Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history. It represented a literal watershed moment; unprecedented co-equal decision-making between the tribes and their historical nemesis – the US government.

Once complete in 2024, the project will liberate the Klamath river and several tributaries to once again run free across 400-miles from Oregon through California and into the Pacific Ocean.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

In this episode, Yurok fisherman and tribal leader Sammy Gensaw and environmental scientist-turned-activist Craig Tucker share the epic story of how Indigenous leadership and non-Indian allyship made the impossible inevitable: the biggest-ever dam removal and salmon restoration in history. It represented a literal watershed moment; unprecedented co-equal decision-making between the tribes and their historical nemesis – the US government.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in U.S. History”.

In 2023, for only the second time in California’s history, the State declared a drought emergency and banned all salmon fishing on its coast and most of California’s rivers. The menacing reality of likely extinction loomed for this iconic fish, a keystone species for over 100 other organisms, and a staple food for the regions’ Native American tribal communities.

Also in 2023, it was no coincidence that the first of four dams on the Klamath River spanning Oregon and California was removed – and the others set for deconstruction in 2024.

This almost unimaginable victory was led by Indigenous tribes – and for wild nature. It marked the epic climax of a more than century-old battle between the tribes and the U.S. government and private corporations.

The Klamath Project will mark the biggest dam removal in U.S. history. It also heralds the most ambitious river restoration ever undertaken. It will liberate the Klamath and several tributaries to once again run free across 400-miles from Oregon through California and into the Pacific Ocean.

For the first time in over a century, it will start to become possible for salmon to reach their historic spawning grounds at the Klamath headwaters. Similarly, Indigenous communities will once again be able to practice their traditional lifeways, religious practices and subsistence fishing and gathering that had previously sustained them since time immemorial.

The battle had come to a head in the early 1970s with the infamous “fish wars” when the tribes defied federal orders barring them from fishing. It was the beginning of the beginning of a dramatic reversal of fortune for the tribes and the river.

Yurok fisherman Sammy Gensaw is a descendant of those elders… He spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Sammy Gensaw (SG): First, I have to acknowledge the people who went through the fish wars to make sure that we can even have the rights to fight for dam removal. At one point in time, our grandparents were lined up across the river and they were faced against people with flak jackets, machine guns, they were getting their boats sunk, people were going missing, people were getting beat up, they were getting kidnapped. There were a lot of things that were happening with the fish wars.

And when that happened, we were at war with the United States government. They were coming for our people and they were coming for our land and our water, and they didn’t want us to exist. And so these are the people who stood up before our tribe was organized. Our tribe, as a Yurok tribe, politically organized in 1993, but before then it was a coalition of people who came together to make sure that these rights were respected by the United States government. And that’s one thing that I will always do, I will never bend from, is that we have sovereignty and we have the rights to defend our people, and that’s one thing we have to continue to pass on.

Host: In the mid-1800s, the U.S. government began forcibly removing tribes from their ancestral lands in the Klamath Basin onto ever-shrinking reservations in order to create farmlands and irrigation for settlement. By the early 1900s, the federal Klamath Reclamation Project teamed up with private companies to start building the dams that would also be used for hydroelectric power. 

By the 1960s, the so-called Bureau of Reclamation had devastated the once thriving riparian system. The formerly legendary salmon runs sank into precipitous decline. The Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, Shasta and other Klamath River tribes had fought fiercely all the way along for legal tribal recognition. They demanded their rights to their traditional ways of living in a sacred relationship with the lands and waters that gave them life.

The dam removal movement grew directly out of the 1970s fish wars and the quest for tribal sovereignty and the health of the river.

Craig Tucker became part of the Undam the Klamath coalition in the late 1990s.

Craig Tucker (CT): I will just say it’s been a distinct honor and privilege to be a part of this fight to remove dams, and restore fisheries on the Klamath River. I left a career in academic science to pursue a career in environmental activism. Didn’t really know how to do that. So I spent a year with a program called Green Corps, but it was a training program, really, how to do the fundamental basics of how you do grassroots organizing, put together political campaigns. 

And I went to work with a statewide river group called Friends of the River, and that’s when the fish kill happened back in 2002, when somewhere around 70,000 adult salmon died on the Yurok reservation before they could spawn. And it really kind of put the Klamath in an international spotlight. 

And so I started going to meetings about Klamath, and it wasn’t long that I figured out or started to figure out this intersection between environmental issues and social justice issues, issues related to tribal sovereignty and issues of democracy. 

And I’m very appreciative of folks like Isaac and Sammy, and a lot of other folks who put up with my whiteness, I guess. [LAUGHTER] And taught me how to behave in Indian Country, and allowed me to work on this project with them, and I’m forever grateful for it. 

