Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
October 12, 2024
The vinyl decals, featuring salmon crying to get beyond the first of the dams, were wrinkled, the banner itself battle-scarred in places. But the message was still clear: “Un-dam the Klamath now!”
That message became fact at the end of September, when the final hunks of concrete were trucked away from the last of the four dams that had impeded fish migration for nearly a century. The world’s largest dam removal project to date was complete, and about 500 people came to a meadow about 10 miles south of the Klamath on Oct. 5 to celebrate and to look forward to the next phase of restoring an entire basin the size of West Virginia…The Klamath River Basin suffered a near-death experience after being subjected to more than 100 years of mismanagement and injustices against tribal communities. Governments and private industry built dams on ancestral Shasta Nation lands, replumbed the Upper Klamath Basin for agriculture and channelized a key tributary, resulting in massive amounts of phosphorus flowing into the Upper Klamath Lake and eventually, the lower river…
Immediately, he said, the tribe lost 25% of its food supply. In 1984, the tribe was forced to stop fishing altogether when their other two major fish species, the c’waam and koptu, plummeted in numbers, victim to toxic waters in Upper Klamath Lake and the depleted water supplies as farmers asked for more water to be diverted for crops where the Lower Klamath Lake once stood…The two sucker fish, a cultural touchstone for the Klamaths, were listed as endangered in 1988 and have yet to recover. The tribe is the only one in the basin that holds treaty rights, and has made several “water calls” to keep enough water in Upper Klamath Lake to support the dwindling c’waam and koptu stocks. But that hasn’t proved to be very successful, and [William] Ray said that he is “upset, concerned, angry and frustrated at the prospect of extinction.”
