Yurok People have always been on the Klamath River.

The creator made the land, made the water, made the animals made the plants and the trees and then made the humans last and said, This is all here for you and I made it for you.

And if you take care of it, if you live in balance with all of this, you will never want for anything.

You will always have enough.

We said, All right, we'll be the protectors.

It was a cultural covenant to protect all the things that we rely on.

About 200 years ago, white people came, and since then we've been going through colonization.

We've always been fishing people.

We fish the same family of fish today that our family has always fished for.

It's the same run.

Those same salmon always call us home and they give us place and they give us purpose.

In 1855, the Yurok Reservation was created.

We were supposed to have reserved our Aboriginal rights to continue our fishing way of life, to continue that exercise of that cultural covenant.

But meanwhile, about 1902 and at the top part of the river, the feds authorized one of the largest federal reclamation projects in the whole country.

They essentially took the headwaters of the river and completely redid the plumbing.

They drained the wetlands, they moved the riverbeds.

They did all these things to essentially create this land for agriculture.

In the middle part of the river, they built four dams without fish ladders.

The lowest dam is called Iron Gate, and that is literally what it is from the salmon's perspective.

There's no fish ladder.

There's no way for it to get past that iron gate.

The river was colonized, fish were colonized, the people were colonized.

And, you know, all of that essentially was happening through like the 1960s.

Water is a prime necessity without which the nation cannot prosper.

In that time, the agricultural project on the river, which is called the Klamath Reclamation Project, expanded, and they wanted more and more water.

And so they kept diverting more and more water out of the river.

In the nineties, that's when we started seeing the salmon runs really start to decline in a real significant way.

The fish were just never going to make it.

The river was never going to make it.

We have that great privilege of living from the salmon, but along with that privilege comes that duty of stewardship.

I always think about that original agreement we made with the Creator.

It was a cultural covenant to protect all the things that we rely on.

What's interesting, I think, about being Yurok now is that we exercise that duty.

Our modern tribal government is charged with putting the weight of its sovereignty behind enforcing that caretaker role.

You know, and we use our own traditional knowledge, our ecological knowledge, and we sort of marry that with modern science and law and policy.

And that's been our approach to river restoration.

In 1994, we created the Yurok Tribe.

So once we created our own constitution and our own form of government that established us to have water rights.

And through trial and error and resiliency, through court and through treaties, we proved that we had a senior water right that was well-established before the development of the Klamath Basin Irrigation District.

Our water rights and dam removal, this is all a lifetime of work.

We need those dams out of there.

If we want to restore our river to a natural state then we need those out of there, that's going to give our salmon the best opportunity to survive.

We’re about six miles up from the Elwha mouth.

This location itself was what we called the lower dam.

Behind it was a lake.

A lot of the water had covered what we're looking at right now that was under water.

We would see a big pool of water that was below the dam.

The fish was just mingling around in the pool, trying to make their way up past the dams.

After the dam started being released.

This was the first place we've seen that first salmon make its path across their blockage.

So when they first started working on the dams, our people did their best to speak up as loud as they could.

We told them the salmon are going to die.

But to speak up back then, it was useless.

Nobody listened back then to Native people.

We just, it was like we were not here.

The colonization of our people, you know, the dams are a part of that colonization.

That is what brought in all the new settlers.

So it changed us traumatically.

We lost all our songs.

We lost our language.

And the dams just, just was another thing to add to kill our spirits.

We were the original environmentalists and we were the original managers.

The resistance never died.

It kept on and on.

Eventually, people started understanding and then people started buying in.

The people started wanting to be part of the movement.

People wanted to better the Elwha and they want our salmon runs, the wild salmon to come back.

I always wondered, what would that be like?

You know, to witness the dams come down, is it going to really change us?

Are we just going to be the same?

And it actually lit our light in our spirit, all of us.

I hope and pray that the Elwha river flourishes with many, many salmon.

But our people have agreed not to fish the Elwha river until we see better numbers.

We're on the Elwha river and our job is to ID the fish, count them and send them on their way and we use this information to gauge how the salmon populations in the Elwha are doing.

And we're seeing a lot of good things happen on this river.

And this is part of telling that story.

They come back right away.

You know, they come back and they went farther up the river.

It was one of the biggest moments, you know, to keep asking how far are they going?

How far are they going?

Oh, they went up there about 50 miles.

Dang!

We’re within a mile of a couple of places where I know that loads up every year with salmon now.

With dam removal, we've seen this place just skyrocket in terms of fish productivity.

We've gone from no salmon to having a thriving population of Chinook, coho, steelhead.

Now pink salmon.

First day that lower dam was taken out was the first day we see that salmon make that cross.

And we knew that the prayers have been answered.

We will see those salmon come back.

We will witness the plentifulness that our elders talk about.

It is still closed to any fishing, but in a couple years we are looking at open it back up for families to be able to go back and start fishing.

There was no words that could express the day when we seen that first dam being removed.

There was no words.

One hundred years it had taken us to get those dams out.

A hundred years our ancestors had fought.

It was the women at that time that went back to D.C. and fought for what we had fought for, for what you're fighting for right now.

They told us that it would not happen and it happened.

You paved the way.

