Republican leadership in the Idaho Senate clapped back at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s seeming support for dam breaching during his visit to the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery last week.

Senate President Pro Tempore Kelly Anthon, R-Rupert, and others said they have repeatedly worked to protect the dams and cited Joint Memorial 103, an anti-dam breaching message, passed by Senate Republicans in 2021.

“The dams on the Columbia-Snake River System are not only vital to Idaho’s economy and rural communities — they are essential to our way of life,” Anthon said in a Friday afternoon news release. “They provide carbon-free energy, affordable electricity for rural Idahoans, efficient and sustainable transportation of our goods, and irrigation that supports the most productive farmland in the country. The people of Idaho, not Washington, D.C., should decide the future of our water and infrastructure.”

During his visit to the hatchery near Lewiston, Kennedy spoke of the importance of salmon to the diets of Nez Perce and other Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and linked the diminishment of the fish to poor health outcomes in tribal communities. He said the fish are critical to the ecosystem as well and noted his past efforts as an environmental attorney working with Columbia River tribes to save the fish.

“We fought many years to dismantle the Snake River dams and to reopen them to the salmon,” he said. “In the meantime, until that day happens, we need these hatcheries, and we need to keep the salmon stocks alive and flourishing.”

Kennedy’s remarks were well-received by Nez Perce Tribal Chairperson Shannon Wheeler and other members of the tribe’s executive committee. But they ran counter to President Donald Trump’s executive order killing a historic agreement between the tribes and the Biden administration. The Columbia Basin Initiative exchanged a pause in salmon-versus-dams litigation for $1 billion in salmon recovery, investments in tribal-led renewable energy projects and studies that were designed to prepare for dam breaching.

For the Idaho Republicans, the comments amounted to friendly fire, even though Kennedy seemingly has little power to influence salmon recovery policy that is dominated by the Interior and Commerce departments.

Kennedy also called historic treatment of Native American people by the federal government genocide and said it continues today “with a food system that is actually poisoning the tribes — poisoning all Americans — disproportionately with the tribes, which have the highest diabetes rates of any demographic in our country, the highest obesity rates, the shortest lifespan, cardiac disease, autoimmune diseases, all of these diseases that were unknown even 20 years ago.”