[env-trinity] Crops or Salmon: Sac Bee

[Patrick Truman]

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9722718p-10645719c.html
Crops or salmon: What will it be?
Indians gain on farmers in big battle
By Tim Holt -- Special To The Bee
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, June 20, 2004
Injun Billy remembers as a boy running as fast as he could on the hot sand along the river so it wouldn't burn his feet. In those days, there were deep holes all along the meandering river, holes that were thick with salmon in the fall and spring. And there were eels and acorn soup to eat along with the salmon, cooked over open fires by the water. 
Injun Billy, also known as William Carpenter, 71, is a Hoopa tribal elder, who lived as a boy and young adult along the wild Trinity River. 

The 144-square-mile Hoopa reservation is in far northwestern California - a place so remote that the casino craze sweeping other California reservations has bypassed the tribe, which enjoys a relatively quiet, bucolic life, surrounded by forests and their river - or what's left of it. 



       
 Today the sand bars and deep fishing holes of Injun Billy's early days are gone, as are 80 percent of the Trinity's fish. Today's Trinity River is a creature of the Bureau of Reclamation, and of the powerful economic and political forces that have shaped Northern California's water delivery systems. The bureau built the river's dams as well as the 11-mile tunnel that has diverted as much as 90 percent of the Trinity's water southward via the Sacramento River. 
In pre-dam days, before 1964, the river channel was periodically scoured out by high winter and spring runoffs from the lakes and tributaries of the nearby Trinity Alps. The more even, regulated flows of post-dam days limited this scouring, allowing sediment and vegetation to accumulate along the river's banks, filling up the fishing holes, clogging the gravel in spawning grounds and over the decades creating a straight, rectangular-shaped riverbed. 

Now this reshaped river, this creature of the federal government, is the subject of a tug-of-war in federal court. The river is currently at the center of a monumental legal battle between Central Valley water users and public utilities, led by the sprawling Westlands Water District, and the Hoopa and Yurok tribes that want river flows, and their fishery, restored. 

At stake for Westlands is no more than 10 percent of their federal water deliveries, but they have already been squeezed over the past dozen years by droughts and cutbacks for environmental needs. If the Indians do manage to regain the flows they feel they need for a healthy river, Westlands farmers would have to make up the difference in the open water market, at a cost substantially higher than the federally subsidized water they receive now. 

They and the Trinity Indians are in the fourth year of a legal stalemate that has recently prompted U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to step in and personally mediate the dispute. In the meantime, the river that passes by Injun Bill's home and that of the other 2,500 residents of the Hoopa reservation ebbs and flows according to which side of the legal battle is in the ascendancy. Lately the waters have been rising. 

For over half a century Westlands, the largest irrigation district in the nation, has been a major player shaping water delivery decisions in Northern California. By the early 1950s, its farmers had severely depleted their water supply, an underground aquifer. They began looking northward to replace it and soon found themselves paired with Northern California Congressman Clair Engle, who was looking for support for an extension of the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) into the Trinity region. The resulting alliance helped secure funding for the Lewiston and Trinity dams and the 11-mile diversion tunnel through the mountains to the Sacramento watershed, a $225 million public works project that eventually turned the Trinity into a trickle of its former self. 

Since then, federally diverted and subsidized water has allowed Westlands to grow cotton in a parched and sun-drenched climate, to grow 90 percent of the nation's head lettuce and half its garlic. In round figures, its farmers grow a billion dollars worth of crops each year. 

During most of the post-dam period, the contest over the fate of the Trinity has been laughably one-sided, pitting one of the most powerful players in California water politics against a couple of small and impoverished Indian tribes. While Westlands and the rest of the CVP clients got their water, the Hoopas and the Yuroks, who live along the nearby Klamath River, got empty promises, beginning with Congressman Engle's vow that once the Trinity project was completed the Indians would still have all the water their river and its fish needed. 

In the 1970s through the 1990s, as it became obvious that the water exports were having a devastating effect on the river, the Indians received as their consolation prize an endless stream of federal studies telling them what they already knew, that the dams and diversions were killing their fishery. 

The political will to do something about it did not surface until the very last days of the Clinton administration, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt issued an order to ramp up the flows in the Trinity to 47 percent of their historic levels, a level that the government's voluminous studies had determined would bring the river's chinook and coho salmon and steelhead to sustainable population levels. That decision was promptly challenged in court by Westlands and several other litigants. They have effectively blocked implementation of Babbitt's decision up until the present day. 

But the balance of power between the Northern California Indian tribes and their principal adversaries, the San Joaquin Valley farmers, is beginning to tilt in favor of the Indians - a seismic shift in California water politics that has been a couple of decades in the making. 

As with other tribes around the West, the Hoopas have become increasingly sophisticated in their dealings with the government and their political adversaries. Starting in the early 1980s, they began hiring some well connected and highly respected advocates, including Seattle-based attorney Tom Schlosser, who specializes in tribal law, and Washington, D.C. lobbyist Joy Membrino, who in the 1990s helped shepherd through a series of laws that put Congress on record in support of the Trinity's restoration. Key language was inserted in a reform measure, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, passed in 1992; it called for giving equal status to environmental needs in the allocation of CVP water, alongside those of farms and cities. 

And significantly, in this era of court-dictated river flows, the Hoopas have for the past three years had a tribal chairman who's a lawyer: Clifford Lyle Marshall, 47, who taught law at UCLA for two years. 

