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Over
the last two years, I have traveled
repeatedly to the Klamath River near the
California-Oregon border to report on
the dismantling of four dams. I saw
crews in excavators as they clawed at
the remnants of the Copco No. 1 and Iron
Gate dams. And as the giant reservoirs
were drained, I saw newly planted seeds
taking root in soil that had been
underwater for generations.
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When
the last of the dams was breached in
August 2024, the river began
flowing freely along about
40 miles for the first time in more than
a century.
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While
working on a series of
stories about the undamming of the
Klamath, I spoke with Indigenous leaders
and activists who had spent two decades
campaigning for the removal of dams,
including by filing lawsuits, holding
protests and speaking out at meetings of
utility shareholders.
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I
learned that the historic process of
tearing down the dams was also a
watershed moment in a long history of
resistance by Native leaders and
activists, who saw how the dams were harming the
river and its salmon, and
who determinedly set their sights on
unshackling the waters to restore the
Klamath to a healthier state.
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I
recently read a new book that powerfully
tells a multigenerational story of
resistance leading up to the removal of
the dams. The 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 near the mouth of the Klamath
River. In the book “The Water
Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s
Fight to Save a River and a Way of
Life,” she tells a
remarkable story about how her relatives
struggled
for decades for their right
to fish for salmon in the Klamath River,
facing discrimination, raids and arrests
by law enforcement officers, and even
violence.
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Recounting
that history, she writes: “No one
understood how fishing in the same place
your family had been fishing forever
could be illegal. It was like making
breathing illegal.” Yet, there was a
state law, adopted in the 1930s, that
for decades prohibited Yurok people from
fishing along the river. It was a fight
that ultimately led to a Supreme Court
decision affirming the tribe’s
fishing rights, and it also laid the
groundwork for years of efforts by
tribal members campaigning to remove the
dams.
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In
the book, which will be out Oct. 28,
Bowers Cordalis eloquently describes her
people’s deep connection to the river
and the salmon, and her own experiences
catching salmon, using a gillnet to haul
in fish along the same stretches of
river where her ancestors lived.
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She
was working as an intern for the Yurok
Tribe’s Fisheries Department in the
summer of 2002 when tens of
thousands of dead salmon
appeared floating in the Klamath River.
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A bird stands in the Klamath River in
2023. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles
Times)
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The
mass fish kill became a defining event
for her and others, showing the river
ecosystem was gravely ill. There were
multiple causes. Water diversions for
agriculture had dramatically shrunk
river flows that year. And the Klamath’s
hydroelectric dams had degraded the
water quality, contributing to toxic
algae blooms and disease outbreaks among
the fish.
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Bowers
Cordalis writes that in response to the
fish kill, she and others resolved to
fight to save the salmon by restoring
the river’s health.
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She
blamed Vice President Dick Cheney for a
decision that had sent water to farmers
and sapped the river. She was in her
second year of law school in Colorado
when then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton
came to speak. Bowers Cordalis
confronted her wearing a T-shirt that
read “Bush Kills Fish, 70,000 Salmon
Dead on the Klamath River, Yurok
Reservation.”
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In
subsequent years, Native activists
repeatedly protested to demand the
removal of the hydroelectric dams, which
were built without tribal consent
between 1911 and 1962.
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The
dams were used only for power
generation, not water storage. Warren
Buffett’s PacifiCorp, which owned the
aging dams, eventually agreed to
relinquish them after determining it
would be less expensive than bringing
them up to current environmental
standards. Agreements involving
PacifiCorp, California and Oregon were
negotiated to finally remove the dams.
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The
project, which took more than a year and
involved hundreds of workers, was the largest dam
removal effort in U.S.
history.
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Bowers
Cordalis, co-founder and executive
director of the nonprofit Ridges to
Riffles Indigenous Conservation
Group, says she is confident
that dam removal will heal the river’s
ecosystem, allow the fish to rebound and
show that nature-based solutions work.
She also writes that tearing down the
dams served justice because those dams
“embodied the legacy of the dark
underbelly of the founding of this
country that supported the
industrialization of nature at the
expense of Indigenous peoples, the
environment and marginalized
communities.”
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I
recently caught up with Bowers Cordalis
by phone to talk about her book, the
state of the Klamath River, and the
salmon that have been returning to
spawn in waters the dams had
made inaccessible for more than a
century.
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“I
felt deeply moved to write the book to
tell the whole family’s story about all
the generations that had worked to
preserve Yurok culture and sovereignty,
and the health of the river and salmon,
and how that all built up to dam removal
and this historic moment that we’re in,”
Bowers Cordalis told me.
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“Because
it wasn’t just me, it wasn’t just this
current generation that worked on that
fight. It’s been building ever since
colonization,” she added. “And so I
wanted to be able to tell the story from
my perspective and put all that history
of Yurok and advocacy and the family all
together into one narrative that was
comprehensive and could tell the world
how deeply important dam removal is, and
the health of the river is, to Yurok
people.”
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Bowers
Cordalis said she also hopes the story
of tearing down
these obsolete dams inspires
people by showing an effective solution
that is enabling a damaged ecosystem to
flourish again.
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“We
used a nature-based solution to heal an
ecosystem, and by doing so, you not only
heal ecosystems, but you heal people,
you heal culture and you heal
economies,” she said, “I just wanted the
whole world to know it’s possible, we
can do it, because we need hope right
now.”
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She
said it’s important for people to
understand how Indigenous people, after
enduring a
genocide and having most of
their lands taken, continued to be
arrested and prosecuted in the 1970s and
‘80s for fishing for salmon along the
Klamath River.
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“We
had to fight for generations just for
the right to continue our way of life.
And we weren’t harming the resource. We
weren’t overfishing. There was no real
legal justification for us not being
allowed to fish. It was just racial,”
she said. “And that took a lot away from
us — our means of living, the way that
we had survived.”
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I
asked her how the river and its drained
reservoirs look one year after dam
removal. She said last week she saw
crews at work beside a creek on the
drained reservoir lands using excavators
and other equipment to move earth and
restore a more natural floodplain. Crews
have also been scattering
seeds by the millions to
help bring back the native vegetation.
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Stream restoration workers ride in a
utility vehicle in August 2024 across
lands that were previously underwater in
a reservoir and emerged as dams were
removed on the Klamath River. (Gina
Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
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“They’re
building salmon playgrounds and
expediting Mother Nature’s healing,
basically,” she said. “They’re setting
all the conditions right, natural
features, so that the river will heal
faster and that aquatic life, vegetation
will do better in those areas. So it’s
phenomenal.”
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This
summer, Bowers Cordalis has been out on
the river fishing with her family, and
she is confident that in the coming
years the salmon will thrive once again.
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She
recently joined a group of
young Indigenous kayakers
for part of their journey as they
paddled down the river, and she was
struck by how the water looked different
than she had seen previously.
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“It
moves with this power that I have never
witnessed. And also, the water is
cleaner. It used to be that you couldn’t
see the bottom of the river. Now you
can,” she said. “It used to be that you
would see a bunch of algae moving in the
river, and there is still some, but not
nearly as much.”
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She
said the water also is colder, and has
lost a putrid smell of decay that had
plagued the river downstream from the
dams.
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“I
used to always say, I want my
great-grandmother’s river back. And I
feel like I am just getting to know my
great-grandmother’s river,” she said.
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Her
great-grandmother Geneva was born in
1904 and died in 1986. In her childhood,
Geneva had seen the river before the
dams were built.
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“Now,
I feel like I am just now beginning to
see little glimpses of what I imagine
she saw: a beautiful, healthy, vibrant
river,” Bowers Cordalis said.
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