‘It’s a Story of Hope’: Reflections on Undamming the Klamath

This article was originally published by High Country News here.

One year after the largest dam removal project in history, salmon have reached the headwaters of the Klamath River, an area they hadn’t been seen in for some 115 years.

In her new book out this week, The Water Remembers, Amy Bowers Cordalis recounts the intergenerational struggle to protect the Klamath and Yurok way of life. Through a mix of memoir, historical narrative nonfiction, deeply researched legal analysis, and Yurok storytelling, Cordalis reflects on her own journey and role in the dam removal, from witnessing the historic 2002 fish kill as a tribal fisheries intern to becoming general counsel for the Yurok Tribe.

“I felt really compelled to write this at a time when it could end on such a high note, so that we could show the world how Indigenous resistance, Indigenous resilience, Indigenous knowledge, can lead to these massive victories,” Cordalis said. “It’s a story of hope.”

A day before our conversation, Cordalis had been out on the river with members of her nonprofit, Ridges to Riffles, and Karuk Tribe staff, tagging salmon to aid in habitat restoration. So far, collective efforts have replanted 19 billion native seeds within the former reservoir area, and projects are underway to restore 20,000 acres of spawning grounds — work will continue through 2028 and beyond, Cordalis said. In the following conversation with High Country News, she reflects on family, stewardship, and what will come next for the river.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: Did you learn a lot more about your family through research for the book, or did you already know most of it?

Amy Bowers Cordalis: Researching the book was extremely emotional. It just gave me even deeper respect for the work of my ancestors and previous generations because they fought so hard and put themselves in harm’s way just so that they could continue to be Yurok people. All the successes that we have had on the Klamath River really were because of those generations and how they fought back.

I’d grown up hearing about the fish wars and how traumatizing it was for Yurok people and for my family, because we did what we always did, which was fish. But in response to that, federal marshals, like SWAT teams, were sent out in full riot gear with machine guns, bulletproof vests, these huge jet boats. And when we would go out and fish, they would jump in their boats and try to take the nets. And there would be these really violent clashes. We did win the day, because eventually they left and we continued our fishing way of life. But what a great injustice that (we) even had to fight that way when everybody else around (us) was allowed to fish. It was so arbitrary. It was so unjust. It was criminalization of our way of life; it was racial profiling.

The other piece of it was that there was an oral historian who had done interviews with my family in the 1980s, and a lot of details in the book were from those transcripts. In the third part of the book, I go into my story. It was really remarkable to be able to reflect on my work and have a better appreciation of how previous generations had positioned us to be able to get to Klamath dam removal. We did this amazing thing: we removed these dams. It’s the largest river restoration project in history. I hope that by the end of it, readers feel like they’ve gone through this multigenerational epic journey to a win.

HCN: I noticed some parallels between your story and your Great-grandma Geneva’s. There’s a moment when she’s on the river bootlegging salmon, and you write about how she’s seen so much destruction of Yurok land from the canneries to the timber companies. Meanwhile, you saw the first fish kill on the river. I’m curious about your thoughts on how to keep going when you’re a witness to things that make you feel powerless.

ABC: Writing the book was a tremendous opportunity for reflection. I realized, for me, that injustice was a huge source of trauma. I think we all have some kind of trauma that we’re dealing with. For me, my response to trauma was action. I put all that hurt and grief into dedication to get through law school. But it was hardcore, because I worked as if my whole family and future and the future of my people depended upon it.

My hope for this book in this moment of time is that it can be the antidote to the political and environmental crisis we are experiencing. Because what I have learned is that even the most marginalized people can make a big difference, and coalitions are so important. Finding our commonalities and uplifting each other and being OK with failing, because you only need one right path to work. When people work that way, you can accomplish amazing things. And we’ve done that on the Klamath. The dams are out, and the fish are in Oregon. The river is fiercer. (The book is) a blueprint of how we did it — all the structures in terms of the grassroots movement, the legal strategy, the political relationships. But also, I hope that it really resonates in this heart chord of inspiring understanding that what you do makes a big difference. Maybe the world is in a fish-kill moment right now, but we’re also going to keep fighting, and we’re going to work together, and we’re probably going to fail, but we’re going to keep going until we win.

