How a Yurok family played a key role in the world’s largest dam removal project
The Water RemembersAmy Bowers CordalisLittle Brown & Co., $30In September 2002, an estimated 34,000 to 78,000 adult Chinook salmon died in the Klamath River within the Yurok Reservation in Northern California. The U.S. government had diverted river water to farms during a drought. The resulting low levels and warm temperature of the water, coupled with the flow of toxic blue-green algae that bloomed in the reservoirs behind the river’s four dams, created the perfect conditions for “ich,” a parasitic gill rot disease, to spread and suffocate the fish. It was one of the largest fish kills recorded in U.S. history.The ecological disaster catalyzed an Indigenous-led movement to remove the dams, the oldest of which had choked the river, blocking fish migrations and tainting water quality, for over 100 years. In The Water Remembers, Yurok tribal member, activist and attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis shares an intimate look into her family’s and nation’s decades-long fight to restore the health of the Klamath and preserve their way of life — a multigenerational effort that culminated in the largest dam removal and river restoration project in history.
The Yurok people believe it is their duty to live in balance with nature. They steward the Klamath and its surrounding ecosystems. In return, the river gives them sustenance, physically and spiritually. This sacred reciprocity is reflected in Yurok stories, Cordalis writes, which “teach that if the Klamath salmon and the Klamath River die, so will the Yurok people.”
Cordalis’ reverence for the river, the salmon and the craft of fishing drips from every page of this memoir. She describes the thrill that overcomes her and other members of the Yurok Nation when salmon return to the Klamath River from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. Bobbing in a boat, gill net in hand, surrounded by trees, water and wildlife, is a spiritual practice.
In 2002, tens of thousands of salmon died in the Klamath River from a gill rot disease called “ich.” The river’s four dams helped create the perfect conditions for the illness to spread.Northcoast Environment Center
Every page is also stained with stories of historical injustice. For nearly two centuries, colonization, genocide and their lingering scars have threatened the Yurok’s way of life, from the United States’ theft of Yurok land since the 19th century to California’s mid-20th century ban on Yurok fishing to boost non-Indigenous logging and fishing businesses.
Through it all, Cordalis’ family has resisted. Cordalis’ great-grandmother, Geneva Mattz, and her sons fished and sold bootlegged salmon throughout the ban. In the late 1960s, her great-uncle Ray Mattz sued California for violating his Indigenous rights by repeatedly arresting him for fishing on his ancestral land — a case that he won in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. The 2002 fish kill reinvigorated this tradition of resistance. Cordalis, then a 22-year-old intern at the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, witnessed the devastation firsthand. Her gruesome descriptions of the limp and rotting carcasses of thousands of salmon crowded on the riverbank convey the visceral and emotional response of the Yurok to what Cordalis deems an “ecocide.” More