Host: Along with guidance from the Indigenous leaders Sammy Gensaw and Isaac Kinney, Craig Tucker had first been mentored by Ronnie Pierce. A structural engineer and marine biologist of Squamish ancestry, she was a near-mythic figure who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to catalyze the impossible dream of dam removal. 

CT: She was a Native woman that worked for the tribes on the Klamath, and represented them in the dam relicensing. She was about five feet tall and probably smoked two packs a day. And we’d go to these rooms full of bureaucrats and environmental activists and government agency folks, and PacifiCorp, and she would just call bullshit in the middle of the meeting, and say, ‘You know, if you guys are going to do this, I’m going to smoke.’ And she would leave. [LAUGHTER] And I was like, I can’t believe she just did that! I can’t believe she gets away with that.

But then I’d follow her out and she started explaining to me what was going on. No one had ever attempted removing a large dam, much less four large dams at once. And so it was a really radical idea in 2001, 2002, 2003 to be talking about it, and she was fearless in talking about it. And so she was one of those people when I said, you know, we should, instead of this stuff with the government, this is ridiculous, we need to get after this company, she was like, Yes. And that’s when she started credentialing me, I think, in tribal communities. She’s the one who took me and introduced me to tribal leaders and tribal councils. And so, I think she made sure I had thick enough skin to do it. She worked on me pretty hard.

SG: As I grew older, and I started working with Undam the Klamath Coalition, actually Craig was the first guy with a full beard that I knew could stand up for the river like that. [LAUGHTER] First guy I ever heard a Southern accent. I thought he was messing with me at first. But there’s a group called the Undam the Klamath Coalition, and they had a meeting in my high school, and they didn’t think that everybody was going to show up because the email didn’t go out. And so they had all this Subway there, and then somebody had to eat it, so they called the kids in. 

So I was sitting there, and all of a sudden this whole table started filling up full of activists, and I knew I heard their names before, and I’ve seen these people. And then they started talking, and I said, “Well, I can help organize it too if you guys need some help.” And then Craig looked over, and he’s like, “Wait, wait, who are you?” And I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Well, I’m Sammy Gensaw, future leader of the Yurok tribe.” [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] He’s like, “Welcome aboard.” 

From then, you know, I just started organizing and traveling around with these guys, and you know, I’d leave my house as a 15 year-old, I would leave my front door and I didn’t know when I would walk back through it. But I took those steps knowing that when, if I did this, then one day somebody wouldn’t have to make the same decision. And that’s what my grandma always told me – we do this, we make these sacrifices, you sit here and you listen to these stories, you continue these stories, because one day they’re going to need people like us. And she’d always tell me that. I’d say, “Grandma, I want to go play football. I want to go do sports.” “Nah, you’ve got to come here. You’ve got to go bail out the canoes. You’ve got to do all this because one day they’re going to need people like us.” And she wasn’t lying. That time is now. [APPLAUSE]

Host: The Klamath River originates around Crater Lake in Oregon in the Cascade Mountains. It’s known as the “upside-down river” because it’s a vast wetlands at the headwaters that only turns into rapids and waterfalls as it empties into the Pacific in California. 

The River Basin is shaped like an hourglass, and the waist is where the dams were constructed between 1918 and 1962. Before the dams, salmon climbed 5,000 feet of elevation to spawn in the wetlands at the headwaters once known as the Everglades of the West. Its sixteen thousand square-mile area is in the middle of the Pacific Flyway, where 6 million migratory birds pass through annually.

Apart from stopping the salmon’s spawning, the dams created horrific water quality problems. Upstream of the dams, the Bureau of Reclamation eliminated the immense wetlands that otherwise filtered the copious nitrogen and phosphorus of the high desert volcanic soil. The dams then trapped these nutrients and created massive blooms of highly toxic algae that are 10,000 times above any supposedly safe level.

Sammy Gensaw’s Yurok family lived through the radical degradation of the river system that climaxed with the game-changing fish kill in 2002.

Sammy Gensaw (SG): I know in the ‘70s, my father used to talk about it. He can look over the edge of his boat and he can see down to the bottom of the river, and he could actually see salmon, and they could fish. They didn’t have to worry about not being able to provide for their families when they went down to the river to harvest.

And I know my Grandma Elma[ph], she was the same way. When she would go down to the river, they didn’t have a lot of concerns like we did growing up. But there was always this teaching that they passed on that said the river wasn’t always like this. They understood what was happening very early on.

But what really affected me was in the 2002 fish kill. That was the first day I’d seen my grandmother just full out bawl her eyes out – my great-grandmother, Lena[ph] Nicholson[ph]. She spent her whole life in California fighting for the healthcare of Indigenous People, and she really put me on to standing up for my rights and our people. But when I seen her cry like that, and we all jumped in the rigs and we drove down to the river, and I heard everybody crying, and I seen and I just smelled genocide, it’s something that sticks with you throughout your life. And it was at that time that my grandmother and my parents told me that it’s not the end but it’s the beginning. We have to start doing something right now, and it starts with us.

