October 25, 2016 — The people who have lived along the Klamath River for millennia are now facing crisis levels of violence, disease and depression. Diabetes and heart ailments run rampant in their communities, and suicide rates have skyrocketed.
To save his people, Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, believes there is one thing to do: Bring back the salmon.
“We’re salmon people,” says Hillman, a tribe member in his early fifties who lives in the riverside town of Orleans. “Our very identity is based on salmon.”
His tribe, working with the neighboring Yurok and Hupa tribes, has been at the front lines of the political battle to save and restore the Klamath’s dwindling Chinook runs, both by demanding better management of water flowing out of the upstream reservoirs and by calling for removal of four dams that make hundreds of miles of salmon habitat inaccessible. In protests and marches the Klamath basin tribes have often targeted PacifiCorp, which owns the Klamath’s dams. They have crashed company meetings and even dumped bucketfuls of toxic river algae – which thrives in the slow-moving, sun-warmed reservoir water – on the front steps of PacifiCorp’s Portland, Oregon headquarters. They’ve done the same several times at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Sacramento office.
The tribes, working together as the Klamath Justice Coalition, have also negotiated over dam removal with state and federal agencies, and soon their efforts are going to pay off. The giant concrete barriers, built between World War I and the 1960s, are now slated to be removed – which will certainly go down in the books as one of the greatest environmental and cultural victories in the West.
Salmon, primarily Chinook but also coho, were the core of many California Indians’ nutrition, wealth and culture. For young Karuk boys, catching and killing a Chinook was an important rite of passage, and the villages along the river subsisted on salmon almost all year. Of several seasonal runs of Chinook, the spring run was the most plentiful and important on the Klamath. Using nets and spears, fishermen caught tens of thousands of the big fish, which often weighed more than 40 pounds. Tribes on other river systems along the north coast of California and in the Central Valley were similarly dependent on Chinook salmon.