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27-03-2025
- Politics
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The Backup plan
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News. Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleI llustrations by Jackie FawnGrist PART III — The Backup Plan In February of 2010, Jeff Mitchell shook California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand before reporters at the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, with the governor of Oregon and the secretary of the interior looking on. 'Hasta la vista, Klamath dams,' Schwarzenegger said as he leaned over to sign the agreement to demolish the four dams, settle rights to the river's water, and return land to the Klamath Tribes. Beneath the capitol dome, the former bodybuilder joked that, even for him, the deal had been 'a big lift' to get over the finish line. The mood in Salem that day was ecstatic. After years of protest and negotiation, the entire basin — the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, the region's conservative farmers, and environmentalists — had come together behind a plan to take the dams down, and they'd brought both the federal Department of the Interior and the dams' corporate owner over to their side. Because the deal hinged on millions in federal restoration funding, as well as a legal directive to let Interior take the lead on dam removal, the last remaining step was for Congress to pass a bill that authorized the demolition and allocate money to restore the river to its original undammed state. Later that year, the Republican Party scored a resounding victory in the 2010 midterm elections, riding a wave of backlash against the election of Barack Obama two years prior. Many of those elected to the congressional majority that emerged in the House of Representatives were partisans of the far-right Tea Party movement. They advocated a scorched-earth opposition to the Obama administration's entire agenda, rejecting bipartisan achievements like the Klamath deal, despite its origins in the Bush administration. 'I think there was a whole lot of just blocking of anything that could be a potential positive legacy for the Obama administration,' said Leaf Hillman, the former vice chairman of the Karuk Tribal Council. 'Congress was hell-bent on making sure he got nothing to be proud of.' Like many legal settlements, the Klamath deal had an expiration date at the end of 2012. If Congress didn't ratify the deal and the settlement lapsed, the parties had to start all over again to negotiate a new one. After the 2010 election, a few years suddenly didn't seem like much time at all. The Republican resurgence also elevated a man Mitchell knew well: Greg Walden, a longtime congressman for the Oregon side of the Klamath Basin and now an influential leader in the House Republican caucus. For years, Mitchell had known Walden as a fierce advocate for the state's agricultural interests and a critic of the Endangered Species Act. The two men had spoken about fish issues on the river, but Mitchell had never felt like Walden cared much about what he had to say. Still, Walden had expressed his support for the Klamath settlement when it came together in 2008, saying that the negotiators 'deserved a medal.''He kept saying, 'If you guys can develop an agreement, I'll do my job and I'll get it through Congress and get it funded,'' recalled Mitchell. Walden had been engaged on Klamath issues since the 2001 water crisis, and had secured funding for financial relief and infrastructure in the basin. He had even enabled the dismantling of a very small dam on a tributary in Chiloquin, Oregon. As a high-ranking Republican and the member representing Oregon's side of the basin, he seemed to be in an ideal position to advance a bill that would ratify the settlement. But despite urging from farmers, tribal leaders, and other elected officials, Walden failed to push for the settlement — a decision that many advocates saw as an attempt to block dam removal. Before long, he became public enemy number one for the settlement parties, who soon found themselves forced to extend the ratification deadline to the end of 2015. In the summer of 2013, after multiple years of stagnation in Congress, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden held a public hearing on the Klamath deal in an attempt to generate some forward momentum. Mitchell, Hillman, and Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe came to Washington to testify in support of the deal and urge legislators to pass it. 'We hope that you will work with us to make sure that [the settlement] gets passed,' said Fletcher in his impassioned remarks to the Senate natural resources committee. 'People have got to move off their entrenched positions.' Part of the reason for Walden's resistance to moving the agreement through the House was that the landmark Klamath agreement, which brought together dozens of parties, was still not inclusive enough for his tastes. The settlement, he said, had left a number of groups out, including local residents who lived around the dams. Most important to him were a small group of farmers and ranchers that worked land upstream of Upper Klamath Lake and had walked away from initial settlement talks. In an attempt to satisfy Walden, Oregon's governor deputized Richard Whitman, the state's lead environmental official, to work out a separate deal that would resolve a water conflict between these farmers and the Klamath Tribes. Over the next two years, with the other campaigners waiting in the background, Whitman dutifully managed to negotiate an irrigation settlement the holdouts could accept. Walden praised the settlement and suggested he would help push through the broader Klamath deal, including the dam removal, according to Whitman. Then he never did. 'Congressman Walden refused to move legislation notwithstanding that we had satisfied his conditions,' said Whitman. 'He never lived up to that commitment.' Walden said he did not recall making this commitment to Whitman and defended his engagement on the settlement. He said that even if he had backed the settlement, it would never have made it through Congress with a dam removal provision. There were a slew of dam supporters in charge of House committees at the time, and since 2013 Walden's counterpart on the California side of the basin had been the far-right Doug LaMalfa, a former rice farmer and stalwart supporter of western agriculture. LaMalfa was dead-set against the dam removal agreement, and his constituents were on his side — residents of Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, had voted 4-to-1 against dam removal in a symbolic local referendum. 'It just hit a brick wall, and that brick wall was just the realities of control of Congress,' said Walden. 'I kept saying … 'I realize you want to blame me, but tell me the path.'' As the extended deadline got closer, Fletcher, Mitchell, Hillman and other dam removal advocates escalated their pressure campaign. They held a rally in Portland, boosted an anti-dam campaign in Brazil, and organized countless meetings between irrigators, tribal leaders, and elected officials. But nothing happened in Congress. When Senator Wyden introduced a Klamath bill in the Senate in early 2015, with just months to go until the settlement expired, it went nowhere, failing to secure even a hearing in the chamber's energy committee.'In my lifetime, I've seen moments where Congress could really do bipartisan stuff, and try to really solve problems,' said Chuck Bonham, who participated in Klamath negotiations first as a lawyer for the fish advocacy organization Trout Unlimited, and later as California's top fish and wildlife official. 