After the dams, seeing the Klamath River heal

Over the last two years, I have traveled repeatedly to the Klamath River near the California-Oregon border to report on the dismantling of four dams.

- BY IAN JAMES

AT TOP, Hoopa Valley tribe youths cross a sandy stretch between the Klamath River and the Pacific. Above, since the dams' removal, the Klamath is free-flowing in its historic channel.

I saw crews in excavators as they clawed at the remnants of the Copco No. 1 and Iron Gate dams. And as the giant reservoirs were drained, I saw newly planted seeds taking root in soil that had been underwater for generations.

When the last of the dams was breached in August 2024, the river began flowing freely along about 40 miles for the first time in more than a century.

While working on a series of stories about the undamming of the Klamath, I spoke with Indigenous leaders and activists who had spent two decades campaigning for the removal of dams, including by filing lawsuits, holding protests and speaking out at meetings of utility shareholders.

I learned that the historic process of tearing down the dams was also a watershed moment in a long history of resistance by Native leaders and activists, who saw how the dams were harming the river and its salmon, and who determinedly set their sights on unshackling the waters to restore the Klamath to a healthier state.

I recently read a new book that powerfully tells a multigenerational story of resistance leading up to the removal of the dams. The book is by Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok tribe member, lawyer and environmental advocate whom I first met in 2023 in her ancestral village of Rek-woi near the mouth of the Klamath River.

In the book "The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life," she tells a remarkable story about how her relatives struggled for decades for their right to fish for salmon in the Klamath River, facing discrimination, raids and arrests by law enforcement officers, and even violence.