This North Coast Place: It Began Here

 In the San Francisco Chronicle Wednesday, Kurtis Alexander reported on "the nation's largest dam-removal project"--the dismantling of four dams on the Klamath River in far northern California and southern Oregon.  One of the dams is gone, and the other three are due to be erased by autumn this year.  

The article also focuses on the Shasta tribe, exiled from their land along the Klamath more than 100 years ago,  when a dam and reservoir were being built.  Now the remaining members are eager to return, especially as land is reclaimed after the dam is gone.  The article mentions that some 12,000 acres in California had been returned to Native tribes by the state and conservation groups.  

It brings to mind that both of these actions--the removal of the dams, and the return of Native lands, began in some significant way on the North Coast.

The basic reason for the removal of these dams is the sharp decline in salmon in the Klamath River.  Several surviving tribes along the river have centuries' old cultures with the salmon at their center.  These tribes, including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath and Hupa, have been a driving force in this and other efforts to restore healthy conditions in the Klamath and other rivers (like the Trinity) so that the salmon can return.  

This focused activity goes back to the traumatic salmon kill in 2002, when some 34,000 salmon died before the astonished eyes of tribal members.  A few years later, Humboldt State University theatre professor Teresa May convened a group of tribal members and other interested parties to begin discussions that would eventually result in a play dramatizing the issue, entitled Salmon Is Everything.  It was first produced at HSU in 2006, and traveled to a few other venues.  A new production was mounted in Oregon in 2011.  By 2015, these productions resulted in a book on the process and the issue.  

HSU made it the university's book of the year, and a reading of the play was produced in August 2015.  Several participants in the original process spoke, and all lauded the process and the play as a milestone in defining issues, spreading awareness and gathering crucial support that ultimately led to the decision to destroy the dams and allow the Klamath to flow freely again.  Of course, years of painstaking and detailed negotiations made this accomplishment possible, which included the leadership of the tribes such as the Yurok.  But this effort played a part.  

As for the return of Native land, the precedent was set in 2004 in Eureka.  Indian Island in Humboldt Bay was the site of a notorious massacre in 1860 that nearly wiped out the Wiyot tribe.  The Wiyots and members of other local tribes were participating in their World Renewal Ceremony at the village site on the island the Wiyot called Tuluwat.  In 1992, tribal chair Cheryl Seidner, direct descendant of the only known survivor of that massacre, began the annual candlelight vigil in Eureka to commemorate the ancestors.  Two non-Natives from Eureka also cosponsored the vigil, for part of its intent from the beginning was to heal the whole community.  This was only two years after the Wiyot had finally regained federal recognition as a tribe.

In the late 1990s, Seidner began a campaign to raise money to buy back the 1.5 acres of Tuluwat, so the World Renewal Ceremony could be revived.  In 2000, she announced the sale was about to happen, though more funds would be needed for the site's restoration.  In February of 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle published my article about the 1860 massacre, the candlelight vigils (which I had been attending) and efforts to revive the Wiyot cultural identity, and the reacquiring of the Tuluwat land--something that at the time seemed without precedent.  Seidner had expressed the desire to see all of Indian Island back in Wiyot hands--while a few parcels were in private hands, most of it was owned by the city of Eureka.  

After months of negotiation, the Eureka City Council voted in May 2004 to deed all of its land on the island to the Wiyot.  The ceremony of transfer of 40 acres (with 60 acres more added later) was held in June.  No one knew of another voluntary transfer of land by a municipality back to the tribe that held it sacred.  Not in California, and probably not anywhere in North America.  After extensive cleanup of toxic industrial waste, the site was restored, and the first 10 day World Renewal Ceremony in more than a century was held in 2014. 

Another major contributor to what has become a trend of returning Native land and especially recognizing Native tribes as environmental administrators of ancestral lands, as well as fostering grassroots cultural revival, has for long been the Seventh Generation Fund, headquartered for years in Arcata and now in nearby McKinleyville.  I'm proud to have worked with this group shortly after I came to the North Coast. 

The efforts of Cheryl Seidner and others in the Wiyot vigils and subsequent activities also set a template for other efforts, in involving both tribal and non-Native communities in a common process.  The Salmon Is Everything project also included voices of concerned parties beyond the tribes, like farmers.  One possible result is that, while the dam removal project was very controversial when proposed, it seems now mostly accepted. So more and more are the partnerships with tribes.  For example, the Siskiyou County board of supervisors, who long opposed the dam removal, recently endorsed the transfer of property that will result from the dam removal to the Shasta tribe, because they would make "good neighbors."