Tribes of the Klamath Basin Show Us How to Heal a River
Reflecting on degrowth, decolonization, and the largest dam removal project in US history.
On January 16th, 2024, demolition experts blew a hole in the John C. Boyle Dam on the Klamath River in southern Oregon. One of four dams marked for demolition, it’s part of the largest dam removal project in United States history. This project was won, in no small part, by the Indigenous-led movement, Un-dam the Klamath.
The explosion is captured in the video below: a thunderclap of dynamite, followed by the roar of the river rushing through the rubble. I’ve watched the video at least a dozen times. What is it that’s so cathartic about that moment of destruction?
We can stand on a bluff or bridge and point to something called “the river,” but rivers are more like verbs than nouns. As Heraclitus observed over 2000 years ago, one can’t step in the same river twice: it’s constantly in flux. Follow a river far enough, and you’ll find yourself in a lake, or an ocean, or a cloud. Rivers are but one manifestation of the Earth’s magnificent water cycle.
As clouds grow dense and heavy, raindrops fall onto the slopes of the river basin. Earth’s gravity pulls water to the surface, and beneath the surface, into subterranean passageways and tangled tree roots, and still further down, to winding creeks leading to larger streams, minerals and microbiota tumbling through the rapids until all the fallen rain joins together to form the river. The river unites the watershed, weaving woody, mossy, squishy, scaly, feathered, four-legged, and philosophizing creatures into a cohesive biotic community.
In the Klamath River basin, anadromous fish — particularly salmon — play an important role in this community. ‘Anadromous’ originates with the Greek ‘anadromos,’ meaning literally “running upward.” Salmon begin their lives in small mountain streams, swim out to the ocean to mature and mate, and then fight the current all the way back to their spawning grounds. In the words of cultural ecologist David Abram, those who complete the journey die shortly after “ensuring that the glinting gift will be reborn afresh from a lump of luminous eggs stashed beneath a layer of pebbles.” On the map below, you can trace the incredible pilgrimages of Pacific Northwest salmon. The Klamath loop can be seen in light green.
While out at sea, dining on crustaceans and aquatic insects, salmon grow heavy with marine nutrients. Then, along their long voyage home, they deliver these precious parcels to bears, wolves, humans, eagles, and other birds of prey who, in turn, disperse them throughout the forest for ferns, firs, fungi, and myriad other lifeforms to take up into their bodies. Biologists estimate that wild salmon sustain more than 100 species in the Pacific Northwest, making them a keystone species. On a regional scale, they are like seafaring diplomats: vessels through which terrestrial and deep sea ecologies co-create and communicate with one another.
In their book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel write: “salmon are to rivers as hearts are to blood vessels. They both function as nutrient pumps in systems of circulation. We sometimes proceed by simile: dams are like vascular obstructions.” Indeed, dams are a major contributing factor to crashing wild salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest. Klamath chinook are in decline, and Klamath coho are listed under the Endangered Species Act. David Abram also reaches for cardiovascular language to describe salmon migrations in his ecodelic essay, “Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet”:
This circulation, this systole and diastole, is one of the surest signs that this Earth is alive — a rhythmic pulse of silvery, glacier-fed brilliance pouring through various arteries into the wide body of the ocean, circulating and growing there, only to return by various veins to the beating heart of the forest, gravid with new life.
Is that why the video offers a sense of release: because I feel my own blood beginning to circulate again? Yes, but it goes deeper than that. The hole in the dam represents the promise of wholeness not only ecologically, but socially.
The explosion of the dam grabs your senses: a powerful material transformation has taken place, all at once. This shift is restorative for the salmon and for all who receive their physical and spiritual nourishment. The Indigenous communities of the Klamath River basin — the Yurok, Klamath, Karuk, and Hupa peoples — call themselves “Salmon People.” For over 10,000 years, they have lived in careful and caring relations with the species.
Turtle Mountain Chippewa scholar Lindsey Schneider has extensively studied the processes and effects of colonialism in the Pacific Northwest. She writes: “It would be difficult to overstate the importance of salmon to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest (PNW), not just as a cultural and traditional food source, but as a key signifier of their reciprocal relationship with the land, the rivers, the ocean, and the rest of the environment.”
