To save their salmon, this Native coalition fought the government for 20 years—and won

I was fortunate to be raised in a traditional Karuk family—where dipnet fishing, renewal ceremonies, and cultural fire were practiced in concert with the annual cycles of the natural world. When I was growing up, my dad would drive an old rust-colored Chevy home from the dipnet fishery at Ishi Pishi Falls in Northern California, the truck’s bed full of glimmering áama, or salmon. We would stay up late processing fish, hanging strips in the smokehouse, and chasing away bears.

As Káruk Va’áraaras, we are salmon people. We are river people. We are fix-the-world people. We are taught that our relationship to the fish is reciprocal and that as long as there is one Káruk Áraar fishing, the salmon will continue to be called to make the journey up our river to provide for us.

In 2000, I was 18 years old and working at my first job with the Karuk Department of Natural Resources. That year, as we watched the Klamath River visibly thicken with neon green toxic algae, the Northwestern-based power company PacifiCorp announced it would be seeking another 50-year license for operation of its hydroelectric dams upstream. The four dams had been built in the 20th century to generate hydroelectric power, with, I believe, little forethought about the long-term consequences. It didn’t take contemporary science to tell us our problem was flowing from the dams. Their reservoirs were the same noxious color.

The next year, with the Klamath River Basin locked in a severe drought, tribes began calling for federal action to save the river. The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water management and hydropower systems in the western United States, regularly diverted water upstream of the dams for irrigation through the Klamath Project. That year, though, the bureau elected to greatly curtail the water deliveries to protect the river’s endangered fish. As the drought dragged on, farmers and ranchers managed to pressure the Bush administration to overturn the bureau’s decision. We chartered buses and loaded them with folks from our river communities to stand and protest the reopening of the irrigation headgates. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were preparing ourselves for the decades of direct actions that would follow.

Summer 2002 was scorching. Though we could see the riverbanks rotting and smell the toxins in the water, our fish returned as they had done for millions of years, desperate to reach their birthplace. That September we suffered the greatest fishery disaster in our communities’ collective memories. At least 34,000 dead adult salmon lay decaying on the banks of the Klamath, killed by disease brought on by warm waters and low river flows. When you ask people how they remember the 2002 fish kill, overwhelmingly they will answer: the smell.

We were devastated—and catalyzed.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is in charge of deciding whether dams stay or go after their initial term, or license, expires. With the Klamath dams up for review, the agency had the power to clear the waterway. As FERC began to hold public hearings in river communities, we showed up in force to testify. Holding my infant son, I poured my heart out while a half dozen bored bureaucrats sat emotionless. It was their decision to keep the dams, to choose capitalism over our culture, and they wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

Following one FERC hearing, a couple dozen of us met around a fire on the banks of the Klamath and agreed that there was no other option but dam removal. Nameless at the time, the campaign to Undam the Klamath and Bring the Salmon Home was born. We’d eventually form the Klamath Justice Coalition, led by a handful of Indigenous community members, including me. Our small group worked hard to look big. We rallied thousands of our river people to action through the years, in hundreds of direct actions. Ask any Klamath River Native about their participation, and they will have a story of joining a protest or traveling to testify in some long-forgotten hearing.

We made mistakes and learned plenty over those years. We were introduced to the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, which trained us in the art of nonviolent direct action. We sat in, sneaked in, and even bought our way in. We went to shareholders’ meetings of the companies that successively owned the dams, first in Edinburgh at ScottishPower, then in Omaha, Nebraska, at Berkshire Hathaway, where we dropped a banner reading, “Klamath Dams = Cultural Genocide.” We were cussed at, spit on, roughly removed, and told it was impossible. But wherever we went, we chanted our now famous refrain: “Undam the Klamath, Bring the Salmon Home!”

Our coalition was composed of folks from the various and distinct tribes of the Klamath Basin. We are very different, but we have one thing in common: We are salmon people. We had to work hard to put aside the trauma of assimilation’s divide-and-conquer culture and learn to trust each other. We blended families through marriage, had kids, and raised them together. And together we helped realize that impossible future.

On November 17, 2022, after many starts and stops, and now with my husband and our five children alongside, we once again gathered around a fire on the banks of the Klamath. This time, though, we were celebrating. We brought our old banners and took pictures together as the river fog swirled around us. We smiled and laughed and cried as we set up a satellite internet connection and watched FERC unanimously approve the removal of four Klamath River dams. Twenty years of work—our entire adult lives and our children’s lives—culminated in a two-minute decision.

I always say that the Ishkêesh, or the Klamath River, has defined my existence. It shaped my childhood and my career; it’s where I met my husband and where we formed our family as we campaigned. Today, when I look upon our increasingly healthy river, I contemplate that maybe the 2002 fish kill was our Creator’s call to action, and I feel a depth of gratitude for how we responded. Indian Country is rising to save the world with our traditional knowledge, and though the coalition is quieter these days, we have raised a generation of protectors who are empowered to enact change.

Throughout 2024—the last year in the life of the lower four Klamath River dams—we returned to the upper basin to watch as the dams were blasted and dismantled. We’ve seen our beautiful river reclaim power, flowing once again through sections that haven’t been wet in more than a hundred years. In this New Year, we all celebrate a free-flowing Klamath River and the return of the áama to their traditional homelands. Bring the salmon home indeed.