'When the negotiations started, that was the prevailing theory. By the time we got there, that was impossible.' By the start of 2015, campaigners had been trying to pass the settlement for almost five years. Senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which had brought the deal together under the Bush administration, were desperate to get something through Congress before the uncertainty of the following year's election. That fall, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and longtime Interior lawyer John Bezdek decided to try a last-second gambit. They conveyed to Walden they would support a broader Klamath settlement bill without a dam removal provision. The bill would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the river and settle the water conflict between the Klamath Tribes and the farmers, and it would even preserve the Klamath Tribes' land restoration agreement — but it would allow the dam agreement to expire, leaving the basin with no guarantee that PacifiCorp's dams would come down. 'We couldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good,' Jewell said. Meeting with Bezdek in a side room in the U.S. Capitol, Walden again sounded an optimistic note. If the dam removal mandate disappeared, he thought the rest of the settlement could pass, despite hesitance from other Republicans. But it took him until the final month of 2015 to introduce a settlement bill, and that bill stood no chance of passing — it opened up thousands of acres of federal forest land to new logging operations, a carve out that Democrats and Indigenous nations dismissed as unacceptable. The bill went nowhere. Walden said he didn't remember the specific conversation with Bezdek, but said he thought his final bill had a chance of passing. 'This one got away,' he said. 'I couldn't figure out how to do it.' With the settlement's expiration imminent, the fragile coalition that had come together around the dams' removal began to fall apart. Leaders from the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes had put decades of work into the negotiations, and some tribal leaders, like Fletcher, had made removing the dams their life's work. Watching all that progress vanish due to Congress's inaction felt like an echo of previous betrayals. 'There was a sense of extreme frustration, because these agreements were very difficult to negotiate,' said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who came on as its lead counsel in 2014. Cordalis had decided to go to law school after witnessing the mass die-off of salmon on the river in 2002. Most of her work since then had led up to this moment, and now it was about to vanish. In September of 2015, the leadership of the Yurok Tribe announced that it was withdrawing from the Klamath deal, essentially dooming the watered-down agreement. In a press release, the tribe said that the 'benefits of the agreements have become unachievable.' The Karuk and Klamath tribes said they would follow suit by the end of the year if Congress didn't act. A few weeks after Yurok leadership announced they were pulling out of the deal, Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik met up with Fletcher on a scorching day while the Yurok director was hitting golf balls. Belchik was frustrated with Fletcher for abandoning the deal, but Fletcher was adamant that the move was a strategic maneuver designed to bring everyone back to the table. 'The dam removal deal won't die,' he told Belchik. 'It's got too much life in it. It's going to happen.' Two weeks later, during a meeting on Klamath water issues on the Yurok reservation, Fletcher suffered a fatal heart attack. His sudden death at age 53 was a blow not only to the Yurok Tribe but to the entire Klamath Basin: The breakthrough deal to restore the river was no more, and the man who had done so much to bring it together was gone. 'It was just such a terrible shock, it was awful,' said Belchik, who had spent countless hours with Fletcher — driving to and from PacifiCorp meetings, playing poker and golf, and strategizing about how to bring the dams down. 'He really in a lot of ways gave his life to Klamath dam removal and to the river,' said Cordalis. With Fletcher gone and Congress having failed to pass the settlement into law, it seemed like there was just one strategy left for the Klamath, albeit one that negotiators had rejected a decade earlier. PacifiCorp's overriding priority was that some other entity — any other entity — take responsibility for demolition of its dams, allowing the company to avoid legal liability for the removal process. The Klamath settlement deal had come together around the appealing idea that the federal government would be that entity — having the Interior Department take the dams down had always made the most sense, given the federal government's sheer size, expertise, and funding. As Congress stalled, longtime dam opponent and tribal counsel Richard Roos-Collins thought back to the early days of the settlement talks. He had been involved in Klamath negotiations for more than 10 years, and had been one of the tribes' only representatives at the tense West Virginia talks back in 2008. He recalled that, during those early stages, before the Bush administration had signed on to the deal, environmental groups had proposed that PacifiCorp transfer the dams to a new corporation run by the tribes or by the states — essentially a holding company that would accept the dams only to destroy them using money from PacifiCorp and the states. At the time, PacifiCorp had rejected the idea as ridiculous and unproven, and negotiators had given up on it, putting their hopes in the Interior Department. But Roos-Collins remembered that a group of environmentalists and local organizations in Maine had created a nonprofit trust to purchase two dams on the Penobscot River back in 2004. The trust had since destroyed those dams, reopening the river for fish migrations. He thought there might be a chance that the same idea could work with PacifiCorp: The utility would apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to transfer the hydroelectric dams to a nonprofit entity, and that nonprofit would take them down, shielding PacifiCorp from liability and costs. It was still an outlandish plan. The Klamath dams were several times the size of the ones in Maine, and far larger than any other dams that had ever come down in the United States. FERC had a history of support for hydropower, and there was no way to know if it would endorse the idea of demolishing an active power facility if the Interior Department wasn't the one doing it. Neither the states, the tribes, nor the environmental groups wanted to take ownership of the dams, which meant the 'removal entity' would have to be a bespoke nonprofit created for that express purpose. 'There was resignation, and kind of a demoralization, that was, 'Well, we only have one option left, and that is FERC,'' said Chuck Bonham, who had helped negotiate the original settlement at Trout Unlimited and was now the lead Klamath negotiator for the state of California. PacifiCorp executives worried the system was a Trojan horse to keep the utility involved: If the process cost more than projected, would the dam removal entity come back to the company for more money? If the sediment that got released from behind the dams turned out to be toxic enough to kill off downstream wildlife, would lawsuits drive the removal company into bankruptcy? Federal, state, and company negotiators went back and forth over the details for months toward the end of 2015 as the settlement fell apart in Congress. They made little progress. Remembering his meeting with Fletcher back in 2008, when Fletcher demanded that the Bush administration bring PacifiCorp to the table on dam removal, Interior lawyer John Bezdek called another closed-door meeting at the same remote site in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Once again, he bartered with PacifiCorp official Andrea Kelly late into the night, pushing her to endorse the idea of transferring ownership of the dams. She refused to commit: The proposal left PacifiCorp too exposed to liability. As Kelly and Bezdek debated utility law, they grew increasingly frustrated. After dinner one evening, the two got into an argument and stormed off to their respective dormitories, fed up with one another. 