One relentless group leading the fight to restore salmon runs and prevent the raising of Shasta Dam is the Winnemem Wintu. They refer to themselves as “salmon people,” and the McCloud River is where they have always lived.
Their ancestors entered California thousands of years ago and occupied the upper Sacramento River region. They came to be known as the Wintu. One band of this group built their villages alongside the McCloud River, whose origins can be traced to a meadow spring at the base of Mount Shasta. The people also believed they emerged from this spring.
The McCloud was the middle river among three major rivers in the region (the upper Sacramento, McCloud, and Pit), so these people called it We-nemmem (mem means water in their language). They were the “middle river” or “middle water” people — the Winnemem Wintu.
Due to its clear, cold waters, the McCloud River was one of the most productive salmon waterways in the world. It supported three runs of salmon — four exist in the Sacramento River — including the winter run.
The Winnemem depended on fish for food. They saw salmon as part of their family, which includes all of nature’s creatures, but salmon have always been the most revered. Much of their culture and spirituality was connected to this supreme f ish, which returned from the distant ocean each year to nourish the people, animals, and forests.
In bringing ocean nutrients to the rivers and mountains, salmon enrich all fauna and flora, particularly as their carcasses rot and decay. Trout and other fish also consume protein-rich salmon eggs that become dislodged from spawning redds. All these nutrients help make the Sacramento River system one of the world’s best rainbow trout fisheries.
In the McCloud River, the salmon halted their journey below the lower falls, which the Winnemem called Nurumwit-ti-dekkit, or “falls where the salmon turn back.” There the people built a village called Nur-um-witipon (“salmon come back”). The men lashed stout poles to form catwalks over the water, enabling them to spear passing fish. Reportedly, six men speared more than five hundred salmon in one evening, averaging five hundred pounds per man.
The Winnemem’s way of life came tumbling down when Shasta Dam was constructed in the 1930s and 1940s. The reservoir flooded their homes and spiritual sites and blocked the salmon runs. The Winnemem were never consulted about this massive project. Neither their needs nor those of the salmon played any part in the decision. The loss of free-flowing waterways and rich forests was also ignored in the building of this massive dam.
Since that time, the Winnemem have been on a mission to return salmon to the McCloud. In the words of Caleen Sisk, tribal chieftain and spiritual leader of the Winnemem: “The salmon are an integral part of our lifeway and of a healthy McCloud River watershed. We believe that when the last salmon is gone, humans will be gone too. Our fight to return salmon to the McCloud River is no less than a fight to save our tribe. As salmon people and middle water people we advocate for all aspects of clean water and the restoration of salmon to their natural spawning grounds.”
Home Again
The unique winter-run Chinook salmon that had migrated for eons up the McCloud, upper Sacramento, and Pit Rivers still seek to go there. They enter the Sacramento River and swim upriver as their forebears have always done. But Keswick Dam — built as an afterbay impoundment below Shasta — stops them. Here officials capture them at the dam’s base — the “Keswick trap”— and taxi them to the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery at Shasta Dam’s base, where the eggs are hatched and fry are raised. These are then taken by truck and released back into the Sacramento.
Despite these attempts at technological remedies, the winter run has been designated “endangered.” From nearly one hundred thousand returning fish in the late 1960s, fewer than two hundred came back in the early 1990s. The numbers rebounded to a yearly average of 13,700 fish from 2004 to 2006. However, they have since dropped below three thousand. Prevented from reaching their ancestral waters and probably interbreeding with other salmon races, their primeval genes are very likely being diluted. According to fish biologist Dr. Peter Moyle, what is being artificially maintained is largely a “museum run” of fish that in all probability will not survive.
The Winnemem do not accept this verdict. They believe it is their duty to return their relatives to the river where they once lived together. But rather than depending on the deprived fish that can no longer swim far up the Sacramento and into the McCloud, the Winnemem are instead looking to the distant waters of New Zealand, where they believe their brethren have taken residence.