When I think about my community in Warm Springs, when I go home, I went home for seven years and worked for the tribe and there were a lot of things that were broken.

And I kept asking why.

And when I come here along the river and I look and I see that river and I say, I'll never know what it's like to stand along that river.

I can feel it.

I feel it pull me.

But I'll never know.

Because that river has been silenced.

Our villages were flooded.

Our gravesites were desecrated.

Our way of living was taken away.

And then they ask you, why are you broken?

My work around the environment and in particular the Snake River issue is tied to that belief of healing, of hope, of knowing that if we take care of the salmon, we take care of our relative, “wikonish”.

If we do that, we will be okay.

2002, I was working for the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department.

My job was to count fish and I loved it.

I was on the river all the time.

I was talking to the people.

I was counting fish.

It was fantastic.

September comes around.

Big run of fall Chinook salmon like beautiful big salmon.

At the top of the Klamath River,there's this huge irrigation project.

It was a drought year.

And so they diverted all of this water away from the river to irrigation.

And within days the fish started dying.

And over a two week period, you know, there's estimates somewhere between 70,000, 100,000 adult Chinook salmon died.

I remember sitting in the boat and I thought, I've got to do all I can to make sure this never happens again.

And then my next thought was like, Well, I'm going to law school, and that's it.

It was the most like one of the I mean, the biggest tragedies in all of Yurok history.

But the silver lining was that it really was like the canary in the coal mine kind of sounding the alarm that if we didn't change the way that things were done on the river, we were essentially going to kill the whole river.

And so people started getting together and talking about how can we remove dams.

When you try to get your song, you go out on your own.

You go by yourself.

There has to be a desire inside you.

It has to be a purpose that you have inside yourself.

Nobody telling you that you need to go do this is something you do on your own.

And so you come down here.

You come down here like that creek over there.

You go over there to the side of the creek and just sit there and you just sit there and you think and you be quiet.

You be quiet like we are now.

And you hear how the water hits that rock down there.

You hear the little trickle and you listen to the wind.

Listen to the birds.

And you start singing a little bit.

You start moving it, moving your voice with the water.

Then you find your song.

Being the salmon people, we depend on them.

Not just for food.

They actually control our well-being.

Fishing gave me so much.

And when I was younger, we had we had a lot more salmon than we have now.

And it made our family really tight.

And over the years of my lifetime, I seen how the abundance of salmon impacted our families and communities.

And then right now, we don't have any right now.

And there's a lot of our people that are suffering.

So they’re our everything.

It was a 30 year long fight.

And we're going to see the fruits of that labor here next year.

January of 2023, they're going to start drawing the water levels down so that we can start deconstructing the dams.

We as a nation, if we don't sort of embrace that, like rivers need water, salmon need water and we have to put legitimate legal protections on in-stream flows for fish and that baseline ecological health for rivers.

We're going to lose all of our salmon.

That's an unacceptable outcome.

If the salmon no longer exist, then we don't.

You can't have a fishing lifestyle if there's no fish, and we won't allow that to happen.

The salmon people won't allow that to happen.

While things have changed, they will change again.

And that we will continue our sacred obligation to be those stewards, to love these places, to speak for the salmon, and to bring them back when the time comes.

The work that you have done, you brought the salmon home.

And in doing that, you have shown that all of us can do it and we will do it and we are doing it.

That's what we're doing on the Klamath.

Those dams are going to come down in about a year and a half and we talk about the Elwha all the time, and say things like, well, they did it, we're doing it.

You know, in the law, they call that precedent, right?

You set the precedent.

So those dams will come down.

And just like they're going to come down on the Klamath, they're going to come down on the Columbia, they're going to come down on the Snake.

And we will move through the salmon nations removing these dams, because that's who we are and that's why we're here.

We're strong.

We're very, very powerful.

When all of the nations walk in together and everybody’s saying the same thing, that's a message that is very powerful.

All of our Indigenous people, we’re tied together through the salmon.

We wanted to create a song for that for all of our neighboring tribes, all the way down to really bring our people together and stand together and work together.

When we make drums, we always have that prayer that, wherever this drum is going, that gift of song goes with that drum too.

Today, you know, the song that we're sharing comes from my son.

The first part...

The second part... How does that part go?

See, it drops down.

You guys catching it?

Jefferson, got it?

JoDe?

Even though they sold Celilo Falls, it’s sleeping over here.

The roar of the falls echoes in our hearts.

I want to be able to fish that spot before I die.

But if I can’t do it, I want our children to be able to do it.

We have a responsibility to continue to fight in whatever way that we can.

It wasn't just about the fish.

It was about everything.

It's about the culture.

It's about the livelihood.

It's about the environment.

It's about the gratitude and that protection.

We're in this massive climate crisis and the idea that you can just extract, extract and pollute and pollute and consume and consume without consequence is over.

And I think the rest of the world is seeing that.

And they're now looking to the salmon people to say, you know, what were the sort of grounding principles about how you interacted in balance with the natural world?

And how can we apply those to get better environmental outcomes and to pull us out of this climate crisis?

That's my hope, and that's where I think we're going in the future.

And, you know, the only thing is, is like, can we act fast enough?