'I actually thought for sure it was done,' Bezdek said. 'I went back to my room, and I called my wife, and I said, 'I think it's done. I don't think we can get there.'' Some time after midnight, Bezdek got a call from Kelly, who couldn't sleep either. They threw on their coats, met on a bench outside the dormitories, and started talking again. Bezdek emphasized that the entire Klamath Basin, from the tribes to the farmers, had come together in the belief that the dams needed to go. It was time for PacifiCorp to do the same; the fight would never be over until the company let go. By the time the sun came up, Kelly had agreed to the new plan. California and Oregon would endow a joint nonprofit dedicated to the dams' removal, and PacifiCorp would apply to FERC for permission to transfer the dams to that nonprofit. Bezdek took the agreement to his boss at Interior, Sally Jewell, who approved it. There was no need, with this new arrangement, to get Congress involved. Walden said he wishes he had known it was possible for the dam removal to take place without Congress' involvement. If he had, he said, he would have pushed to pass the rest of the Klamath settlement and advocated for the FERC path toward dam removal, potentially saving the settlement and speeding up removal by several years. 'Had I understood that, dam removal would never have been a federal issue, because it didn't need to be, and we might have been able to find a different solution,' he said. 'That's my fault.' A few months after the second Shepherdstown summit, on a hot April day at the mouth of the Klamath River in Requa, California, tribal leaders gathered with Jewell, Bezdek, and the governors of California and Oregon to celebrate the revived dam removal agreement. They signed the documents on a traditional Yurok fish-cleaning table, a long white plank of stone that tribal members had cleaned for the occasion. Then the dam removal advocates took the group on a boat up to Blue Creek, the same part of the river where the devastating fish kill had occurred in 2002. There was a notable absence: Jeff Mitchell of the Klamath Tribes was not part of the celebratory photo op at the fish table. There was still a path toward dam removal, but the broader Klamath settlement had died in Congress, dashing hopes for a water accord between the Klamath Tribes and the irrigators. The Klamath Tribes did not sign the amended dam removal agreement because it did not have the same protections for their treaty rights as the original deal. 'I wish that we would've been able to work through that,' Mitchell said. 'The price that we paid for that was pretty, pretty deep — pretty, pretty big price — because it took us away from the table.' For the other tribal leaders who had been fighting for dam removal, the day felt momentous. 'I was naively stoked,' said Amy Cordalis. To her, the memory of the dead salmon was still fresh, even 15 years later — she could still smell the rotting flesh. It had been a moment of clarity of her life's purpose. 'I felt like my great-grandmother, who had passed away when I was 6, came to me and was like, 'You need to make sure that this never happens again,'' she said. Cordalis was part of a new generation of tribal leaders and their allies who were determined to carry on the fight. But neither Sally Jewell, nor the governors of California and Oregon, nor the tribal activists knew whether or not FERC, a government body that operates independently of the presidential administration, would accept the new transfer proposal. It would take years to refine the details of the new agreement, and it was far from certain that the coalition would hold together: Not only was Fletcher gone, but PacifiCorp's Kelly was about to retire. Bezdek was about to leave the negotiations as well, since the Interior Department would no longer have direct involvement in the dam removal. More than a decade after the fight to remove the Klamath dams began, none of the campaigners could have known that the new agreement would next have to survive a global pandemic. This is Part III of a five part series. This story was first published by Grist.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How the Klamath Dams Came Down
Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleIllustrations by Jackie FawnGrist This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News. PART I — FISH AND PAPER At 17 years old, Jeff Mitchell couldn't have known that an evening of deer hunting would change his life — and the history of the Klamath River — forever. Over Thanksgiving week in 1974, Mitchell and three friends were driving home to Klamath Falls, Oregon, when their truck hit black ice, careened off the road, crashed into a ditch, and rolled over violently, throwing Mitchell from the vehicle and knocking him unconscious. When he woke up, Mitchell's leg was pinned underneath the pickup truck, and he could feel liquid pooling around him. At first he thought it was blood. Then he smelled the gasoline. A concerned bystander walked up to him with a lit cigarette in his mouth. 'My god, I'm going to burn up,' Mitchell thought. The crash put two of his friends in comas, while the third had emerged unscathed. If not for the black ice that nearly killed him, Mitchell might never have helped launch one of the biggest victories for Indigenous rights and the contemporary environmental movement in North American history: the demolition of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a degraded 263-mile waterway that winds through Mitchell's ancestral homeland and that of four other Indigenous nations. He might never have witnessed the fruit of that victory, the largest dam removal in United States history, when nearly 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and concrete finally came down in October of last year, more than 100 years after the first dam was built. He might never have seen the restoration of one of the largest salmon runs on the West Coast, an event that set a profound new precedent for how the U.S. manages its water. As climate change causes more extreme swings between wet and dry weather, straining scarce water resources and threatening the survival of endangered species, it has forced a reckoning for the thousands of dams erected on waterways across the country. These dams were built to produce cheap power and store water with little regard for Indigenous rights or river ecosystems, and they continue to threaten the survival of vulnerable species and deprive tribes of foodways and cultural heritage — while in many cases only providing negligible amounts of electricity to power grids. For decades, Indigenous peoples and environmentalists have highlighted how these structures destroy natural river environments in order to generate electricity or store irrigation water, but only recently have state politicians, utilities, and bureaucrats begun to give serious credence to the notion that they should come down. The removal of the four dams on the Klamath, which were owned by the power utility PacifiCorp, represents the first real attempt at the kind of river restoration that Indigenous nations and environmentalists have long demanded. It is the result of an improbable campaign that spanned close to half a century, roped in thousands of people, and came within an inch of collapse several times. Interviews with dozens of people on all sides of the dam removal fight, some of whom have never spoken publicly about their roles, reveal a collaborative achievement with few clear parallels in contemporary activism. The fight began, however improbably, with Mitchell's accident. After several surgeries, he found he couldn't get to his university classes on crutches, so he moved back home to Klamath Falls. Not knowing what else to do, Mitchell, an enrolled citizen of the Klamath Tribes, trained to be a paralegal and began attending council meetings for his tribal government. His job was to take notes during meetings at the tribe's office, a repurposed beauty shop in the town of Chiloquin along the Klamath River. But a year later, a resignation on the tribal council thrust Mitchell into the leadership body. Suddenly, the 18-year-old was a full-fledged tribal council member, setting policy for the entire nation and getting a crash course in Klamath history. 'I wanted answers,' he said. 'I wanted to know why my homelands were gone.' The Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin-Paiute tribes had been forced to cede 22 million acres of land to the United States in 1864, after settlers violently claimed their territory. The 1864 treaty established a 2.2 million-acre reservation in what is currently Oregon and secured the tribes' fishing, hunting, and trapping rights, but that reservation got whittled down further over the years due to fraud and mistakes in federal land surveys. By 1954 — three years before Mitchell was born — the Klamath Tribes no longer existed on paper. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States 'terminated' the Klamath and more than 100 other tribes. The bipartisan termination movement aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eliminating their status as sovereign nations, removing their land from federal trusts, and converting tribal citizens into Americans. Much of what remained of the Klamath's ancestral homelands was taken by the federal officials and turned into national forests or sold to private interests. By the time Mitchell joined the tribal council in 1975, the Klamath Tribes were about to head to court, arguing that the federal government's termination policy had no effect on their fishing, hunting, or trapping rights. They were also fighting for their rights to Klamath River water. 'Marshes were drying up because water was being taken and diverted,' Mitchell said. 'We had to protect water rights so we could protect fish and animals and plants and other resources that we depended on.' The Klamath River had once hosted one of the West Coast's largest salmon runs, with thousands of adult Chinooks swimming upstream every autumn. But in 1911, a local power utility called the California-Oregon Power Company began to build a hydroelectric dam along the river, erecting a 10-story wall of tiered concrete that looked like the side of a coliseum. Over the next few decades, the company built three more dams to generate added power as its customer base grew in the farm and timber towns of the Pacific Northwest. Together these four dams blocked off 400 miles of the Chinook salmon's old spawning habitat, depriving them of access to the rippling streams and channels where they had once laid eggs in cool water. Before the dams, nearly a quarter of the Klamath Tribes' diet came from wild salmon. 'In a blink of an eye, you're talking about losing one-quarter of all your food source,' Mitchell said. 'I just sit back and think, It must have been one hell of an impact on my people.' In 1981, six years after Mitchell joined his tribal council, a report crossed his desk, which had been relocated from its makeshift beauty parlor digs to those of an old movie theater. The study, conducted for the federal Department of the Interior, provided official confirmation for what Indigenous leaders and tribal members already knew: The dams were responsible for the missing salmon. 'Although the builders of the dam promised to provide fish-passage facilities, none were built,' the report read. 'There is no evidence that any consideration was given to the fish loss suffered by the Indians of the Klamath Indian Reservation despite continued protests by the Indians and by officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the Indians.' The Klamath Tribes were still busy in court defending their water rights, and they were making headway in their fight to regain their status as a federally recognized tribe. When Mitchell discussed the report with other tribal council members, they agreed that they probably had grounds to sue either the utility that built the dams or the federal government that allowed construction to happen. But suing over the missing salmon would mean spending money that the nation didn't have. So Mitchell filed the report away and moved on with his life. He got married, had kids, and the Klamath Tribes regained their federal recognition in 1986. Government services like health care and housing were rebuilt from the ground up, and the tribes successfully gained endangered species protections for two Klamath Basin suckerfish that were critical to tribal tradition. But the river's water quality continued to decline, and the Klamath Tribes continued to fight for its water rights in the court system with no end in sight. By the turn of the century, Mitchell was in his 40s and serving as tribal chairman. It was then that he received a letter from PacifiCorp, the company that had absorbed the California-Oregon Power Company and now owned the dams: Would the Klamath Tribes like to join meetings to provide input on the company's application for a new dam license? Mitchell didn't have to think about it. He said yes. The Klamath River watershed begins as a large lake in what is currently southern Oregon. It winds its way south through the northern edges of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for more than 250 miles before emptying into the Pacific Ocean in what is now northwest California. The lake provides a haven for C'waam and Koptu — gray suckerfish with round, blunt noses that exist nowhere else on the planet — and its vast expanse of surrounding marshes are a stopover for migrating tchikash, such as geese and ducks. Every fall for thousands of years, as the mountain forests flashed gold and red, tchíalash, or salmon, raced upstream through the cold mountain waters and laid their eggs, feeding the people who lived along the riverbanks. In 1901, a local newspaper called the Klamath Republican said the fish were so plentiful that they could be caught with bare hands: 'Five minutes' walk from Main Street brings one to the shores of Klamath rapids, where every little nook, bay, and tributary creek is so crowded with mullets that their backs stick out of the water. … Mullets, rainbow trout, and salmon — splendid fish, giants of their size, and apparently anxious to be caught.' By then, white settlers had spent decades seizing land and water from the tribes and manipulating the landscape. Once they had established a permanent hold on the Klamath River, the settlers set about draining lakes and diverting streams to service industries like agriculture, mining, and timber. The federal Bureau of Reclamation then established a massive irrigation project at the head of the river and, within a few years, settlers cultivated thousands of acres of alfalfa nourished with irrigation water. Today, the basin produces mostly beets and potatoes, the latter often used for french fries. The four dams constructed over the first half of the 20th century held back water from the lower reaches of the Klamath, forcing salmon to navigate a smaller and weaker river. Salmon also need oxygen-rich cold water to thrive, but the water of the Klamath grew hotter as it sat in stagnant reservoirs and flowed shallower down toward the Pacific, which made it harder for salmon to breathe and reproduce. This warm water also encouraged the growth of toxic algae and bristleworms that emitted microscopic parasites. The dams blocked off the upstream Klamath, making it impossible for adult salmon to swim back to their ancestral tributaries. As they raced upstream toward the frigid mountain waters, they ran into the earthen wall of Iron Gate, the southernmost dam on the river, flopping against it futilely. Over the decades, these conditions drove the fish toward extinction, threatening the survival of a species that was central to the Yurok, Karuk, and Shasta peoples who had lived around the downstream Klamath Basin for thousands of years. This might have remained true forever were it not for a quirk of federal bureaucracy. In order to run dams, power companies in the U.S. must secure a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation's independent energy regulator, and those licenses have to be renewed every 30 to 50 years. In 1999, the license for the Klamath dams was less than a decade away from expiring. The California-Oregon Power Company, the utility that built the dams, had passed through a series of mergers and acquisitions since its founding in 1882, eventually becoming part of a for-profit regional company known as PacifiCorp, which owned power plants across the Pacific Northwest. In order to keep running the Klamath dams, PacifiCorp needed to secure new state water permits, get operational clearance from federal fish regulators, and solicit feedback from local residents, including the Klamath Tribes, which again had federal recognition. For most hydroelectric dams, the process was lengthy but uncontroversial. Jeff Mitchell had other ideas. He wanted the company to install fish ladders, essentially elevators that would allow the salmon to pass through the dams. The power company had promised to build them nearly a hundred years before, when construction was still underway, but had never followed through. He wasn't the only one who was frustrated. While the Klamath Tribes lived farthest upstream and no longer had access to salmon, there were other tribes on Klamath tributaries — the Karuk, the Hoopa, and the Yurok — who could still fish but had been watching their water quality decline and salmon runs dwindle. The Hoopa and Yurok tribes had spent years in court fighting each other over land. But when they all crowded into windowless hotel conference rooms to hear PacifiCorp's plans, the tribal representatives quickly realized they had the same concerns. There was Leaf Hillman, the head of the Department of Natural Resources for the Karuk Tribe, who had grown up eating salmon amid increasingly thin fish runs. 'It was a struggle,' he said, recalling the meager amounts of fish he and his uncle would catch on the river. 'Frequently all the fish that we got were given away or went to ceremonies before any of them ever got home.' There was Ronnie Pierce, a short, no-nonsense, chain-smoking Squamish woman who was trained as a biologist and structural engineer and now worked as a fisheries biology consultant for the Karuk Tribe. Pierce had short, slicked-back hair, wore champagne-colored glasses and black leather boots, and had zero patience for corporate-speak. 'I went through your draft application, and I can't tell if a goddamn salmon even lives in the Klamath River,' she once told company executives. Then there was Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe. A tall, charismatic man with a resemblance to Tony Soprano, Fletcher had spent years building up a Yurok program for studying and managing the river's fish population before taking the helm of the tribal government. Fletcher knew the fishery was one of the only economic drivers for the Yurok nation, and a decline in salmon meant unemployment, exodus, and, eventually, cultural collapse. 'As one of our elders put it, the Klamath River is our identity as Yurok people,' Fletcher said. The group quickly noticed a pattern: Company executives' eyes would glaze over when the tribes discussed the cultural importance of salmon. In March of 2001, during a public comment process that lasted more than a year, Mitchell submitted a formal comment to PacifiCorp that argued, 'Fish passage on the Klamath River has been 'blocked' and interferes with the property rights and interests of the tribe.' The company responded to his comment in an official report by saying, 'Comment noted.' Pierce took to storming out of the room every time she got fed up with the company. Once, she got so upset at a meeting in Yreka, California, that she slammed her binder shut and drove several hours home to McKinley Grove, California, more than 400 miles away. She had little tolerance for the ignorance some PacifiCorp executives revealed about the landscape their dams had remade. 'Where's Blue Creek?' one of them asked in one meeting, clearly unfamiliar with the sacred tributary within Yurok territory. The pristine tributary, which flowed through conifer-covered mountains and across expanses of smooth rock on its way toward the Klamath main stem, was one of the most beautiful places in the entire river basin, and the first refuge that salmon encountered as they entered from the Pacific. ''Blue Creek? Where is Blue Creek?'' Pierce snapped. 'You are really asking that? You dammed our river, killed our fish, attacked our culture, and now you ask where Blue Creek is?' As the license meetings continued, Pierce wanted the group to take a harder line. She invited Hillman, Fletcher, and other tribal officials to dinner at her home in California. Over drinks, the group strategized about how to deal with PacifiCorp. 'You guys are fools if you go for anything but all four dams out,' Pierce said. 'You've got to start with all four — and now — and the company pays for it all. That's got to be the starting position.' It was a radical idea, and one with no clear precedent in American history. Hillman, the Karuk leader who worked with Pierce, knew that for many farmers and politicians in the West, dams symbolized American conquest and the taming of the wilderness. He couldn't see anyone giving that up. But he felt inspired by Pierce, who was so hardheaded that the Interior Department once threatened to pull the Karuk Tribe's funding if the nation kept employing her, according to one dam removal campaigner. Pierce's vision that evening propelled the dam removal campaign to ambitions that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, but she wouldn't live to see it realized. She soon received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and just a few years later she would find herself sitting with Hillman and others around that same table, making them promise to get the job done. She wanted them to scatter her ashes on Bluff Creek along the Klamath River after the dams were removed, no matter how many years it took. 'A lot of us tried to emulate her, how she was,' Hillman said. 'There was no surrender.' The campaign would need Pierce's determination to survive after her death. The fight was only heating up. The year 2001 arrived at the start of a megadrought that would last more than two decades and transform the American West, sapping massive rivers like the Colorado and driving farms and cities across the region to dramatically curtail their water use. This drought, which scientists say would be impossible without climate change, delivered the worst dry spell in the Klamath's recorded history. All along the river's banks, forests turned brown and wildfires sprang up. Small towns lost their drinking water. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that 'signs of desperation are everywhere … birds are dying as ponds dry up in wildlife refuges … sheep grazing on bare ground run toward the road when a car stops, baaing furiously and wrapping their mouths around the strands of barbed-wire fence.' That spring, the federal government shut off water deliveries to Klamath farmers in order to protect endangered salmon and suckerfish on the river. The once-green fields of the basin, which had bloomed thanks to irrigation water from the vulnerable river, turned to dust. The earth cracked. With no water, farmers were forced to abandon their beet and potato fields. More than 200,000 acres of crops shriveled, wiping out as much as $47 million in farm revenue and driving up potato prices as the harvest in the Klamath collapsed. Dozens of farmers filed for bankruptcy, school enrollments plummeted, businesses closed as farm families fled the region, and reports of depression and suicide skyrocketed. Farmers and their supporters gathered by the thousands to stage a series of protests at the federal canal that released water from Upper Klamath Lake. First, they organized a ceremonial 'bucket brigade,' led by girls from the local 4-H agriculture club, stretching 16 blocks from the lake into an irrigation canal. On multiple occasions, including the Fourth of July, protestors used a chainsaw and blowtorch to force open the headgates of the canal and siphon a small amount of water. It wasn't enough to save anybody's farm, but it was enough to prove they were serious. When local authorities sympathetic to the farmers refused to intervene, U.S. marshals were brought in to guard the canal and quell protests. For the rest of the summer, locals loudly floated the idea of open revolt to overthrow the government. 