In a short documentary by High Country News, Yurok attorney and fisherwoman Amy Bowers-Cordalis described Klamath River salmon as “the core of our lifeway.” In 2019, because stocks were so low, the Yurok Tribe banned subsistence fishing among its members for the first time. That year also saw spiking rates of suicide, an emergency Bowers-Cordalis argued was directly related to the state of the salmon. The dams on Klamath are mostly to blame; according to Bowers-Cordalis, their removal will restore salmon populations by an estimated 80 percent.
In 2002, upwards of 70,000 salmon were killed, along with several other species of fish, due to federal mismanagement of irrigation on the Klamath during a drought year. This was the largest fish kill in Western US history. “The fish kill was, to us, a form of ecocide,” said Bowers-Cordalis. “And I use that term to mean an attack on a people’s core natural resource that they rely on for survival.” Evidence suggests that Vice President Dick Cheney and White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove ordered the resumption of irrigation despite reports by wildlife biologists showing that it would violate the Endangered Species Act by killing fish. “It was an act of the government that led to our salmon, the core of our lifeway, being killed,” said Bowers-Cordalis. She compared the salmon ecocide to that of the American bison in the 19th century. In this wake of the fish kill, Un-dam the Klamath stepped up its organizing and garnered national media attention.
The John C. Boyle Dam, a hydroelectric dam in southern Oregon, was constructed as part of the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project. The project, which began in 1903, was headed up by the California-Oregon Power Company. It totaled six dams, which came to be owned and operated by PacifiCorp in the 1960s — about the time the last dam was completed. The dams were constructed as part of a broader effort to energize the settler economy of the Pacific Northwest. They powered extractive logging, fishing, and mining industries, among others. Such industries are described as “extractive” because they tend to take as much from the land as global markets can consume. Forests are clear cut, fish stocks are decimated, mountains are dynamited, and Indigenous communities are violently dispossessed. Today, the dams left standing continue to generate value in global circuits of capital. PacifiCorp is a private electricity conglomerate which is 93 percent owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., one of the top ten holding companies of the investor class.
Post-growth activists are well aware that capital has an insatiable appetite. Marx often compared capital to a vampire: dead labor feeding on the living. Political economist Ian Wright described capital as an amoral egregore summoned by humans who perform its rituals. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser posited what she calls “Cannibal Capitalism”: an ouroboric economy devouring its own basis of survival.
Several Indigenous scholars and storytellers have invoked the legendary figure of the Wiindigo to describe settler capitalism. Ojibwe storyteller Elaine Fleming writes, for example: “For the Ojibwe, history and legends are passed down orally. There are the stories of Wiindigo, a giant monster, a cannibal, who killed and ate our people. Colonization was our Wiindigo.” Ojibwe scholar and activist Winona LaDuke described the Wiindigo as representing a “spirit of excess” that sows discord in one’s relationships.
“There are the [Ojibwe] stories of Wiindigo, a giant monster, a cannibal, who killed and ate our people. Colonization was our Wiindigo.”
LaDuke and geographer Deborah Cowen theorized dams as instantiations of what they call “Wiindigo infrastructure.” Infrastructure is a more complex phenomenon than meets the eye, but broadly speaking it consists of elements of the built environment that enable society to sustain and reproduce itself. Its architectures vary by geography and reflect the accretion of cultural formations over time. In the context of North America, modern colonial infrastructure was and is constructed, first and foremost, to produce and circulate commodities for capital accumulation. As LaDuke and Cowen write:
Wiindigo infrastructure has worked to carve up Turtle Island, or North America, into preserves of settler jurisdiction, while entrenching and hardening the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures. We see this in sharp relief today, with pipelines and dams and roads and prisons and toxic water infrastructures.
Without explicitly calling out the settler political economy, river scientists Allison Oliver, Randy A. Dahlgren, and Michael L. Deas clearly blame its infrastructure for the ecological crises in the Klamath Basin: “Today, the decline of the Klamath River fisheries is attributed to multiple factors, including dams, water diversions, land-use change, disease, loss of genetic diversity, fishing, forest harvest, mining, eutrophication, and climate fluctuations.”
