The vision
“We understood and knew that if we didn’t fight this fight, we could lose all of our resources. Everything needs water. And all we wanted was enough water.”
— Klamath Tribal leader Jeff Mitchell
The spotlight
Last year, Indigenous tribes in California and Oregon realized a longstanding dream: the removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. It was the largest such environmental restoration project in U.S. history, opening the way for salmon to return home to the Klamath and for tribes and other advocates to begin restoring the ecosystem that once flourished there.
And last week, Grist’s Jake Bittle and Anita Hofschneider published a five-part, 14,000-word feature delving into the decades-long history of how it all happened. In their story, they describe the dam removal as “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.”
Over many months, Bittle and Hofschneider interviewed dozens of people — tribal leaders, activists, farmers, former members of Congress, and beyond — about the battle to remove the dams. “It’s hard to do a call on this topic that’s, like, less than two hours long,” Hofschneider said. They paired these in-depth interviews with archival newspaper research to piece together the story as it had unfolded across decades, in many cases rebuilding scenes from years ago.
Even 14,000 words can’t describe every twist and turn from nearly half a century’s worth of events that involved thousands of people. Both Bittle and Hofschneider described the challenge of having to leave some things out of the final piece. (“Are we even allowed to say that, for a 14,000-word story?” Bittle joked.)
“There were a lot of people who I regretted not being able to tell their stories,” Hofschneider said. For example, she spoke with a Karuk man named Ron Reed, a cultural biologist who was involved in relicensing conversations with the company that owned the dams from the early days. “He told me about how his mom had passed away during that time period, and she had died from health complications related to her diet. His people had lost a huge amount of access to salmon because of these dams,” she said. Because of this, it was hard for him not to feel that the dams, and the company behind them, were partially responsible for his mother’s death. “There was so much emotion there when he was sharing what salmon and what the river meant to his people,” she described.
There were still others whom the writers didn’t get the chance to interview, because they didn’t live to see the end result of their efforts. Those who did describe the momentous victory of the dam removal as a gift to future generations — as well as a responsibility to uphold.
“When you go back and listen to people talk about the early stages, the feeling was like, this will literally never happen. That is the most unrealistic demand that you could possibly make, for a company to take down revenue-generating dams that had been there for almost 100 years,” Bittle said.
It’s a lesson in tenacity, and the power of keeping a vision and a body of work alive in the face of seemingly unbeatable odds, Bittle and Hofschneider said. And now that the dams are down, that is a tangible victory that cannot be clawed back — even as the work of maintaining and restoring the river ecosystem continues against the current of threats like climate change and drought.
“I was writing the piece with Indigenous youth activists in mind, who are working on campaigns today that feel huge and insurmountable, where the end is not in sight,” Hofschneider said. “I felt like this is just a really epic story of activism and persistence, and I’m hopeful that it informs some of those readers to help them understand what’s possible, and what it takes in order to achieve something of this magnitude.”
Below, we’ve pulled out excerpts highlighting two powerful moments from the decades-long battle that Bittle and Hofsneider chronicled. Be sure to check out the full story on the Grist site, here.
— Claire Elise Thompson
The beginning of a long fight
In 1999, PacifiCorp was seeking input on its application to renew the license for the four dams on the Klamath River — a required part of the renewal process, and typically uncontroversial. For Jeff Mitchell, then the chairman of the Klamath Tribes, who had spent decades fighting for water rights, it became an opportunity to challenge the dams that had decimated the rivers and salmon. He saw a chance to push for the fish ladders the company had long promised but never delivered. That idea soon grew.
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.
Ronnie Pierce stands beside a stack of binders containing PacifiCorp’s draft application to relicense its dams on the Klamath River. Courtesy of Leaf Hillman
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.
The final gambit
By 2020, hard-negotiated deals that brought together tribes, farmers, ranchers, and politicians, had come close multiple times — once, a done deal failed to get congressional approval. A different approach that required sign-off from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hit roadblocks when the first Trump administration took office. Meanwhile, tribal activists like Chook Chook Hillman — Leaf Hillman’s son — were keeping the pressure on through protests, and formed a group called the Klamath Justice Coalition. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amy Cordalis, then lead counsel for the Yurok Tribe, organized a last-ditch attempt at diplomacy: a meeting with top executives from PacifiCorp and parent company Berkshire Hathaway, which would take place at Blue Creek on the Klamath River, to show the executives the ecosystem their dams were suffocating. Along the way, the group came face to face with protesters blockading the river.