'The battle of Klamath Falls will go down in history as the last stand for rural America,' said one resident in an interview with The Guardian. The New York Times adopted the same narrative: An article that summer described the endangered animals as 'all-but-inedible, bottom-feeding suckerfish' and framed the fight as one between environmentalists and hardworking farmers, erasing the tribes from the narrative altogether. At Klamath Tribes' headquarters in Chiloquin, half an hour from the headgates of the Bureau of Reclamation canal, Jeff Mitchell and other tribal leaders warned tribal citizens not to go into town. There had always been tensions with settlers over water, but now the farmers were blaming the tribes for the death of their crops, since the tribes were the ones that advocated for the protection of the endangered fish. One afternoon that December, three drunk men drove through Chiloquin in a metallic gold pickup truck and used a shotgun to fire shots at the town. 'Sucker lovers, come out and fight!' they yelled. They shot above the head of a child after asking him if he was Indian. In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney intervened. The former congressman from Wyoming maneuvered to open the headgates and divert a full share of irrigation water to the farms, regardless of how little water would be left in the Klamath for salmon and suckerfish. The 2002 diversion dried out the lower reaches of the Klamath just as salmon were starting to swim upstream from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. The low water levels resulting from Cheney's decision heated up the river even more and made conditions prime for a gill rot disease, a fungal infection that thrives in warmer temperatures. As the salmon crowded into these small stretches of water, packed more densely than usual, they contracted the disease and gasped for air. Cheney's water diversion was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and Congress would later ask the vice president to speak about his role in the fish kill. He declined. The Yurok saw the effects first. Adult salmon weighing as much as 35 pounds surfaced with their noses up and mouths open in the hot, shallow drifts. After they dove back down, they then rose to the surface belly-up. Hundreds of dead salmon appeared in the river, then thousands. Within weeks, tens of thousands of dead salmon piled up on the riverbanks and became food for flies as their flesh baked in the sun. When their bodies turned gray and their skin ruptured, meat bubbled out, and birds pecked at their eyeballs. The stench was overwhelming. 'It was a moment of existential crisis, it was a form of ecocide,' said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who was a college student working on the river that year. A week earlier, a judge had sentenced the three men who shot their guns at the child in Chiloquin. They admitted their attack was motivated by racism and received 30 days behind bars and community service. As the fight in the Klamath unfolded, PacifiCorp had continued to slog away on its attempt to relicense the four Klamath dams. After years of back-and-forth, the company closed in on finishing its draft application. It mailed copies to everyone involved in the more than 200 meetings held by the company. The application was so long that it filled several binders in multiple cardboard boxes. When Ronnie Pierce stacked the binders on top of one another, they were taller than she was. The application was comprehensive, but Pierce, Mitchell, Fletcher, and others noticed that despite the massive die-off of salmon they'd just witnessed, the company still had not committed to build the fish ladders it had promised almost a century earlier. 'That's when we decided to go to war with PacifiCorp,' said Mitchell. On January 16, 2004, more than 80 years after the first dam was built, members of the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa tribes gathered at the Red Lion in Redding, California, a two-star hotel off the freeway with a Denny's and trailer parking in the back. They were joined by Friends of the River, a tiny nonprofit and the only environmental organization willing to stand with the tribes at the time. As the tribes and farmers fought with PacifiCorp and the George W. Bush administration, one major player had escaped notice altogether, ducking responsibility for destroying the river's ecosystem and remaining largely in the shadows. That was PacifiCorp's parent company, ScottishPower, which owned the utility from across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. Leaf Hillman had learned about ScottishPower during a meeting with a PacifiCorp executive in the company's Portland, Oregon, headquarters. Frustrated that she wouldn't consider dam removal, Hillman asked to speak to the executive's boss. 'If you're going to talk to my boss, you're going to have to go to Scotland,' she replied, laughing. As he sat in the meeting at the Red Lion, he could still hear her laughter. Six months later, Hillman and his allies walked through immigration at Glasgow Airport. A United Kingdom customs officer asked them to state the purpose of their visit. 'We're here to get those damn dams off the Klamath River,' Dickie Myers of the Yurok Tribe replied. This is Part I of a five part series. This story was first published in Grist
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chuck Sams reflects on the past, present and future of national parks
Wil Phinney Underscore Native News Charles F. 'Chuck' Sams, the outgoing director of the National Park Service, said he was 'shocked' by the firing of nearly 1,000 NPS employees on Feb. 14 and cautioned park guests that they will see the consequences of the budget-cutting edicts of the Trump administration. Sams, the first Native American to lead the National Park Service (NPS), sat down for an interview with Underscore Native News on Feb. 13 before cuts to NPS employees were announced by the White House. On Feb. 16, he fired off a strongly worded post on Facebook and then met for a second interview with Underscore on Feb. 18. 'How can the national parks be healthy and happy if their staff are not healthy and happy?' Sams asked from his home in Pendleton during the second interview. 'I have great concerns for the staff of the National Park Service,' he said. 'You can feel their angst, their confusion and their frustration and their anger. You know, it's one thing to be let go because you fail in doing your job or you just don't meet the bar. It's another to be fired without any specific reason … There may be rhyme or reason to it. I don't know what that rhyme or reason is. And nobody's been able to explain it, at least publicly so far.' Sams said visitors are going to notice changes due to the cuts, a prediction already coming true amid reports of long lines, visitor center closures, canceled rentals and other negative impacts on park visitor experiences. Sams said he's baffled by the politics, too. 