Dams are coming down on rivers across the West. Why many tribes are all for that

Coverage of tribal natural resources is supported in part by Catena Foundation

Dams were first built along many major rivers in the country to control the flow of water, to create reservoirs, or generate electricity. But now, as the environmental and cultural impacts of many of those dams are coming to the fore — they’re starting to come down. 

That’s the story that’s playing out on one river in Northern California called the Klamath. And Debra Utacia Krol spent a long time  reporting there — from the tribal concerns about the four dams along the river to how taking them down will bring salmon back to its shores. 

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Krol is an Indigenous affairs reporter for the Arizona Republic and The Show spoke with her about what's happening.

Full conversation

DEBRA UTACIA KROL: The Klamath River, its official length is 263 miles from upper Klamath lake in the town, eponymously named Klamath Falls, down through Northern California. The mouth of the river is at Requa, which literally means mouth of the creek in the Karuk language.

LAUREN GILGER: So it's been dammed up for a long time, but those dams have come down. Tell us about why and sort of what led to this conversation.

KROL: Well the dams were originally constructed in the early 20th century as hydroelectric generators. That was the first time that northern California, in far northern California, had actually had electric service. There are actually six dams on the Klamath and then the big project right now is to take the four worst offenders down.

As the years went by, it became apparent that these dams were preventing salmon and steelhead runs, which had economic, cultural, religious and social implications all up and down the river, because the the tribes have always depended upon salmon for their livelihood, for their ceremonies, for their subsistence. Most of that region is extremely remote, and subsistence is a big part of the river, both for the Native peoples who have lived there for thousands of years and the non-Native people who've moved in, fish are a big part of people's diets, and they're part of their culture.

You know, there's part of the cultural transmission between parents and kids and grandparents and grandkids, and when you can't get out there and go fish, and you can't get into the river because the toxins generated from the algae build up. But those four dams come coursing down the river. It's too toxic for people to go in. It's too toxic for dogs to go in, and it's certainly too toxic for fish, so something had to be done.

GILGER: So the fish were dying, essentially?

KROL: In 2002, there was a giant fish kill related to the Bureau of Reclamation cutting off river flows from those dams down. And they estimate anywhere between 30 to 70,000 fish died.

GILGER: Wow.

KROL: It was an ecological disaster. And so the tribes that the Yurok, the Hoopa, the Karuk, the Shasta, and farther up, were the main drivers between bringing those dams down.

GILGER: How long has this been going on? Like this is a long term effort, that was 2002 you're talking about, when did they finally come down?

KROL: The first dam came down this summer.

GILGER: Wow, decades? Yeah. I mean, tell us about the people behind that effort and how they made this happen.

KROL: It was a coalition led by tribes and their allies, environmentalists, people who lived along the river whose livelihoods as fishing guides were dying. Commercial salmon fishers on the Pacific Ocean because of the estimated salmon run of 500,000 had dwindled down to 40,000, which meant that nobody was catching fish, nobody was making money. You know, mortgages went unpaid. Homes were getting repossessed. Families were disintegrating because they weren't able to make a living off what the river provided.

GILGER: Tell us a little bit about what it's meant to them to be successful in this, to watch those dams come down. And have we seen any changes yet? I mean, it hasn't been long since the first one came down, as you said.

KROL: The tribes are very, very, very thankful. They're grateful. They're stoked to see the dams coming down. The first dam that came down, you can already see the channel re-establishing itself, which is really cool. And the tribes know that this is only the start. You know, they've also been rehabilitating salmon spawning areas and side creeks up and down from where the dams are coming down, down to the mouth. They think it might be decades.

However, on the other hand, we've seen with the Elwha River dams situation in Washington, it was about 10 years before they started seeing salmon spawning and having enough to actually fish out of the river again. So it might not be, might not be decades. It might be a decade.

GILGER: A decade, but a long time regardless, yeah, to rehabilitate these areas. So this is not the only place in the country where these kinds of conversations are happening, right, like where there's talk of removing dams that have been there a really long time, in many cases, and that were sort of put there in theory, to conserve water, to help the situation on these rivers, right, to make sure that it was evenly spread out. All these things. There's hydropower involved. There's business and economics involved here. Tell us about the broader conversation about why people are thinking about taking dams down now.

KROL: They're starting to see that dams are not the solution that everybody thought that they were, that they're actually a net negative on the larger environmental situations like those dams, the four major dams on the Klamath have literally affected the entire basin, which, by the way, is around the size of West Virginia, huge area. Yeah. So right now they're talking about removing dams on the Snake River for a lot of the same reasons, to restore not just the salmon runs, restore the entire ecology.

You know, we down here have heard rumblings about, you know, maybe removing Glen Canyon Dam. We don't know if it's ever going to happen, but there's certainly people starting to think about maybe that one should come down, maybe Boulder Dam should come down. I'm not sure about the likelihood of either of those happening anytime soon, but there's more of a realization that what happens at once one part of the river affects all the parts of the river. And I think it's a growing realization of how the environment and the lands and the waters are all connected to each other. And I think it's also a reflection that people are starting to listen to us, Indigenous peoples.

GILGER: Right, like these are tribal-led efforts, tribal-led conversations. And these are things that people in tribes have been saying for a long time, it sounds like. What do you think is shifting now, so that their voices are being heard?

KROL: I think that it's not only the environment that is starting to realize this. Last week, I was at the Colorado River Water Users Association Conference known, CRWUA, which is the big gathering of all the water buffaloes, as they call themselves, the big water managers of the basin. Now I can't speak for all 1,700 people there, because they didn't hear them all.

I didn't hear anyone talking about climate denial. They're all talking about climate change. They're all talking about the water being available, water is shrinking. What are we going to do? And the tribes are saying, well, let us in, because we have solutions and we can work together. And I think there's a growing realization that there are people who've been around for a long time who understand how things fit together. It's the holistic, qualitative way of doing science, as opposed to the Western models, which is quantitative. You know, things are listed and things are put in little rows, but when you put the two together, they start to see that, when you merge the quantitative and the qualitative, that you're getting a much better picture of how the earth works and how best to sustain it. Because, after all, if we sustain the Earth, we sustain ourselves, too.