HCN: You wrote about how even when your great uncle, Ray Mattz ,won his Supreme Court fishing rights case, the federal government still prevented Yurok people from fishing. Then, once the Yurok could fish without persecution, the salmon runs were collapsing and the focus shifted to dam removal. One takeaway that I had is how the work is never done: There’s always going to be something to fight for or defend from one generation to the next.

ABC: What you’re talking about is being a steward, right? If you are a steward of a place, you make that choice to step up and respond to the needs of that river or that forest or that wetland or that mountain. I look back on the collective experience of Indigenous people on the planet, and we have been stewards. Whatever the place needed, that’s what we tried to provide. We are taught that Yurok Country was made for humans, but also the land and the water and the creatures, and it’s our job to live in a balance with them. If we do that, we’ll never want for anything, we will always have enough. And that’s a worldview of sustainability, right? You have that responsibility, but you also have this great privilege of being the beneficiary of all the abundance that comes from the world. I hope that people will think about that perception, because it’s a way that we could re-evaluate our relationship with the natural world and how we live here. We can all choose to adopt that value and then implement that as a steward.

We got the dams out, and so the next thing the river needs is restoration. Through Ridges to Riffles, my nonprofit, we’re working on restoration projects in the former dam area, and we’re helping to lead an intertribal group that is using traditional knowledge along with modern science to basically be an advisory committee over that restoration work. We’re also trying to get more of a natural hydrograph. We’re responding to whatever that place needs. And that’s our role as stewards in order to keep the balance, right? It’s an honor to do that.

HCN: You wrote about a memory with your siblings looking at the dams and saying how you wish you could just blow them up. And then you literally got to press one of the detonators to blow up COPCO 1 Dam.

ABC: It was so surreal. Even as you talk about that, I’m like, “Wow, that all happened.” It was my birthday, and I knew they were blowing up a part of COPCO 1, but I didn’t know that I was going to get to press the detonator. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that would have happened. Because I do remember sitting on the river bar — there were more than a few times — where we had a conversation of, “Oh, we should just go and blow those dams up,” you know how you just daydream about that stuff. So then to have it actually happen was definitely surreal.

It used to be that when I looked at those dams, I felt so much pain. Think about the person you love the most in your life, knowing that they were in tremendous pain and for a long time feeling like there was nothing you could do about it. And then finally they get surgery, the dam’s out, and they’re starting to heal. For the first time in your life, there’s health and healing. It was such a tremendous relief. And I swear, seeing it, I felt like I was crying the tears of multiple generations of my family. I do believe that we maintain strong connections to ones that have passed, and I think they do rest deeper in peace knowing what they did made such a big difference.

Anybody can do that hard work, anybody can create real, meaningful change when we work in partnership, when we work with nature, when we’re good to each other.

HCN: How are the fish doing since dam removal last year?

ABC: It’s already paying off; as we speak, I’m getting texts from colleagues that are saying salmon are everywhere.

My village (Rek-woi) is at the mouth of the river, and in August, I had the opportunity to harvest some salmon. Those salmon were larger, more resistant, more resilient. They fought so hard, and they were bigger than any I’ve seen in probably five or six years. (Now) they have gone all the way past Iron Gate, which is at River Mile 190. Fish have gotten all the way to Keno Dam, past Link River Dam, past Upper Klamath Lake and into the Williamson and the Sprague River. So that’s, I don’t know, 300 river miles from Rek-woi.

“Anybody can do that hard work, anybody can create real, meaningful change when we work in partnership, when we work with nature, when we’re good to each other.”

They took a couple months to make that journey. But they’re doing amazing. In part, that’s because already the river is so much healthier. The river itself is fiercer; the water is cooler. It’s cleaner. Now that the dams are gone, the people are reunited in a way we haven’t been in 100 and some years. What happens at my home village impacts those same fish that go all the way up to the Wood River. And so, they’re bringing us back together in this beautiful way that gives us the opportunity to re-evaluate our relationships. The Klamath has been plagued with water wars, and what I hope is that collectively, we as people of the Klamath Basin can use this opportunity to rebuild our communities and bring us back together.

Water is connected through the hydrologic cycle, even the water that’s within us, right? And so seeing the Klamath, which is this beautiful big river with all this water, heal, I think it makes the water in us heal too. We remember what it was like to be on a healthy planet. I think all of us are just starving to get back to that. When we work with nature, when we devote ourselves to these really important causes, when we decide we’re going to be stewards like we were talking about, it creates this internal healing, and it allows us to remember. And it feels really good.