'I'm perplexed,' he said, 'because, in general, national parks have been nonpartisan. Parks don't know any party. Flora and fauna don't have any party. It's humans who are responsible for being able to be their protector and preservationists. And that's the expectation that was laid out in the 1916 Organic Act when it was passed to hold these lands for ourselves in perpetuity for the next generations.' Sams, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon, returned with his wife, Lori, and 11-year-old daughter, Ruby, to their home in Pendleton in January after his term as parks director under the Biden administration. In his interviews with Underscore, Sams reflected on his three-and-a-half years in Washington, D.C. overseeing the National Park System, a federal organism that includes 85 million acres of public lands, 20,000 employees, 250,000 active volunteers, tens of thousands of buildings, and 12,000 vehicles in a fleet of aircraft, boats and ships. All told, the National Park Service oversees about $377 billion of assets. Sams said he had no intentions of re-entering federal government service after serving in U.S. Navy intelligence decades ago to satisfy a treaty obligation to protect the United States. He was stationed with an attack squadron at Whidbey Island Naval Base in the Puget Sound and served in the first Gulf War in 1991. 'I did my time in the military and thought that I was done and had no intention of ever returning back to federal service,' Sams said. Trump changed all that. 'After the first Trump administration, I saw that there was a need to help rebuild the trust in the American people about what we were doing, especially in federal lands, and what we could do to ensure that balance was there,' he said. Democrats normally pick a long-serving member of the NPS to lead the organization, Sams said. But in talking with President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Sams said, 'it was very clear that they wanted to see some cultural changes and shifts within the National Park Service.' As NPS Director, Sams worked in the U.S. Department of the Interior under Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna of New Mexico and the first Native American to head the Interior Department. Change couldn't be accomplished by edicts alone, so Sams visited 112 of the country's 250 national park sites, part of the National Park Service's 433 holdings, where he talked with staff at all levels. 'The only way I was going to see this change was to get out and visit the parks and talk to the line staff, talk to the GS4, GS5, GS7, GS9 (referring to rank, pay grade and qualification of federal government employees), for the people out there daily,' Sams said. 'The guys out there that are trimming trees, that are doing interpretation, that are clearing the roads.' In his official capacity, Sams traveled from A-to-Z, visiting Arcadia National Park in Maine to Zion in Utah. He went to the bottom of the Grand Canyon by helicopter to check out the Colorado River bed and flew to Banff, Alberta to discuss co-management, particularly for bison, with counterparts in Canada. 'In those three-plus years, I got to see both incremental and grand changes in the way the National Park Service did its work,' Sams said. 'I came away still impressed from the first day I ever met a National Park Service ranger, of their dedication and their willingness to serve.' 'I was constantly impressed by the staff at all levels through the Park Service for their willingness to work hard each and every day to be America's stewards of these resources.' Haaland directed Sams to 'fiercely tell' the stories that were not necessarily being told at sites in the park system, including through interpretive panels popular throughout the National Park System. All this new information, Sams said, was to be shared so that more people 'could see themselves in the park.' During Sams' tenure, the National Park Service used Great American Outdoors Act funding in parks across all 50 states, several U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Those improvements — new roadways and trails, as well as renovated visitor centers, new kiosks and interpretation — represented an annual investment of about $1.3 billion. Sams pointed out the new interpretive signs at Whitman Mission, the site of the so-called 'massacre' of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and 11 others in Walla Walla, Washington in 1847. One of the interpretive signs at Whitman Mission says: 'One-sided representations that portray the Whitmans as martyrs and depict a Native 'massacre' of non-Indians have further marginalized the associated Native peoples. Addressing the mission's complex historical context — including the complicated legacy of Manifest Destiny and its continued impacts on Native populations — will promote healing and understanding.' One of Sams' own initiatives promoted the expansion of co-management and co-stewardship between the federal government and tribal nations. Sams took the 'education that I got here on the Umatilla Indian Reservation' and applied it to the development of the co-stewardship and co-management policies that he laid out for the National Park Service. The Interior Department's most recent Tribal Co-Stewardship Report noted that, by the end of Sams' tenure, the number of units co-stewarded by tribal nations had more than quadrupled, exceeding 400. 'I took some solace in understanding that if we as Native people have been managing this land for 30,000 years, these 85 million acres could be managed in a way that respects tribal knowledge and ways of knowing,' Sams said. A memorandum from President Biden in November 2021 promised to use Indigenous knowledge to help further understand the natural world, with an emphasis on understanding climate change. Sams met early on with his counterparts — Martha Williams at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Tracy Stone-Manning at the Bureau of Land Management and Camille Touton at the Bureau of Reclamation. 'And we all sat down and said, 'What can we do on a landscape scale? What can we do together with the funding that we have to look at ecosystem function across our federal landscape and what partners are not currently at the table?'' All four federal bureaus had been working regularly with states, local counties and gateway communities in and around national parks. 'But who was missing from the table was, of course, tribes,' Sams said. 'And being able to figure out how we could bring tribes to the table to co-steward these resources was extremely important.' In March of 2022, Sams met for the first time with Native leaders and members of Congress to promote the expansion of co-management and co-stewardship between the federal government and the tribal nations that call the parks home. Sams said he reminded staff at the National Park Service that when they took their oath of office it was an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution and to abide by the Constitution, as well as treaties, which Sam notes are the 'supreme law of the land.' 'And if treaties with tribes are the supreme law of the land and supersede the Constitution, then we have an extra obligation to ensure that those treaties are also honored,' Sams said. Furthermore, Sams said, many treaties — for tribes whose ancestors managed the lands for thousands and even tens of thousands of years — mark out the importance of flora and fauna, and the obligation to protect and preserve lands. It is logical, Sams said, that tribes should co-manage federal lands. The Pacific Northwest Fish Wars of the 1960s-70s and the Belloni and Boldt court decisions proved to the federal government that tribes have a right to co-manage resources. 'We have a right to co-manage salmon,' Sams said. 