Chook Chook’s son approached the executives first. The 11-year-old handed them a white flag. Chook Chook reminded them that his son had been just a week old when PacifiCorp executives first visited and promised to remove the dams.
“We’ve kept up our end of the bargain, we’ve given you 11 years to do it,” Chook Chook said. “I don’t know what you guys are going to decide at your meeting, but what needs to happen, has to happen. We don’t have any more time.”
Activists handed Fehrman a jug filled with foul-smelling river water. “Take the lid off and smell it,” said Annelia Hillman, a Yurok Tribe citizen and Chook Chook’s wife at the time. The Berkshire executive opened the bottle and sniffed the algae-tainted water.
PacifiCorp executives smell a bottle of toxic algae-infused water taken from the Klamath River during a standoff with Klamath Justice Coalition activists in 2020. Courtesy of Sammy Gensaw III
“Our fish are drinking that,” said Dania Rose Colegrove from the Hoopa Valley Tribe. “They have to swim in that.”
“We understand that’s a challenge,” one of the executives replied. Sammy Gensaw III, one of the Yurok youth activists, implored the executives to understand the stakes.
“This isn’t just about the Klamath River. What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations,” Gensaw said. “The rest of history will look at the decisions that we make here today.”
Gensaw’s younger brother, Jon Luke Gensaw, spoke next. “If this doesn’t end, you’re going to see more of us,” he said, surrounded by hundreds of people from all of the Klamath’s tribes. “I take my mask off because I want you to remember my face, because you’ll see me again.”
Frankie Myers, the vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, who was on the boat with the executives, reminded the younger activists that the tribal leaders shared their goals, and that they had a schedule to keep with the company. Myers’ father, Dickie, had been one of the original dam removal campaigners who had traveled to Scotland more than a decade earlier. Chook Chook and the others felt they had made their message clear, and decided to let the executives through.
“We’re sorry we had to do this, but you know, this is what we do,” Colegrove said as they parted. “We didn’t get invited to the meeting, so we invited ourselves. You have to hear the people — it’s just how it is.”
The executives and tribal leaders finally made their way to Blue Creek. Myers urged them not to abandon the deal, and Cordalis presented an offer from the states and tribes to provide additional insurance and funding. Abel and the other PacifiCorp executives agreed to take a term sheet from the tribal campaigners, and responded to their entreaties politely, but they did not commit to meeting FERC’s new demands.
It was a beautiful day: Salmon were swimming in the cool waters, and a bald eagle flew over Abel as he defended the company’s position. Tribal leaders could not have picked a more serene place to make their case for what was at stake, but PacifiCorp didn’t concede. After lunch, the group drove their boats back to the reservation and thanked the executives for coming. At the Yurok Tribe’s debriefing meeting, the disappointment was so profound that some broke down in tears.
But a few days later, Cordalis got a call from Bill Fehrman, the Berkshire Hathaway Energy executive who had gone to Blue Creek. The voice on the other end of the line said something that stopped her in her tracks.
“Let’s talk, we need to get the dams out,” Fehrman said, according to Cordalis’ recollection.
Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik later learned what caused the about-face. The executives had been moved by their time at Blue Creek. While they remained noncommittal during the meeting, a company representative revealed to Belchik that as soon as they boarded their jet to leave, Greg Abel, the vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway, told his employees they needed to figure out a solution. “Blue Creek changes people,” Belchik said. As Bittle and Hofschneider write: “At the start of the dam removal campaign, Ronnie Pierce had berated PacifiCorp executives for not knowing where the waterway was, and 20 years later, the company’s leaders had fallen under its spell.”
More exposure
- Read: the full, five-part story — How the Klamath Dams Came Down
- Read: … you know what, that’s probably enough reading for now! Take your time with this epic tale.
A parting shot
The original artwork that accompanies Hofschneider and Bittle’s story was done by Jackie Fawn, a Yurok, Washoe, and Filipina illustrator. In this illustration, Fawn shows scenes of activism as well as the coalition-building that took place between tribes and farmers in the Klamath Basin.
