[env-trinity] SF Chron April 11

[Byron]

Battling Upstream; The tribes on the Klamath know that as the river goes, so
go the salmon

San Francisco Chronicle - 4/11/08

By Glen Martin, staff writer

 

The Klamath River surges just below Merk Oliver's house. Right now, the
water is slightly turbid, clouded and green - perfect for steelhead fishing.
The Klamath is the second largest river in California, following the
Sacramento, and its watershed encompasses a landscape that seems removed
from the rest of the state by time as well as distance. Freeways, the
digital economy, the entertainment industry, industrial agriculture - up
here they seem like ill-recalled dreams.

 

But what happens on this river affects Lower California greatly. It
determines whether commercial fishermen and recreational anglers can take
salmon - and whether there'll be fresh wild salmon in markets and
restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ultimately, it figures into
the availability of water for the state's homes and farms.

 

Oliver's home is several hundred yards from the river's mouth, and from his
property you can hear the muffled reports of big combers breaking on the
beach. A group of Yurok Indian youths are in the yard, grilling Pacific
lampreys - anadromous, eel-like fish with circular mouths filled with sharp
radula. Lampreys are highly esteemed by the Yurok, and are gaffed in the
winter during low tides, when they skitter across flooded sandbars from the
sea to the river. The close proximity to the big surf makes eel snagging a
dangerous business, and fatalities from sleeper waves occur with some
regularity.

 

Inside the small, clapboard house, Oliver, a tribal elder, is eating strips
of smoked salmon. Oliver is thin but not frail, an exceptionally handsome
man with long iron-colored hair and dark eyes glimmering with humor. 

 

He is 78, and has lived in this home for 55 years. A wood stove provides
radiant heat. On the walls are photos - of family and tribal members, but
also of fish: big salmon arrayed on a plank, skewered salmon staked around a
fire, a close-up of a lamprey in shallow water, a huge sturgeon hanging from
a tree limb. The room smells pleasantly of smoke and fish. 

 

A few Yuroks are seated and standing around Oliver, who is ensconced in a
comfortable chair near the stove. As he nibbles on the fish - symmetrical,
long strips of blood orange chinook, translucent as stained glass - he uses
a jack knife to carve a lamprey hook handle from yew wood. 

 

Lamprey hooks are the essential tool for eel fishing. The requisite
technique is to chase an eel as it lunges across the sandbar, snag it with
the hook, then flip it high up on the beach with a flip of the arm and
wrist. 

 

Oliver's eel hooks are held in particularly high regard, a set of finished
hooks hang on a wire above Oliver's chair, the golden yew wood handles
glossy. They are carved with uncanny accuracy to represent a lamprey head,
right down to the radula in the mouth and staring, inquisitive eyes. The
lamprey is an intelligent fish, say the Yurok; when you run after them with
the hook, you can see the alarm in their faces. Somehow, Oliver has captured
that sentience in his carving.

 

The talk is discursive, humorous and mildly chaffing. Oliver asks one of the
young men if he is still seeing a Tlingit woman. Tlingits are a southeastern
Alaska tribe, accomplished fishers and marine mammal hunters who have
long... enjoyed must be the operative verb... a reputation for pride and
aggressiveness. 

 

No, the young man says, a half-smile on his lips. She went back north.
Oliver nods his head sagely, intent on his carving.

 

"That was a tough woman," he says after a time. He looks around the room,
fixes on a visitor sitting nearby on a stool. "That woman could've whipped
three of you," he says. "She was fierce. Ate too much seal meat." There are
gentle laughs, and heads nod in agreement. 

 

This is a conversation that has been going on for a long time - eight to ten
thousand years, give or take a millennium. That's how long the Yurok,
California's largest tribe, have occupied this reach of the Klamath River. 

 

The three main tribes inhabiting the Lower Klamath - the Yurok, Hupa and
Karuk - all have maintained strong cultural identities, but the Yurok are
perhaps most closely identified with the river. This is because of the
location of the ancestral Yurok lands: From the Klamath's mouth and
surrounding littoral territories to more than 50 miles upstream. All the
Klamath tribes depended on the fish runs, but the river and its coastal
nexus assumed particular significance for the Yurok. 

 

The Yurok had access to the migrating fish as soon as they left the sea,
when they were at their fattest and brightest. Along with the river - and
its salmon, steelhead, lampreys and candlefish - they also had the open
ocean to exploit. Their food sources included Dungeness crabs, seaweed,
mussels, abalone and periwinkles from the intertidal zone. They carved -
still carve - elegant boats from redwood logs, and were redoubtable
mariners, hunting marine birds, seals and sea lions and fishing for ling cod
and rockfish in the rough inter-coastal waters. They had first rights to the
dentalium and abalone shells that were the primary medium of exchange for
the Klamath River tribes. 

