had kept the river and tides from spreading onto adjacent farmland. When an excavator breached the ridge, tidewater returned for the first time in over 100 years, creating a new 230-acre tidal marsh.
“Before, it was a dairy operation, and now it’s a big tidal marsh,” says Boyd, a tribal member and deputy fisheries manager. The marsh is part of a broader effort by the roughly 400-member tribe, which only gained federal recognition in 1976, to buy riverfront land in its traditional territory and restore habitat for Chinook salmon. Over the past 15 years the Stillaguamish have purchased about 2,000 acres for fish and wildlife habitat.
Tidal marshes are critical nursery habitat for young Chinook, a species listed as threatened in Puget Sound. After decades of habitat loss, Chinook returns to many rivers are dangerously low: in 2025 so few Chinook returned to the Stillaguamish River that the tribe was allowed to catch only 26 fish. Restoration projects like the one at the river mouth are intended to rebuild the floodplain and juvenile rearing habitat that salmon need.
The restored site, called zis a ba 2—named for a 19th-century Stillaguamish chief—was prepared before the levee breach: restoration crews dug channels to help tidal flows and found ancient middens of fire-charred clam shells dating back as much as 1,500 years, evidence of long human use. Shorebirds such as dunlins now swarm the new wetland, and uprooted trees and fresh sediment delivered by recent floods are helping the marsh reestablish.
The landscape changed again in December when a string of intense storms scoured and reshaped parts of the area, delivering more wood and sediment to the nascent marsh. Washington’s governor called the December floods the state’s costliest natural disaster; FEMA later approved a major-disaster declaration for recovery in Washington and Oregon, though it denied a request for funds to reduce future flood damage.
Tribal officials also emphasize flood-risk benefits for people. By giving the river room to spread into restored floodplains, surges can dissipate rather than concentrate and drive destructive flows against infrastructure. The tribe built a new levee farther back from the river before removing the old one, and that new dike stands about four feet taller than the previous ridge. “By giving the river more space, we are reducing the damage and the expense to society to maintain infrastructure,” says Stillaguamish biologist Jason Griffith. He adds that moving levees back and building them higher can be cheaper to maintain over time.
But the shift in land use brings tradeoffs. Farmers and tribes want different uses for the same lowland: crops or salmon habitat. Tyler Breum, a fifth-generation farmer near Stanwood, says levees make life in the floodplain possible and worry about the stability of aging dikes. During the December storms he spent an anxious night riding a levee by his farm. A prior breach in 2021—a hole in a century-old levee only 2 feet wide on top—was discovered by chance and patched before it flooded nearby Stanwood. A Snohomish County study estimated that failure of that levee could displace about 1,100 people.
Breum and his partners tried to buy the farmland at zis a ba but were outbid by the tribe. He does not fault the tribe for buying land and supports removing some levees if farmers also benefit. In the area where the tribe restored marsh, Breum notes, farmers got a “brand new, world-class dike” as part of the project—something he envies when he drives by.
Local officials and tribal leaders have sought emergency permits to repair other damaged levee stretches ahead of future storms and high tides. The intense storms, high tides and rising seas expected with climate change make both levee maintenance and strategic restoration urgent.
The Stillaguamish Tribe has so far restored hundreds of acres and aims to restore many more. Scientists say it will take thousands of acres of restored floodplain and tidal marsh to help Puget Sound Chinook recover and be removed from the threatened list. For tribal members like Boyd, restoration is about culture and future generations: his great-grandfather fished these waters and made a modest living from them. Boyd wants his children to have that possibility too. “These habitat projects are the best bang for our buck right now,” he says, noting that restoring habitat is central to restoring the resource the tribe reserved when it ceded most land under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott. Buying back and remaking portions of that landscape is, he says, a bitter but necessary step to get things back on track.