'We have a right to co-manage the water that the salmon live in. We have a right to co-manage the trees, then the watersheds where the water runs down to the rivers that help the salmon.' Back home in Oregon, Sams is still committed to public service. On Feb. 18, the Oregon Senate confirmed Sams, who was nominated by Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, to a seat on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which has the responsibility to develop a regional power plan, along with a fish and wildlife program, to balance the environment and energy needs of the Northwest. Its mission is to ensure, with public participation, an affordable and reliable energy system while enhancing fish and wildlife in the Columbia River Basin. Sams was previously nominated for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in 2021 by then Gov. Kate Brown. Shortly afterward, he was nominated by President Biden for the NPS position in August of that year, confirmed by the U.S. Senate in November and began his tenure as parks director in December of 2021. He served eight months on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council before he went to work in the Biden Administration. Sams said he was surprised and honored when he was asked to serve as the director of the National Park Service, although his resume speaks for itself. In addition to serving in the Gulf War as a Navy Intelligence Officer, Sams has worked for more than three decades in tribal, state and federal government, as well as in the nonprofit natural resource and conservation management field, with an emphasis on the responsibility of strong stewardship for land preservation. Sams holds a Master of Legal Studies degree in Indigenous People's Law from the University of Oklahoma School of Law, plus a bachelor's degree in business administration from Concordia University. Sams has had a variety of roles with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, including as executive director. He has also had roles as president/chief executive officer of the Indian Country Conservancy, executive director for the Umatilla Tribal Community Foundation, national director of the Tribal and Native Lands Program for the Trust for Public Land, executive director for the Columbia Slough Watershed Council, executive director for the Community Energy Project, and president/chief executive officer for the Earth Conservation Corps. He also served as director of the CTUIR Department of Communications. Sams brought to the NPS fresh ideas, as well as an unapologetic command of and demand for treaty obligations in the U.S. Constitution, merged with traditional lessons and beliefs he learned from his elders on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In his Feb. 16 Facebook post, Sams explained his reaction to the federal cuts. 'The firings on Friday of the staff … hit close to home. Nearly 1,000 lives have been turned upside down; these are people who I have met personally, people who have stepped forward to serve the nation, and thus all of us,' Sams wrote. Sams said park staff across this nation have been terminated from their positions 'for no real or documented reason.' These positions cover nearly all types of job categories: natural resources, cultural resources, interpretation, education, maintenance, partnerships, administrative, and more. 'The American people and our international guests will see longer lines into parks, we will see visitor centers with limited hours or closed, we will see water treatment plants in danger of failing, we will see delays in response for medical treatment and search and rescue, we will see a reduction in Ranger led programming and we will see degradation and possible destruction of our national treasures both natural and cultural,' Sams wrote. Sams said he visited thousands of staff members, volunteers and partners during his tenure as parks director. 'The National Park Service has consistently attracted people who love their country; people that are willing to forgo more lucrative opportunities in order to ensure our collective history, special places, natural and cultural resources are protected now and for future generations,' Sams wrote. Now, Sams wrote, 'Morale has been stricken hard and maliciously. Those still in uniform and working will have to dig very deep to keep the faith that America's best idea will continue. That America's best idea is worth fighting for today and every day. That America's best idea will stand for those generations to come. It is up to every American to fight for this idea, that the work of our Rangers continues to be of national importance. We all must stand with our Rangers now and help those who are trying to find their way, now that they have been let go, or those who have been spared and must now do more with less. We need the next generation of stewards, or we will all suffer a fate that lacks integrity in preserving lands, waters, flora, fauna, and our collective history.' Sams might take some comfort in knowing that, during his stint with the Biden administration, national parks received bipartisan support. 'While I was there, I never met a member of Congress that didn't love the national parks,' Sams said. According to NPS data, park visitation has risen steadily following the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching 325 million visits across all National Park Service units in 2023. Some parks have implemented timed-entry reservations, parking lot closures, traffic management and other measures to control overcrowding during peak seasons. Now, park-watching organizations warn that smaller parks may close visitor centers during off-peak hours or entirely for certain days due to staffing shortages. Larger parks are expected to reduce hours for key facilities or limit access to certain areas. The Los Angeles Times reported that service cuts include 'park rangers who respond to medical emergencies, as well as visitor center employees and the crews that clean bathrooms and empty garbage cans.' Given national parks' popularity, it can be politically precarious for lawmakers to appear to be even remotely against national parks, which Sams calls the 'biggest classrooms in the country.' 'They may not like how we're managing them. That's a policy issue at times,' Sams said during his first interview with Underscore. 'But they love the parks and they wanted to see their park thrive. They wanted to see their park enjoyed. They wanted to see it protected, preserved, and enhanced.' 'That's a concern now,' he continued. 'Because if we are going to continue with America's best idea, it's got to be funded at the appropriate amount to sustain these lands in perpetuity.' Sams is proud to have led the National Park Service. 'I couldn't have thought of a better job to have,' he said. 'And, you know, coming from a long line of tribes that loves to tell stories, storytellers, preserving those stories and making sure that they are heard and that they are repeated and that they are taught, they have lessons to teach, was a great opportunity to do that on behalf of the American people.' Sams said the lessons he's learned from his elders have informed his decisions in life. He recalled a story from when he was 21 years old, just out of the Navy and fishing with his grandfather, Charles Sams, Sr., on the 'big river' at Cascade Locks. Sams, sound asleep in his sleeping bag on the scaffold, slept through his 4 a.m. duty to check the nets. He awoke to the smell of tobacco emanating from his grandfather, who was pulling the net out himself. 'I apologized and was trying to help and he says, 'What's the matter with you?' And I'm like, 'I don't know. That doesn't matter to me.' He goes, 'What is your plan?' And I told him, 'I'm gonna go to college, I'll get a degree, I'll find a job … I've done my time.'' As his grandfather was cleaning a salmon from the net Sams had forgotten to check, his grandfather told him, 'You know you're responsible to ensure that salmon come back year after year. You're responsible for the water in this river, you're responsible for the trees and for all the other animals that made you a human being.' 'Your obligation never ends,' his grandfather continued. 'So, you're not just going to go to school and get some job. You've got to figure out how you're going to uphold your responsibility to Creator's law. That's what you're going to do.' So that's what Sams did, and continues to do through his work for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. 'I think as a Cayuse-Walla Walla,' Sams said, 'the promise that we made through our covenant with the Creator to be the voice for flora and fauna to protect, preserve and enhance them, it never ends.'
