How Colonization Wreaked Havoc On The Klamath River
The US government installed ecologically devastating dams in the Klamath River, which were recently removed.
The following is an excerpt from The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life, by Amy Bowers Cordalis.
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The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life
Since time immemorial, my ancestors have lived on the lower Klamath River. We continue to enjoy a subsistence lifestyle of fishing, gathering, and hunting. We are a dance family with responsibilities to host annual world renewal ceremonies, brush dances for sick children, and other ceremonies in our village. We still honor our covenantal duty to protect the River, Yurok Country, and every living thing there. Over time, complex and restorative laws, practices, traditions, and ceremonies that showed thanks for being in this place were perfected to ensure we exercised our sovereignty to advance our obligations to the Creator.
When I moved home for a summer internship in June 2002 with the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, my family had told me about the creation story and the first covenant, but I didn’t know them well and didn’t understand fully their meaning. My formal education hadn’t acknowledged that Indigenous peoples still existed in the United States, and instead perpetuated myths that Indigenous peoples only existed in the seventeenth century. I did not know how the first covenant between my family and the Creator—and my corresponding responsibility to protect Yurok Country—would direct my life, like a gravitational pull as strong as the moon on the tides, propelling me on a journey, blasting through iron gates, pandemics, water wars, and a lot of fish blood.
I was twenty- two. I accepted the Yurok fisheries internship because I had always loved and felt a calling to Rek- woi, the River, salmon, and Yurok. My mother and father went to great lengths to teach me and their other four children about Yurok customs, religion, and values, taking us fishing on the Klamath River even before we could walk, attending tribal ceremonies and tribal government meetings, and spending time on the reservation. My family maintained two landholdings on the reservation: the family home in Rek- woi at the mouth of the River and the homeplace, next to Brooks Riffle up the River about twelve River miles from Rek- woi. We have always lived in these places.
Despite being raised in Yurok culture, my family was relearning how to live a Yurok way of life again after being subject to two centuries of genocide, assimilation, and oppression by the US government during colonization. Yurok aboriginal law was once about the respect we had for each other and our environment, the songs we sang, the ceremonies we kept, and the balance we maintained between humans and the more-than-human world. But in the eyes of the colonizer, we were not stewards—we were less than human, savages and criminals. The very traits that anchored us to our place—our language, our ceremonies, our fishing way of life, our presence on ancestral land and water—became grounds for execution, surveillance, suspicion, and control. US law, which promises equality, was turned against us. We were policed not for what we did, but for who we were.
I call this what it is: the criminalization of culture and the weaponization of law. It is a form of racialized state violence, where the machinery of justice is bent to mark certain peoples as threats—simply for practicing their ways, defending their lands, or refusing to disappear.
When law enforcement harasses Indigenous people for gathering medicine, fishing for subsistence, or standing on their own land and water, it is not about safety. It is about power. It is about erasure. My family had shed blood, sweat, and tears to exist and uphold its duty to the Creator to protect Yurok Country and the Yurok people through colonization.
When I was born, in 1980, the wounds of their fight were still healing, and the reservation was still a dangerous place, plagued with widespread poverty in the aftermath of the war against the US government. My parents — my Yurok father and my nonnative mother — chose to raise their family in Ashland, Oregon, because of its relative proximity to the reservation, only a short drive away. They desired the stability of white communities outside the reservation, like a good education and recreational activities in a safe town with access to food, electricity, and jobs. My parents wanted me, along with my brother and three sisters, to benefit from a stable home life and good education, while also experiencing the best parts of the reservation—my extended family, the ceremonies, fishing, the River, sacred sites, and the people. They hoped we would stay clear of the lingering effects of colonization, like poverty, crime, pervasive substance abuse, and persistent sexual abuse, or, worse, being stolen by an organized crime unit, like the cartel or the Mafia, and sold into human trafficking (the Yurok Reservation has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the country). Growing up, I recall my grandmother telling me to stay close “or you’ll get stolen.”
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Colonization deprived us of the means to provide for our families and live a Yurok way of life. The Yurok people’s ability to exercise our duties to the Creator was made more difficult because most of our land, water, and access to natural resources had been taken by the colonizers.
It was replaced by a type of poverty — no land, water, or animals — we had never known during our history on earth. My family was trying to learn to live again, raising our young in a colonized world that offered conspicuous consumption and creature comforts, some of which we could afford, like boxed cereals and cable TV. When I grew up during the eighties and nineties, I was taught to believe that the American dream applied even to me, a Yurok girl whose family had been the target of the federal and state governments’ genocidal policies toward Indigenous peoples for the last three hundred years.
I learned our family history through oral histories told by my grandma and other relatives, but I hadn’t lived through the very traumatic struggles of previous generations of my family. While I would later understand that I have always carried ancestral anger, I have, for the most part, lived with radical joy because I am an Indigenous person.
Later in life, I came to appreciate that my ancestors had mastered living in balance with the natural world and survived genocide at the hands of the strongest government in history. This realization empowered me because I carry ancestral knowledge about how people and the planet can live sustainably. I felt lucky to have this life to share that knowledge. I was unapologetically proud to be Indigenous and wanted to learn as much about my culture as possible.
