Karuk Tribe seeks removal of dams to restore healthy salmon diet
| 3/5/2005, 12:51 p.m. PT
By JEFF BARNARD
The Associated Press |
ORLEANS, Calif. (AP) — 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.
"What is so significant here is that the diet changed so dramatically within the last generation, basically the last 30 years, with the loss of the spring chinook run," which were particularly hurt because so many spawned upstream of the dams, said Norgaard.
Her report cites anthropologists who estimate salmon once accounted for half the protein intake of the Karuk, about 1.5 pounds per person daily. Nowadays, Norgaard estimates they get less than 5 pounds per person each year.
She links the diet change to rates of diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure that are all above national averages: Tribal records show 12 percent of Karuk have type II diabetes, compared to 6.4 percent nationally; 39.6 percent of Karuk have heart disease, compared to 11.5 percent nationally; 35.7 percent of Karuk have hypertension, compared to 32 percent nationally.
Dr. Bart Duell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, Ore., said rates of diabetes and heart disease are rising for all Americans, and blaming the Karuk's health problems on the loss of salmon is "not too far fetched."
"This overall change in lifestyle really does have deadly effects by increasing the risk of diabetes, the risk of heart attack, the risk of stroke, high blood pressure, increased risk of kidney damage," Duell said.
Harold Tripp, 54, grew up eating salmon caught by his uncles and cooked by his grandmother almost every day in the 1950s and 1960s. She fried the fish if it was fresh. When there was just dried or canned, she made it into patties.
When authorities cracked down on Karuk fishing in the 1970s because they had no treaty to guarantee their rights, Tripp ate more beef and chicken, like the white loggers he worked with. By the end of the 1980s, he had diabetes.
"Last year I only got one salmon," he said.
PacifiCorp wants to relicense four dams that produce 147.2 megawatts, 1.7 percent of its total output for 1.6 million customers in six Western states and enough for about 75,000 homes.
While the dams cut off 350 miles of spawning habitat, they are just part of the problem. Irrigation taints the water with pesticides and fertilizers and reduce river flows. Parasites kill young fish. Logging causes erosion that chokes spawning beds. They all contribute to warmer water. Hatcheries dilute the gene pool and overfishing in the ocean leave fewer fish to return to the river.
"How do you extract out this one piece and seek mitigation for it separate from all the other impacts Native American tribes have been subject to over the course of the past century?" asked PacifiCorp spokesman Jon Coney. "That's a tough issue to isolate."
Studies for PacifiCorp indicate the dams may actually improve water quality by settling out harmful agents in the reservoirs.
The utility has not proposed restoring fish passage over the dams, but is talking to tribes and others seeking a settlement in place of a FERC ruling.
Dr. Steve Burns, who runs the tribe's Happy Camp medical clinic, said just giving the Karuk more salmon to eat won't solve their problems, because the fish are central to their culture.
"By destroying the fisheries, you are reaching in and pulling the guts out of the internal framework of the Karuk culture and the culture collapses," he said.
Ancient Karuk ceremonies fell by the wayside during World War II, when too few young men were left to do the dances, said Hillman. Over the past 20 years, however, the Karuk have revived all but one.
The one still not practiced is the first salmon ceremony, when a priest would catch a spring chinook below Ike's Falls, eat the belly and burn the rest on an alter, Hillman said.
With fewer than 500 spring salmon coming up the Klamath each year, no one wants to risk a catastrophic failure of this ceremony until more of them come back.
•__
On the Net: