Sol -
Good questions! This whole idea of wild brood stock is so damn seductivity; it in effect is promising the opportunity to have our cake and eat it as well. As we know life rarely works that way. The issues I raised are just a couple of the potential pit falls of these integrated programs.

In general when folks are talking about wild brood stock programs it is often in the abstract. The reality is that steelhead of the anadromous salmonids traditionally cultured here in the PNW are the most difficult to successfully integrate the hatchery and wild fish. This is due to the their extended freshwater rearing - for example many Chinook spend only 3 months or so in freshwater while steelhead 2 years, late spawning timing - making it difficult to achieve smolts from the later portion of the natural spawning population, and their complex and diverse life histories. As the article provided by Aunty M points out the longer the fish are in the hatchery the less successful they are in the wild - that time can be both the period before release and the number of generations. The rearing selection is compounded with the same fish are used for succeeding generations. Of course one of the problems with a large scale hatchery program as you suggested is that is likely that very few of the "wild" brood being collected after a couple generations didn't have one or more grand parents who were from the hatchery.

Remember that the tribes are entitled to half of the HARVESTABLE wild fish. In many systems there ar little or limited amounts of harvestable wild fish so in accessing the hatchery fish the tribal fishery could over-fish the wild population and hope to make up the escapement short fall with hatchery spawners. In addition in many of the those systems the tribes would be keep wild fish while to make the numbers work the sport fishery would have to be WSR. I'm sure that would fly well with many.

This hatchery approach at least with steelhead is betting that the future productivity of the wild populations will be protected by this hatchery approach. We have had the promise that hatchery fish can make up for wild fish short falls for more than a century and I for one am very uncomfortable with risking wild steelhead production with the idea that this time the hatchery science has gotten it right.

Tight lines
Curt