Ep 1: The Family

Sam & Wars Episode 1, “The Family,” centers on Randy Settler’s fishing family and their place in the broader Columbia River salmon crisis. The episode opens in an Oregon longhouse where Sam George receives the name “To Kayakin” and the community holds a memorial for Randy’s mother, Mary Gaudi Settler—a matriarch and longtime treaty-rights champion. Host Tony Schick weaves family stories into regional history: the 1855 treaties that reserved tribes’ fishing rights, decades of state and commercial pressure, and the mid-20th-century dam-building era that flooded iconic falls (Kettlefalls, Salilo) and destroyed spawning and village sites.