Tribe sees dams as diet issue
ORLEANS, Calif. – Ron Reed and Mike Polmeteer learned from their grandfather how to pull salmon from Ishi Pishi Falls using the two-poled dip nets favored for thousands of years by the Karuk people of the Klamath River Canyon.
As young boys the brothers carried the fish up the steep riverbank to the pickup truck. As they got older, they learned to clean the fish, then to club them, and finally to catch them.
“Eventually, you would have your time,” said Reed, 43.
Now it is their time, but the salmon have dwindled to a precious few at Ishi Pishi. The Karuk caught fewer than 100 last year. Many Karuk depend instead on government handouts of cheese, frozen beef and canned vegetables, plus the burritos and soda pop they buy from local markets.
The tribe now is challenging a new operating license for four small hydroelectric dams on the Klamath owned by the Northwest utility PacifiCorp.
The tribe wants the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to recognize that the high levels of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease can be blamed on the high-fat, high-sugar and high-sodium diet that replaced their lost salmon.
“Government bureaucrats look at you a little bit sideways when you raise the issue of human rights,” said Leaf Hillman, tribal vice chairman. “It’s only credible when you raise the issue in Sudan or South America.
“But whenever you deny or taint the food source for a people, it really is about human rights.”
The Karuk claims appear to be the first to offer FERC evidence of health problems associated with dams, said Mary Morton, legal adviser to FERC Commissioner Norma Mead Brownell.
“I don’t think this is something that could just be rejected out of hand,” Morton said.
The Karuk tribe has 3,300 members, making it the second-largest tribe in California. About half still live in the Klamath canyon; 80 percent have income below the poverty line.
Living some 80 miles up the Klamath in the rugged mountains of northwestern California, the Karuk had little the white man wanted until gold was discovered in the 1850s. After the gold played out, hydroelectric dams went in between 1918 and 1962. After World War II, logging kicked into high gear.
“Most people in California, when these dams were built, didn’t even think there were surviving Indians in California,” said Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist from Duke University who specializes in state tribes and vacations at his grandfather’s gold-mining cabin near the Klamath. “If you were planning a dam, no one would have given a second thought to how this would affect local tribes.
“The white settlement of California was especially brutal,” he added. “In the gold rush in Scott Valley and Fort Jones you go back and read newspapers from the 1850s and Indians were being shot down, lynched and massacred by white settlers.”
Thirteen years ago, Jeanerette Jacups-Johnny, 68, had her chin tattooed with three vertical streaks typical of her ancestors.
“For me it means I am a doctor and a healer,” she said. “I did it so when I talk to the congressmen, they would remember who I was.”
Jacups-Johnny tells them that white people and the Karuk have never wanted the same thing from the canyon. Whites wanted the gold, the electricity and the timber. The Karuk were content with the salmon, the acorns and the deer.
She hopes to enlighten the whites.
“We do prayers at the center of the world here, but they are not just for us,” she said. “It is for the whole world. We are trying to save the world.”
Kari Marie Norgaard, a sociologist at the University of California-Davis, produced a report for the tribe that has been submitted to FERC detailing the effects on the Karuk of losing their salmon.