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A river runs through it: Old adversaries agree to remove dams in the Klamath River basin, hoping to save farms, fish, and tribal culture

Posted by: Maven on May 9, 2009 at 6:47 am

Thanks to Richard for sending me this link! From California Lawyer:

It’s an unseasonably warm winter day at the mouth of the Klamath River, a few miles south of Crescent City near the northern edge of California. The jade-green waters surge into the Pacific, creating a chaotic zone of swells and wave trains. A pair of gray whales appear just beyond the surf line, their spouts framed in white filigree against the deep cerulean sky.

On a sandbar, two Yurok Indians—members of the tribe that holds this land and the fishing rights to the river—patrol the water’s edge with gaffs: lengths of hooked steel rod fitted with an elegant, carved wooden handle. They are hunting lampreys, eel-like fish that enter the river each winter to spawn.

This same scene has played out for the past 10,000 years—roughly the period the Yurok have lived on the lower Klamath River. Almost nothing has changed but the men’s clothes and the forged metal that now makes up the business end of their lamprey hooks.

It’s precisely this point that Troy Fletcher makes at the Yurok nation’s headquarters, a mile or so upriver. Fletcher says his people have been fishing this river, subsisting off its largesse, for a very long time. To the Yurok, the watershed of the lower Klamath is not only their homeland but also the focal point of their culture, religion, and identity. To a significant degree, Fletcher explains, the Yurok are the Klamath.

Hundreds of miles upriver, farmer Steve Kandra feels the same way about the Klamath’s upper basin. For almost a century his family has been cultivating the rich peat bottomlands. The fields, in an area that once was marsh, are irrigated by water transported from Oregon’s Upper Klamath Lake through an extensive system of dams and hundreds of miles of canals begun in 1906 by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Today, the Klamath Reclamation Project irrigates more than 200,000 acres in the river’s basin. Kandra raises alfalfa, wheat, onions, and potatoes on 600 acres near Tule Lake, California, and Merrill, Oregon.

“We don’t go as far back as the Yurok, of course,” says Kandra. “But we have the same attachments to the Klamath watershed and the seasonal manifestations we see on it. This land is very much who we are.”

Read more from California Lawyer by clicking here.

May 9, 2009 · Filed Under Northern California

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