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WASHOUGAL — When families sit down Thursday for Thanksgiving dinner, they likely won’t find wapato among the dishes covering the table. But for the Chinook Indians, the wetland tuber that tastes much like potatoes was a diet staple that helped see them through the winter months.
Wapato is being reintroduced in the floodplain at the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge as part a $25 million project to restore 965 acres of wetland habitat, the largest restoration project of its kind attempted on the Columbia River.