I wanted to live it. The internship as a fisheries technician, counting and recording the Yurok salmon harvest, gave me the opportunity to learn more about Yurok and the tribal government, to explore the reservation, and to fish.
A week before my internship started, I moved into my family home, tended by my grandmother Lavina, located in the village of Rek- woi, which means “the end of the River” in Yurok. The village sits on a sloping hillside that overlooks the Klamath River, the Pacific Ocean, and O’-rey- gos, a once lonely spirit turned into a rock at the time of creation who cares for the area. The family house sits on a rare flat spot in the middle of the village from which you can see the full glory of the Klamath estuary and mouth. The Klamath River makes a 263- mile journey from its headwaters in Southern Oregon to its mouth at Rek- woi at the Pacific Ocean. The headwaters of the River originate in an arid desert in Southern Oregon and flow through the Cascade mountain range. As it enters California, the River runs through a canyon in the Siskiyou Mountains, with thick coniferous forest in the mid- Klamath that gives way to redwoods on the lower Klamath.
The River opens up in the last few miles, stretching the land wide to allow the water to lay flat and big. A sandy beach divides the River from the ocean, broken only at the mouth of the River in a powerful exchange of River and ocean. The energy of the two meeting in one place below my ancestral home is unparalleled. This is big water. Two hundred and sixty- three River miles upriver from Grandma’s house in Rek- woi, in an arid desert, the headwaters of the Klamath River in south Oregon flowed into Upper Klamath Lake and out into the main stem of the Klamath River, connecting into one comprehensive ecosystem as the mighty Klamath Basin, more than twelve thousand square miles of Southern Oregon and Northern California.
Its name was derived from the Chinook language, a commonly used Indian jargon in the area. “Tlamatl” means “swiftness” and translates to English as “Klamath.” At the top of the basin, following the headwaters of the Klamath, was the chemical runoff from 230,000 acres of agricultural land included in the Klamath Reclamation Project. Authorized by Congress in 1905, the Klamath Reclamation Project converted the Upper Klamath Basin ecosystem into agricultural land by draining lakes and wetlands and rerouting the River. This destroyed critical ecological functions that set a trajectory toward the basin’s demise in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.
Further, the land was the aboriginal territory of the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin people, known now as the Klamath Nations, who once lived comfortably on the area’s abundant natural resources until they were subject to murderous raids and the land was violently taken by the US government in the largest Indian war in the area in the late 1800s.
A treaty secured a landholding for the Klamath Nations. With the Indians removed from the land, Congress quickly authorized the Klamath Reclamation Project, auctioning off the tribal land to white farmers, along with contractual water rights to irrigate the land. The federal government tasked the Bureau of Reclamation with the administration of the water contracts and the Klamath Reclamation Project.
In the mid- Klamath, the lands of the Shasta and Karuk people were also violently taken without compensation. Here, there was no treaty or Indian reservation. Instead, the Indians were slaughtered. My fifth-great-grandmother was killed attempting to cross the Klamath River by Orleans, while fleeing a murderous raid by colonizers. Many others fell to the same fate.
After the Indigenous peoples were slaughtered, private companies seized economic opportunity. Between 1911 and 1964, in this area, four dams were built in the mid- Klamath without fish passage. Behind the dams were reservoirs that converted the River channel into more than two thousand acres of reservoir. Built without fish ladders, the dams blocked salmon and other anadromous species’ access to more than 450 miles of spawning habitat, blocked cold-water springs from cooling water downriver, and prevented sediment from naturally flowing.
This violent, relatively short period was one of the most destructive for both humans and the ecosystem. The first peoples and the ecosystem of the Upper Klamath Basin had been colonized. In the early summer of 2002, the legacy impacts of colonization were at a breaking point. There was a drought. There wasn’t enough water for farmers and fish. Making matters worse, when I returned home, the chemical runoff from the Klamath Reclamation Project up-river flowed downriver and pooled in the reservoirs behind the four Klamath dams. The water and chemicals mixed and caused a massive toxic algae bloom, turning the water a nuclear bright green that leached into the waters of the Klamath main stem from the Iron Gate Dam spillway, the same waters the Creator told my family to protect.
Downriver, in the middle Klamath River, the weather was hot and the late-summer drought was starting to take its toll. Water levels were lower than ever. The riverbed was visible, which made traveling by boat treacherous, and the chinook salmon, almost en route to spawning waters, would struggle in the shallows and be exposed to the same warm waters polluted with the toxic blue-green algae bloom exploding behind the dams.
Yet, at the mouth of the River, just below my grandmother’s house, the estuary showed no signs of distress. One of the largest runs of fall chinook salmon the Klamath had welcomed home in years was about to enter the estuary. O’-rey- gos eagerly waited for the right conditions to give them the signal to start their journey home. There, water raged, pushing and pulling between the River and the Pacific Ocean in a steady current of prosperous promise and stability. At least that’s what the view from the bay window next to Grandma’s couch looked like to me.
Excerpted from the book THE WATER REMEMBERS by Amy Bowers Cordalis. Copyright © 2025 by Amy Bowers Cordalis. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Meet the Writer
About Amy Bowers Cordalis
Amy Bowers Cordalis is an attorney, member of the Yurok Nation, and author of the upcoming book The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight To Save A River And A Way Of Life.