 

The river was their source of food and wealth, and it was their highway,
their means of establishing commerce with other tribes. They were a water
people, and still are. The photos on Oliver's walls are religious icons -
graphic representations of all that is sacred to the tribe: the fish.
Fishing nets and implements. Boats. The River. Because in any conversation
with a Yurok, it always comes back to the river. To a very significant
degree, the river is the reservation: Tribal holdings extend 1 mile inland
along each bank from the mouth of the Klamath more than 40 miles upstream.
Most of the land is exceedingly steep, of little utility for anything except
conservative and limited forestry. What the tribe has always had, and still
has to a significant degree, is the Klamath.

 

"The river gave us everything we needed to thrive," said Troy Fletcher, a
tribal member and resource policy analyst. "It gave us food, wealth, beauty.
This was paradise, and we knew it."

 

But like most rivers in North America, the Klamath has suffered.
Agricultural water diversions have depleted the river's once mighty flows;
four moderately sized hydroelectric dams along the Klamath's main stem -
plus a huge dam on its major tributary, the Trinity - have greatly reduced
the spawning grounds for anadromous fish. 

 

Too, the main stem Klamath dams warm the river's water, encouraging
destructive parasites and blooms of toxic blue-green algae. Increasingly, it
is clear the Klamath can have the dams or it can have fish, but not both. 

 

For years, the Yurok have been at the vanguard in a battle to remove the
dams. Allied with them are the other Klamath tribes, commercial fishermen
and sport anglers. Opposing them are the dams' operators - which have
shifted over the years, as the facilities have changed ownership - and
farmers in the Upper Klamath Basin, who divert the river's water for
potatoes, grain, alfalfa, horseradish and other crops. 

 

The Klamath always has been a major front in California's water wars, one
that has waxed especially hot throughout the Bush administration. In 2001,
increased downriver flows by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to sustain
salmon were resisted by Basin farmers, who seized irrigation canal head
gates in protest. Water availability already was a flashpoint issue on the
Klamath because much of the Trinity's flow is diverted south for the state's
cities and agricultural lands. The Upper Basin skirmishes heightened the
sense among the tribes and their allies that the entire system was being
drained, with no regard for the fisheries and the people who depended on
them.

 

In 2002, the Bush administration sided with the farmers and slashed the
releases to the river, delivering the water up to the irrigation districts.
A massive fish kill on the Klamath followed; the salmon never really
recovered from the blow. The incident scarred the collective sensibility of
the Yuroks, and it is a subject that still engenders deep anger on the
reservation. 

 

The situation on the Klamath has far-reaching consequences - all the way
down to Monterey. The scarcity of Klamath fish has resulted in multiple
truncated commercial salmon seasons for California and Oregon, because the
Klamath fish mingle with the nominally more plentiful Sacramento River
salmon in the open ocean. As the Klamath goes, then, so go the fortunes of
the West Coast's commercial fishing fleet - and the Bay Area availability of
fresh wild local salmon.

 

[Some fisheries biologists say it's already too late for salmon in the Lower
48 states. Development, logging, water diversions and dams, they claim, have
compromised the spawning streams to an irreparable degree. 

 

Oceans warming due to climate change - and perhaps overfishing - are just
additional nails in the coffin.

 

As of this writing, the Pacific Fishery Management Council - the regulatory
body that governs West Coast marine fisheries - is poised to proscribe all
salmon fishing for the 2008 season. The reason: An unexpected collapse in
Sacramento River salmon stocks, which up to now have been relatively robust.
If the ban is enacted as expected, it will be the first complete salmon
closure for the California coast since commercial fishing began more than
150 years ago.

 

But many fisheries experts maintain Pacific salmon and steelhead can be
revived in the continental United States. Further, they say, salmonid
restoration will have ancillary benefits.

 

Bill Kier is a Humboldt County consulting biologist who has designed
computer programs to track fishery restoration efforts on the Klamath; they
are so accurate they have been applied by scientists across the country. 

 

Kier acknowledges that the data on southern range Pacific salmon is a mixed
bag.

 

"But I still believe they have a very real fighting chance," he said. "The
fact is that caring for salmon results in stabilized watersheds, better
water quality, more wildlife - and in general terms, a cleaner environment.
If you manage water and land for salmon, it doesn't matter if you're talking
about the Klamath or the creek that flows through Mill Valley - life will be
better not just for the salmon, but for the people who live in those
watersheds, whether they're Native Americans, farmers or suburbanites."