Originally built to service capital, Wiindigo infrastructure can be co-opted and expropriated, according to LaDuke and Cowen. They argue that “pipelines can carry fresh water as well as toxicity,” for example, and that electric rail can be leveraged to supplant private vehicles. Other infrastructures such as dams, however, should be dismantled wherever possible. Hydroelectric dams may be low-carbon sources of electricity, but they are not in alignment with social and environmental justice.
The degrowth movement, with its emphasis on reorienting the economy away from profit-seeking and toward meeting human and more-than-human needs, advocates for a society that requires less energetic and material throughput. Appropriate technologies, robust institutions for sharing and caring at multiple scales (e.g. public goods and services), and practices for cultivating critical ecological consciousness are just a few strategies by which post-growth communities relieve stress on the more-than-human world. A slower social metabolism (reduced societal demand for energy and materials) goes hand-in-hand with decommissioning harmful infrastructures such as dams.
In settler-colonial nations, decolonization is the form of degrowth that justice requires. As Indigenous studies scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” That is, the liberal democratic state needs degrowing. The land was taken without consent. Until Indigenous jurisdiction is reasserted, settler-Indigenous relations and the land itself will continue to suffer in the long shadow of this injustice.
In settler-colonial nations, decolonization is the form of degrowth that justice requires.
Ecological communities tend to be healthier under Indigenous jurisdiction. (This is not because Indigeous peoples and practices are “necessarily environmentally sound,” according to Anishinaabe legal scholar John Burrows — this is a noxious and essentializing stereotype. “Indigenous peoples can be as destructive as other societies on earth — we are part of humanity, not outside of it,” he writes). The difference in socioecological outcomes can be traced to differences in jurisprudence.
Despite various environmental regulations, Western law primarily views the land and its lifeforms as property subject to use and abuse for capital accumulation. The opposite holds in many Indigenous legal systems: more-than-human beings are viewed as kin with whom humans cultivate balanced and respectful relationships. Regarding rivers specifically, Métis fish philosopher Zoe Todd argues that Indigenous laws are straightforward: “Respect fish, respect water, be a good relation.”
Ecological communities tend to be healthier under Indigenous jurisdiction. The difference in socioecological outcomes can be traced to differences in jurisprudence.
Todd makes another observation worth dwelling on: “Western settler sort of systems make it sound like it’s really hard to not destroy the planet. And it’s actually very easy to not destroy the planet.” From the perspective of Western law, reconciling the needs and rhythms of capital with those of the biosphere is indeed tricky. Capital is an abstraction — a runaway algorithm in pursuit of infinite growth — while living bodies are material, fragile, and finite. Their peaceful co-existence is untenable in principle and in reality. In Todd’s view, the solution is simple: the law should be grounded in the literal ground, loyal to the land and life.
“Western settler sort of systems make it sound like it’s really hard to not destroy the planet. And it’s actually very easy to not destroy the planet.”
While the post-growth movement is largely a Western phenomenon, its core insights were, and remain, commonplace in Indigenous traditions of the global North and South. Building a society centered on care and multispecies mutualism, in other words, is hardly a novel aspiration. It is important that Western activists recognize this and embody the humility needed to be effective allies and accomplices. Settlers (like me) cannot be the protagonists or heroes of this story. Indigenous critiques of Wiindigo economies, in both word and action, are as old as colonialism itself. The largest dam removal project in US history is a testament, among many others, that these critiques are as consequential as ever.
With the tenacity of salmon swimming home, Un-dam the Klamath is liberating their river before our eyes. Perhaps that’s the feeling I have watching the J.C. Boyle dam collapse: even when the obstacles facing us are solid concrete, with enough persistence, they too can be broken down and washed away.
Want to learn more about decolonization? Here are three things you can do:
- Learn from Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists. Billy-Ray Belcourt, John Burrows, Glen Coulthard, Vine Deloria Jr., Nick Estes, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Jessica Hernandez, Winona LaDuke, Leroy Little Bear, Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Lindsey Schneider, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, Joshua Whitehead, and Kyle Powys Whyte are just a handful to get started with. (These are all in the North American context — if you have other recommendations for readers, please put them in the comment section!)
- Listen to and support Indigenous media. Great podcasts include Media Indigena and the Red Nation Podcast. For the Wild and Green Dreamer also regularly feature Indigenous guests.
- If you’re a settler in a colonial nation, know whose land you’re on. If you can, build relationships with Indigenous folks in your community and support their movements.
