By Corvo Rohwer, Puyallup Tribal News
For some, fishing is a relaxing weekend hobby, but for Puyallup Tribal Member Christopher Lage, it’s a way of life. While Lage was growing up, his family instilled in him a deep respect for the land and its resources.
Paired with his growing appreciation for fishing, this led him to begin discovering career opportunities in conservation. After beginning his Associate of Arts in Biology, a flyer for an internship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs WaterCorps found its way into Lage’s hands last year.
“My girlfriend and my family both shared it with me. I said, ‘This seems like a cool opportunity,’” Lage said.
He explained he had initially applied for a fisheries position 10 years ago, but unfortunately did not get hired at the time and saw door-opening potential in the internship.
“I assumed I needed school, so I started going to school for it, and then this happened to pop up while I was doing that. So, I took a break from school when I knew I got the internship,” Lage said.
Pausing his academic endeavors, Lage took the plunge to participate in a six-month internship with the Pacific Region’s Western Washington Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. It was there Lage gained hands-on experience with conservation, performing an array of different tasks on each excursion. The primary focus of the internship was focused on resume building and providing interns with the chance to do the work that conservationists do on a regular basis.
“I started off doing stomach lavage my very first day out in the field,” Lage said. “We went out to Lake Washington to do a diet study on non-native game fish, and they had a crew that would net up large mouth, small mouth, pretty much any non-native fish.”
Lage recalled the various duties he learned how to perform during the internship, from population monitoring by electrofishing (using an electrical current to temporarily immobilize fish for sampling) in the Dosewallips River to surveying for invasive European Green Crabs in Grays Harbor. Despite traveling as far as Makah and Elwha, his favorite trip was here at home on the Puyallup River as he helped perform a small watershed study on Coho salmon habitats.
“Coho like smaller tributaries, so we were on one of the systems that was up river,” Lage said. “That one stood out to me because it was on my home river.”
Being able to have his hands in the water is important to Lage, as his love for fishing is only matched by his growing devotion to conservation. For him, keeping fish and their environments safe is a paramount virtue for any fisherman.
“We want to keep fishing and we want to keep the rivers nice. We want to have fish,” Lage said. “Fish are an important resource for most Tribes in the area, and I think it’s important to keep them protected.”
The internship was valuable to Lage in more ways than just developing his resume, as it also provided him with a renewed sense of confidence in his ability to make change in his community. Visiting various places across Washington state and engaging with other Tribes allowed him to learn much more than he could have simply reading from a textbook.
“I want to take advantage of my knowledge of how other Tribes were handling things,” Lage said. “I thought the outreach program in Tulalip where they had very educated and informative people all meet up, bringing that back here would be a great thing.”
After the full completion of the program, Lage looked back with pride at his ability to succeed at something he was passionate about. He encouraged people to follow his lead, even if they don’t have a lot of prior experience.
“I went into it with pretty much no knowledge of what I would be getting into. I excelled at it because I was interested,” Lage said. “I think if you’re interested in it, it’s a great opportunity to make that first step. You can really see all the different aspects of what those jobs have in store and all those positions that you could have.”
If you’re interested in hearing more about Lage’s internship in his own words, you can read his self-authored article, “A Road That Leads to Fish,” which details more about his story of service on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website.