 

Dams are not the only thing winnowing the Klamath's salmon. A couple of
years ago, fluctuating ocean conditions off western North America reduced
the production of plankton, the basic building block for all marine food
webs. Pacific salmon typically run in two-to-four year cycles, so many
biologists think the plankton paucity had a deep and negative effect on the
fish populations that are now returning - or rather, not returning - to the
rivers. 

 

Oliver, who has been watching the fish runs all his long life, is convinced
pollution also is a major factor in the decline. 

 

"Everywhere in the world, people are using these harmful chemicals to do
everything, right down to cleaning their toilets and dishes," he said. "The
timber companies are spraying their lands with herbicides, and it runs into
our rivers. The farmers are using too many pesticides. The whole system is
poisoned, and the fish can't take it."

 

But for the Klamath, most biologists agree, the biggest problem is the dams.
The battle over their disposition has raged in the courts, Congress and the
media for two decades. Last year, the Yuroks and their allies caravanned to
Omaha in an attempt to meet with Warren Buffett; his firm, Berkshire
Hathaway, had recently purchased PacifiCorp Power, the company that owns the
Klamath hydroelectric dams. Buffett declined to meet with tribal leaders to
discuss possible dam removal, claiming he never interfered in the management
of subsidiary companies. 

 

He may have been unnerved by a similar trip the Yuroks, Hupas and Karuks
took to Scotland in 2004 to engage representatives of Scottish Power, the
company that owned PacificCorp at the time. The Scots, who consider
themselves a tribal and salmon-loving people, hailed the Indians as kindred
souls and heroes, and reviled Scottish Power. Chagrined, Scottish Power
executives promised to negotiate a solution with the Klamath tribes.
Instead, they sold PacificCorp to Berkshire Hathaway. 

 

After getting stonewalled by Buffett, a certain level of depression settled
in along the river. But it now appears that serious negotiations about dam
removal and increased flows were not wholly undermined by Buffett's rebuff.
Indeed, talks have continued - both with Upper Basin irrigators and
PacificCorp. The negotiations, Fletcher said, are at a sensitive stage, and
he won't discuss details. But other stakeholders who weighed in on the
Klamath for this article indicated a deal is very close. Not everyone is
completely thrilled by the prospect. Both commercial fishermen and the Hupa
tribe - who live just upriver from the Yurok - have expressed concerns that
the settlement now under consideration may not guarantee sufficient flows
for the Klamath.

 

"That worries us," said Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific
Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "On the other hand, we're not
going to actively oppose a settlement. We have to have good cops and bad
cops on this thing, and the Yuroks are the good cops. We understand that."

 

Fletcher did say any settlement must be predicated on the removal of the
main stem's four dams and adequate downstream flows for the fish. He also
noted the tribe never really felt like its fight was with the farmers. 

 

"After (the) 2002 (fish kill), we reached out to them," Fletcher said. "They
share a lot of our values. They're rural people, people who are tied to the
land, who are spiritual and hard-working. And like us, they face an unstable
future. When we started talking to them, we realized, hey - we have a lot in
common with these guys."

 

But there is still PacificCorp. The farmers aside, Fletcher acknowledges it
is naive to think any corporation would sign an agreement that results in a
significant financial loss simply because other parties consider it the
right thing to do.

 

"We understand this has to make sense for PacificCorp," he said. 

 

Fletcher is built like a logger: big shoulders and arms, and a torso like a
keg. Arriving at tribal headquarters near the Klamath's mouth for a recent
interview, he walks into the building with his hands blackened from grease
and soot. He had just driven over a snowy mountain road from the hamlet of
Weitchpec, about 40 miles upriver. En route, he had come across a car
engulfed by fire, and had stopped to help its owner put it out. That kind of
instinctive willingness to aid a neighbor in trouble is embedded in most
rural cultures, but in Yurok society it extends to the landscape itself.

 

"We believe we were given an obligation by the creator to restore and
protect our land and our fisheries," Fletcher said. "It's spelled out in the
preamble to the tribal constitution. For us, this goes back to the beginning
of time. The challenge right now is extreme. But the obligation has always
been there, and it will never change."

 

As part of meeting that obligation, the tribe imposes fisheries closures and
season quotas on its members, even though the Yuroks have the sovereign
right to catch as many fish as they want. Not all members are happy with the
strictures, though they comply.

