Over the past two years, I’ve traveled repeatedly to the Klamath River close to the California-Oregon border to report on the dismantling of 4 dams. I noticed crews in excavators as they clawed on the remnants of the Copco No. 1 and Iron Gate dams. And because the big reservoirs have been drained, I noticed newly planted seeds taking root in soil that had been underwater for generations.
When the final of the dams was breached in August 2024, the river began flowing freely alongside about 40 miles for the primary time in additional than a century.
Whereas engaged on a series of stories concerning the undamming of the Klamath, I spoke with Indigenous leaders and activists who had spent 20 years campaigning for the removing of dams, together with by submitting lawsuits, holding protests and talking out at conferences of utility shareholders.
I realized that the historic technique of tearing down the dams was additionally a watershed second in a protracted historical past of resistance by Native leaders and activists, who noticed how the dams have been harming the river and its salmon, and who determinedly set their sights on unshackling the waters to revive the Klamath to a more healthy state.
I not too long ago learn a brand new e book that powerfully tells a multigenerational story of resistance main as much as the removing of the dams. The e book is by Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member, lawyer and environmental advocate who I first met in 2023 in her ancestral village of Rek-woi close to the mouth of the Klamath River. Within the e book “The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life,” she tells a outstanding story about how her kin struggled for decades for his or her proper to fish for salmon within the Klamath River, dealing with discrimination, raids and arrests by regulation enforcement officers, and even violence.
Recounting that historical past, she writes: “Nobody understood how fishing in the identical place your loved ones had been fishing perpetually may very well be unlawful. It was like making respiration unlawful.” But, there was a state regulation, adopted within the Nineteen Thirties, that for many years prohibited Yurok individuals from fishing alongside the river. It was a struggle that in the end led to a Supreme Court decision affirming the tribe’s fishing rights, and it additionally laid the groundwork for years of efforts by tribal members campaigning to take away the dams.
Within the e book, which will likely be out Oct. 28, Bowers Cordalis eloquently describes her individuals’s deep connection to the river and the salmon, and her personal experiences catching salmon, utilizing a gill internet to haul in fish alongside the identical stretches of river the place her ancestors lived.
She was working as an intern for the Yurok Tribe’s Fisheries Division in the summertime of 2002 when tens of thousands of dead salmon appeared floating within the Klamath River.
The mass fish kill grew to become a defining occasion for her and others, exhibiting the river ecosystem was gravely in poor health. There have been a number of causes. Water diversions for agriculture had dramatically shrunk river flows that yr. And the Klamath’s hydroelectric dams had degraded the water high quality, contributing to poisonous algae blooms and illness outbreaks among the many fish.
Bowers Cordalis writes that in response to the fish kill, she and others resolved to struggle to avoid wasting the salmon by restoring the river’s well being.
She blamed Vice President Dick Cheney for a call that had despatched water to farmers and sapped the river. She was in her second yr of regulation college in Colorado when then-Inside Secretary Gale Norton got here to talk. Bowers Cordalis confronted her sporting a T-shirt that learn “Bush Kills Fish, 70,000 Salmon Useless on the Klamath River, Yurok Reservation.”
In subsequent years, Native activists repeatedly protested to demand the removing of the hydroelectric dams, which have been constructed with out tribal consent between 1911 and 1962.
The dams have been used just for energy era, not water storage. Warren Buffett’s PacifiCorp, which owned the growing old dams, finally agreed to relinquish them after figuring out it will be inexpensive than bringing them as much as present environmental requirements. Agreements involving PacifiCorp, California and Oregon have been negotiated to lastly take away the dams.
The challenge, which took greater than a yr and concerned lots of of employees, was the largest dam removal effort in U.S. historical past.
Bowers Cordalis, co-founder and govt director of the nonprofit Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, says she is assured that dam removing will heal the river’s ecosystem, permit the fish to rebound and present that nature-based options work. She additionally writes that tearing down the dams served justice as a result of these dams “embodied the legacy of the darkish underbelly of the founding of this nation that supported the industrialization of nature on the expense of Indigenous peoples, the setting and marginalized communities.”
I not too long ago caught up with Bowers Cordalis by telephone to speak about her e book, the state of the Klamath River, and the salmon which were returning to spawn in waters the dams had made inaccessible for greater than a century.
“I felt deeply moved to write down the e book to inform the entire household’s story about all of the generations that had labored to protect Yurok tradition and sovereignty, and the well being of the river and salmon, and the way that each one constructed as much as dam removing and this historic second that we’re in,” Bowers Cordalis instructed me.
“As a result of it wasn’t simply me, it wasn’t simply this present era that labored on that struggle. It’s been constructing ever since colonization,” she added. “And so I wished to have the ability to inform the story from my perspective and put all that historical past of Yurok and advocacy and the household all collectively into one narrative that was complete and will inform the world how deeply vital dam removing is, and the well being of the river is, to Yurok individuals.”
Bowers Cordalis stated she additionally hopes the story of tearing down these obsolete dams evokes individuals by exhibiting an efficient resolution that’s enabling a broken ecosystem to flourish once more.
“We used a nature-based resolution to heal an ecosystem, and by doing so, you not solely heal ecosystems, however you heal individuals, you heal tradition and also you heal economies,” she stated, “I simply wished the entire world to understand it’s doable, we are able to do it, as a result of we’d like hope proper now.”
She stated it’s vital for individuals to grasp how Indigenous individuals, after enduring a genocide and having most of their lands taken, continued to be arrested and prosecuted within the Seventies and ’80s for fishing for salmon alongside the Klamath River.
“We needed to struggle for generations only for the precise to proceed our lifestyle. And we weren’t harming the useful resource. We weren’t overfishing. There was no actual authorized justification for us not being allowed to fish. It was simply racial,” she stated. “And that took rather a lot away from us — our technique of residing, the way in which that we had survived.”
I requested her how the river and its drained reservoirs look one yr after dam removing. She stated final week she noticed crews at work beside a creek on the drained reservoir lands utilizing excavators and different gear to maneuver earth and restore a extra pure flood plain. Crews have additionally been scattering seeds by the millions to assist convey again the native vegetation.
“They’re constructing salmon playgrounds and expediting Mom Nature’s therapeutic, principally,” she stated. “They’re setting all of the circumstances proper, pure options, in order that the river will heal quicker and that aquatic life, vegetation will do higher in these areas. So it’s phenomenal.”
This summer season, Bowers Cordalis has been out on the river fishing together with her household, and he or she is assured that within the coming years the salmon will thrive as soon as once more.
She not too long ago joined a group of young Indigenous kayakers for a part of their journey as they paddled down the river, and he or she was struck by how the water regarded completely different than she had seen beforehand.
“It strikes with this energy that I’ve by no means witnessed. And likewise, the water is cleaner. It was that you just couldn’t see the underside of the river. Now you’ll be able to,” she stated. “It was that you’d see a bunch of algae transferring within the river, and there’s nonetheless some, however not practically as a lot.”
She stated the water is also colder, and has misplaced a putrid odor of decay that had plagued the river downstream from the dams.
“I used to at all times say, I need my great-grandmother’s river again. And I really feel like I’m simply attending to know my great-grandmother’s river,” she stated.
Her great-grandmother Geneva was born in 1904 and died in 1986. In her childhood, Geneva had seen the river earlier than the dams have been constructed.
“Now, I really feel like I’m simply now starting to see little glimpses of what I think about she noticed: a phenomenal, wholesome, vibrant river,” Bowers Cordalis stated.