And so these dams have been affecting our river for nearly 100 years, and to see the population of salmon in my lifetime be affected by these dams, it always felt like there was a monster at the headwaters growing up. It’s always described as like a story of like this force that can’t be reckoned with that’s demolishing everything in its path. And I grew up with that narrative.

Host: Sammy Gensaw knew that monster at the headwaters was a structurally engineered genocide in slow motion.

SG: As a fisherman, I’ve spent most of my life sitting inside of a boat right outside of my home village. I’ve spent most of my life living within my own home village drinking from the same creeks that my grandfathers and his grandfathers and their grandmothers have since the beginning of time. And I realize now that what a blessing that is today.

But on the same hand, we’re not fishing the same kind of river system. Today I can go out there and I can set my net all day. I can wake up early in the morning for the sunrise and I can fish my hardest, I can make sure my nets are cleanest, I can brutal the weather, go through perfect fishing conditions and come home with nothing. And that’s the reality we’re facing.

And today, there’s so many young people who have been taught to be providers. It’s in our DNA. We’re structured to take care of our people. We’re structured to be providers and protectors. And then when you go out all day and you don’t have anything to bring home to your family at the end of the day, no matter what you did, something within that tears you up on the inside. You know? And that’s what our youth are facing. That’s what our people are facing.

And then on top of that, you’re in these places where, right now, even in my homeland, there’s not one grocery store where we can go and if we didn’t catch anything, we can’t even go to the store and bring back some food. You can’t do it. All you’ve got to do is you’ve got to come home and just hope that they understand. And that doesn’t feed your family.

And that’s the difference. There’s people out there that like to eat salmon, and then there’s people out there that need to eat salmon, and that’s who I am.

Host: Facing that existential crisis, Sammy Gensaw and the tribes of the Klamath river redoubled their efforts. They built what’s known in politics as a “nightmare coalition,” engaging conservation groups, commercial fisherman and other allies. The tribes would go on to make the impossible inevitable: Remove the dams and restore the river in what Sammy calls the Restorative Revolution.

More when we return…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…

Host: In truth, although the federal government was the obvious adversary, it was private business that operated the Klamath River dams – and had long profited from them. Yet as time had worn on, even the economics of electricity no longer added up – compounded by a dying river, a salmon population nearing extinction, and climate breakdown that destabilizes everything.

Again, Craig Tucker…

CT: And so when we decided to go for dam removal, we decided we weren’t going to mess around with the federal government and federal agencies and the George Bush administration. We decided to make it a corporate responsibility campaign out of the gate. And I think that’s why Aawok Troy Fletcher and Leaf Hillman asked me to come help, because I thought I was brilliant to have that idea, only to find out they were like, finally, these white guys are figuring out how this stuff works. [LAUGHTER] 

And so 30 of us in 2004 went to Scotland and crashed a shareholders meeting of Scottish Power. And we did that three times. And we thought we were going to win in Scotland, but then they sold PacifiCorp to Berkshire Energy, which is Warren Buffet’s company. And I was—I thought I was going to weep the day that happened. And I can remember Leaf Hillman saying, “Okay, well, where does he live?” [LAUGHTER]

And so the next year, we loaded up and went to Omaha, Nebraska, and crashed the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting, which I call an “orgy of capitalism”. It was really remarkable, but it was years of very confrontational protests, activism, coupled with great legal teams from the tribes. And the environmental groups were really uncomfortable with that in the beginning, but then they kind of got into the swing of it and really stopped trying to position themselves as the leader of this effort and figured out that tribal nations were leading this effort.

So this is a long haul to get there, and I just want to say that four weeks ago, we did the precedent announcing the ground has broken, and the dams are coming out, and they’ll all be out of the river by the end of next year. [APPLAUSE]  

Host: The actual dam removal is not some big dramatic explosion. Before the physical piece-by-piece deconstruction can take place, a carefully staged process gradually lowers the water levels. It assures enough water remains in the river to support the salmon and other life, especially during the spring spawning season.

A company called Restoration Environmental Solutions then comes in to create a massive re-vegetation process. The tribes are also bringing to bear their traditional ecological knowledge of salmon and the riparian ecology in this historic co-equal partnership with federal and state government agencies.

CT: So how do you do that? Well, they’ve been out there for three years collecting seeds onsite. So there’s about 100 native plants in the area; they’ve collected thousands of seeds. They took those seeds to a farm up in Washington and propagated them. Now they have 17 billion seeds. And so as soon as the reservoirs get drawn down, they’re going to go in there and start reseeding and replanting, because if you don’t, you’ll end up with star thistle and Himalayan blackberry. So the scale of the effort is pretty staggering, and I think we’re kind of in real time demonstrating how restoration actually works, and how we can put these watersheds back together.