Last April the Hoopas persuaded a three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to send more water down the Trinity than they've ever seen in this post-dam era. The Indians successfully argued that while the Westlands case drags on, their economy and their culture are suffering. 

The extra water release was an emergency decree; the judges must still issue a ruling on the merits of the Westlands case. Westlands and its public utility allies are centering their case around the energy crunch California was experiencing at the time Secretary Babbitt issued his order. They argue that blackouts could result if releases from dams are altered to benefit fish rather than maximize power production. 

Up until now the Hoopas' legal moves have been defensive, a four-year-long effort to defeat the Westlands lawsuit and clear the way for implementing Babbitt's decision. But last March they went on the offensive, in a carefully worded letter to the Bureau of Reclamation challenging the upcoming renewal of its water contracts to clients all along the CVP system, including Westlands. 

In essence, the formal challenge from Hoopa attorney Schlosser charges the bureau with failure to follow the 1992 CVP reforms that, the Hoopas maintain, place their needs on an equal footing with the water users to the south. Looked at another way, the Indians are asking the government to start making good on the promise made by Congressman Engle a half century ago. 

The lengthy letter, full of legal citations, is clearly meant to be taken as a threat to litigate. As such - with intense, high-level efforts currently underway to resolve the legal conflict over the Trinity - it can also be viewed as a bargaining chip, something to be withdrawn if Westlands should happen to withdraw its lawsuit. 

Representatives of the Hoopas and Westlands have met in two closed-door negotiating sessions with Sen. Feinstein in Washington and at another session in Redding with her staff. Also involved in the talks are two Westlands allies, the Northern California Power Association and the San Luis and Delta Mendota Water Authority, a consortium of Central Valley water users. Representatives from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have also been included. 

That the Hoopas are going into these negotiations on an equal footing with the other parties, with serious bargaining power, is a step forward from the days of empty promises and dead-end studies. Whether they will emerge from these talks with the flows they believe are necessary for a healthy fishery is another matter. 

Chairman Marshall, while tight-lipped about the actual content of the negotiations, is clearly ready to cut a deal. "If we have assurances that \[ex-Secretary Babbitt's\] Record of Decision will go forward, then we have no further reason to challenge the water contracts. That issue becomes moot," he said. Commenting generally on the negotiations, he struck an upbeat note in a recent interview: "We're encouraged. We think there's ultimately going to be a solution." 

The Westlands folks are more guarded, issuing this statement through their spokesperson, Tupper Hall: "We look forward to arriving at a fair and equitable resolution that provides for the restoration that the Trinity River needs, at the same time protecting the needs of California water and power users." 

Westlands has for some time maintained that the river and its fishery can be restored by undertaking physical improvements in the watershed, such as sediment reduction projects, that don't involve increasing river flows. 

A previous effort to broker a deal by the Interior Department's Bennett Raley, assistant secretary for water and science, fell through earlier this year. Raley's compromise proposal was rejected by the Hoopas because they felt it tilted too far in favor of the farmers. Under Raley's proposal, Trinity flows would have been brought up to sustainable levels only in wet years, meaning that any resulting gains in the fishery would be jeopardized in dry and normal years. 

There is a slender thread of tradition running through the Hoopa Valley, connecting members of the 10,000-year-old tribe. They are a stubborn, tenacious people, proud of their history, having successfully resisted all attempts by the government in the 19th century to remove them from their homeland. In the 20th century they helped lead Native American efforts to bring self-government to the reservations, ultimately wresting control from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

But now there aren't many Hoopa elders left. Speakers of the native language, and those who practice tribal crafts and traditions, have dwindled along with the fish. 

The thread of Hoopa tradition is still present in the valley, but it is as slender as the easily tangled lines on the gill nets of Mike Orcutt, 46, who oversees the Hoopa tribe's efforts to restore its fishery. One afternoon I watched a young Hoopa man struggle with the nets as Orcutt directed him from the wheel of his boat. Billy Matilton, 21, is a student at nearby Humboldt State College, and he'll be working this summer for Orcutt. But on this occasion he and Matilton are not out on the river on any official business; they're just checking to see what's been caught in Orcutt's nets. 

After a couple of hours of hauling in line, Matilton has tossed seven chinook into the boat. It is hard, sometimes frustrating work, dragging the fish in and frequently having to unsnarl them from the netting, but Matilton makes no complaints and seems inured to it. For someone majoring in fisheries management, a young man who plans to stay on the reservation after graduating and to make a career managing the river's fishery, it's all part of his apprenticeship, and a hands-on connection with a tradition that goes back thousands of years. 

Injun Billy has grown old and discouraged watching the decline of his boyhood river and its fish. Orcutt, of the next generation, has seen the river's levels go from a relative trickle to almost half its pre-dam flows this year, thanks to the judges' decree. In his 20 years with the Hoopa fisheries, he's seen that effort grow from a department with 12 employees to four times that number. "At least we're moving in the right direction," he says with guarded optimism. 

Because of their remote location, the Hoopas haven't been able to cash in on casino gambling. Instead, they're betting their future on the natural resources of their valley. For all but 40 of the last 10,000 years their river and its fishery have supported them, and they stubbornly hold on to the belief that it will do so once again. 



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About the Writer
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Tim Holt, author of "Songs of the Simple Life," will make "A Case for the Simple Life" in a free talk next Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op in Sacramento. He can be reached at (530) 235-4034.
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