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<H2><FONT size=2><A
href="http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9722718p-10645719c.html">http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9722718p-10645719c.html</A></FONT></H2>
<H2><FONT color=#000080>Crops or salmon: What will it be?</FONT></H2>
<H3>Indians gain on farmers in big battle</H3>
<H4>By Tim Holt -- Special To The Bee<BR><I>Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, June
20, 2004</I></H4>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
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<TD><FONT size=2><IMG alt=" " border=1 height=164
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width=2> 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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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."
<P>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."
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>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.
<P>
<HR noShade>
<DIV class=f11N><B>About the
Writer</B><BR>---------------------------<BR><BR>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.</DIV></FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>