And it’s not just about salmon. Yurok just reintroduced condor to Northern California. Right? Wolves just showed up in Siskiyou County. Right? So I think you can kind of doom scroll on your phone and get really depressed, but I’m like, stop and read about the Klamath, because I think we’re showing that you can put places back together. And a handful of super dedicated people can make it happen.

Host: Today Craig Tucker is a consultant for the Karuk Tribe and others working to restore rivers. He believes the fate of Pacific salmon will be decided in the next 20 to 25 years when all the big dams in the Pacific Northwest come up for relicensing for the next 30 to 50 years. That’s the decisive moment to change history. The tribes figured that out in the 1990s and got to work ahead of the curve.

Yet Sammy Gensaw also knows that dam removal is not a total solution. Given the acute degradation of the Klamath River system – given climate breakdown and its droughts, wildfires and warming waters that are deadly to salmon – and given the very long-term colonization and immiseration of tribal economies and cultures – radical adaptation is now imperative to meet this postmodern predicament.

In response, Sammy and his colleagues founded Ancestral Guard, a program under the auspices of the nonprofit Nature Rights Council. It’s an Indigenous organizing network that combines traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary science and values of world renewal.

Ancestral Guard conducts a suite of programs to help these Indigenous communities survive and thrive. Along with transmitting traditional practices, it teaches people how to garden. It operates a commercial kitchen and portable facility to process elk and other local meats and foods. It promotes cultural tourism to build awareness and allyship, and it conducts cultural exchanges globally with other Indigenous communities seeking greater self-reliance and food sovereignty.

SG: When I first started, we were just teaching kids how to fish, and I heard these kids talk about what they wanted to see in their community once when they were talking on the river, and I just sat back and I listened to these kids talk. And they said, man, I wish—if we could do this, if I had a truck or if I could do this, we’d take fish over here, we’d deliver these fish I want to give to my auntie. I wish we had a store we could go to and do this and get materials so we can have a cookout and we can raise funds.

And so we wrote that down, turned that into programming, and then turned that programming into a nonprofit today in which we work. But we did that with the basis and the belief of what we call a “restorative revolution”. We say the Industrial Revolution is over. It’s done happened. And the effects of that industrial revolution will continue to affect our people for generations.

So right now, people don’t have the option to not listen to Indigenous People more than ever, because if you want to live a healthy lifestyle, if you want your kids to eat, if you want to be in a good way, you have to start living a life that parallels Indigenous values. And if we don’t start doing this today, like Craig said, there may not be an opportunity for our kids in the future.

When I grew up, I grew up rough and tough on the river. I’ve been in more fist fights than I can count. I’ve lived a life on this river that I wouldn’t trade in for nothing, but it’s been rough. But on doing that, I’ve gained a perspective that allows me to survive in these places, because I will never leave my ancestral territory. I will never leave this place, no matter how sick this river gets and no matter how sick I get. Because where I’m from, the average lifespan for a Native American male in my condition, where I live, is about 65 years old. I’m almost halfway there. So having said that, I want to spend the rest of my life on this river. I want to spend the rest of my life teaching my family how to fish and hunt and gather, so hopefully some of these kids will come and bring me some deer meat in the future. You know? That’s my retirement plan. [LAUGHTER] That’s what I got going on. So I suggest you do the same. [APPLAUSE]

CT: I think this is why Indigenous People win. Right? And when I worked for environmental groups, I could organize a protest, could organize a rally, but it’s like, hey, we need to take on Warren Buffet, we need a crew who wants to throw down. And you’re not going to find that outside of Indian Country, or at least it’s very rare to find it.

And I think the commitment that Karuks and Yuroks and Hoopa has to the place —there’s not a problem confronting Warren Buffet on his home turf. There’s not a problem stopping traffic in the middle of Omaha. There’s not a problem taking toxic algae and dumping it on the floor in the lobby of PacifiCorp’s headquarters. It’s like you have to have people who are willing to throw down. And it’s hard to find that.

And I think that a lot of middle class white people are way too comfortable to throw down. And so when I talk to conservation groups, I’m like you better figure out how to be an ally to an Indian tribe, because you’ve got folks there who are going to do anything to protect these resources. Because you’ve got people who have the moral authority to speak to these resources. And you have unique laws that apply to tribes that let you achieve things that non-Indian organizations simply cannot achieve.

So I think if my kids – and our kids out here in the audience – if he’s going to have fish and clean water and breathable air, and my grandkids are going to have opportunities is going to be because we learned how to get behind tribes and let them lead on these issues. [APPLAUSE]

Host: Craig Tucker and Sammy Gensaw… “The Restorative Revolution: How Indigenous Leadership and Allyship Catalyzed the Biggest River Restoration in U.S. History”.