 

One tribal member who feels the regulations should loosen up a little is
Tommy Wilson. Orphaned at 13, Wilson went to Atlanta to live with a married
sister. 

 

"That big city," he said. "I couldn't hack it. After a couple of months, I
came back here, lived on my own, and did what I had to do to stay alive."

 

That included selling salmon, sturgeon, black bear parts and home-grown
marijuana to a friendly man who later turned out to be an undercover U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service agent. In court, Wilson argued that his sovereign
rights allowed him to make a living from tribal lands through any reasonable
means.

 

"I said that we should be able to thrive, not just survive," he said. "That
means when I catch a fish or kill a bear, or plant a seed and harvest the
plant, I should be able to do with it what I want. We were once a wealthy
people - and it was this river that made us rich. I didn't feel the federal
government had the right to force bare subsistence on us." 

 

The judge agreed, and threw the case out of court. But despite his
entrepreneurial views - by no means unusual among the Yurok - Wilson obeys
the tribal fishery regulations without rancor. That, of course, is integral
to being a Yurok tribe member in good standing. 

 

"Individually, we don't define ourselves first and foremost by our
professions," said Maria Tripp, the tribal chairwoman. "To us, the most
important thing is to be Yurok. Work is what you do - Yurok is what you
are."

 

Courtesy among tribal members and hospitality to visitors is written into
the Yurok constitution. There isn't any emotive breast-beating or preaching,
but everyone is expected to strive for right thinking and right acting.

 

 You see this manifest, especially, when it comes to boat building.

 

The Yuroks have been carving redwood log boats for thousands of years; the
craft are exquisite artifacts by any measure, and sacred to the tribe. All
the boats are carved by hand without jigs or other mechanical aids, and a
long apprenticeship is required before an artisan is allowed to create one
without direct supervision. More than a steady hand is demanded of the
carver: A clear mind and quiet heart also are requisite.

 

"No one is allowed to approach a boat if he is angry or upset," said
Fletcher. "We believe the boats are living things - we carve then with
hearts, lungs and noses. They can be affected by bad thoughts and feelings."

 

On a large, grassy lot in front of tribal headquarters, tribal member Dave
Eric Severns has been carving a boat every day, up to 12 hours a day, since
Thanksgiving. 

 

"It's not something you just - do," Severns said, slowly peeling away long
strips of straight-grained wood with a gouge. He moves slowly and talks
softly, seemingly out of deference to the boat. "You live it. I work on this
boat all day, way into the night. And when I go to bed, I still see it in my
thoughts. It stays with me in my dreams, and then I wake up early in the
morning and come back out here."

 

This is the first boat Severns has carved on his own, after working for six
years under his mentor, George Wilson. It's about 20 feet long. The log it
is carved from was more than 5 feet in diameter, and weighed about 1,600
pounds. When the boat is finished, Severns said, four men will be able to
lift it and move it with ease.

 

"This is a river boat," Severns said, moving his hand along the smooth,
brick-red gunwales. "The ocean boats were up to 60 feet long and 12 feet
wide. Eighty years ago, Yuroks used the ocean boats to deliver milk from
Klamath dairies up to Crescent City (about 20 miles). They were incredibly
seaworthy craft."

 

There is a knob in the bow section of the boat that is meant to represent
its heart; a small black stone rests on it. The stone, says, Severns, is a
lock that keeps the boat secure.

 

"Boats had primary owners, but anyone could use one if they needed it -
unless there was a rock on the heart," Severns said. "Someone from the tribe
comes by here and sees the rock on this boat's heart, they know it isn't
supposed to be moved."

 

Up at Oliver's house, the lampreys have finished cooking on the charcoal
grill. Nearby, a couple of young men check conditions in a large smokehouse.
It is full of lampreys; they hang like golden stalactites from racks near
the rafters. One of the Yuroks cuts off a slab of grilled eel, rolls it in a
slice of white bread and hands it to a visitor. The meat is dense, rich,
oily and incredibly sweet. Oliver walks among the youths, evaluating the
cooking techniques, sampling eel, essaying humorous comments. Sometimes he
simply looks at the river for extended periods of time.

 

Tripp says Oliver and other elders are the tribe's bedrock assets, keeping
the people anchored to their place in the world.

 

"When my friends and I were going to college (at nearby College of the
Redwoods and Humboldt State University), Merk was always coming around to
feed us with traditional foods," she said. "He was out of time - connected
to the old, old ways. He kept us grounded, made us understand who we are and
where we came from."

 

 

Byron Leydecker

Friends of Trinity River, Chair

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810

415 519 4810 cell

415 383 9562 fax

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

 

 

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