McCloud salmon landed in New Zealand as a by-product of the first hatchery in the country — the Baird Hatchery — being built on the McCloud in 1872.
At that time, Massachusetts resident Livingston Stone was commissioned to go there and gather Chinook salmon eggs for transport back to East Coast waters, where Atlantic salmon stocks were crashing. It was an ill-advised project from the outset, especially given what we now know about how exotic fish introductions can often devastate native species. None of the Chinook progeny took hold in Eastern waters, just as no Atlantic salmon stock have become established in West Coast waters, where they also were imported in the most willy-nilly of schemes. The Winnemem were initially unhappy with Livingstone’s taking of the salmon. However, a deal was eventually struck: Stone could capture the salmon for breeding and export, but the Winnemem in turn made a covenant with their fish by “promising our sacred fish that they would always be able to return home.” The Baird Hatchery was soon exporting eggs of trout and salmon around the world, including to New Zealand, where rainbow trout took hold and continue to thrive. A stable salmon fishery also got established in several waterways, including the Rakaia River.
A few years ago, a New Zealand fish biologist contacted the Winnemem and reported that these “Rakaia salmon” probably possess the same genes as the winter-run salmon that once occupied the McCloud. (In New Zealand, the salmon spawn during all seasons, so no distinct runs are distinguished there.)
After decades of having their salmon denied reentry to their home water due to Shasta Dam, the Winnemem now see in the waters of New Zealand a possible way forward to bring them back.
In March 2010, 30 members of the Winnemem Wintu boarded a plane for New Zealand, where the Maori people welcomed them. Over the two-week visit, the Winnemem and Maori feasted and bonded over their common struggle to preserve their cultures and lands from the forces of assimilation.
The main event was a four-day ceremony performed by the Winnemem alongside the Rakaia River. It included the rare Nur Chonas Winyupus, or middle-water salmon dance, one that the Winnemem have not performed in over sixty years. It was a dance of atonement or apology to the salmon for breaking the covenant that they could always return to the McCloud.
When Caleen Sisk and her fellow tribal members saw salmon returning to the Rakaia River, they were brought to tears. They knew these were their salmon coming to greet them.
The Winnemem plan to bring Rakaia salmon back to the McCloud. The New Zealand Department of Fish and Game and the Maori have agreed to export the eggs to the Winnemem, who will rear them in a hatchery on the upper McCloud and then release the progeny imprinted with the McCloud’s water back into the Sacramento River.
They will have the salmon return from the Sacramento River to Shasta Lake via a channel circumventing the dams, hopefully with little to no human intervention. From the connecting passageway, the salmon would enter the southwest corner of Lake Shasta. Then, in the words of tribal chief Caleen Sisk: “Once they will get a whiff of their spawning waters, the salmon will find their way home.”
At this time, the Winnemem are negotiating with the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to implement the state-of-the-art project. But there are many bureaucratic obstacles to overcome to make this happen.
Alongside their efforts to bring salmon back to the McCloud, the Winnemem are also fighting to safeguard the Delta, which is critical to the wellbeing of salmon. In their words: “For our tribe’s plan to return our salmon to the McCloud River to be successful, the salmon must be able to survive the Delta, both in the young salmon going out to the ocean and in their return journey back.”
To build support for a healthy Delta, Caleen Sisk and tribal members held a ceremony at Glen Cove on June 6, 2011. Glen Cove is a sacred Native American burial site, home to one of the last remaining shell mounds in the North Bay, which are older than the Egyptian Pyramids. This site is threatened by development. Located on the banks of the Carquinez Strait, Glen Cove links the Sacramento Delta to San Francisco Bay, all vital part of the salmon’s life cycle.
Tragically, thousands of endangered Chinook salmon are killed annually by Delta pumps, which divert vast amounts of water to the Central Valley. The Delta is further under siege by proposals to intercept Sacramento River water and have it circumvent the estuary — the Twin Tunnels project.
At Glen Cove, Caleen Sisk said: “We’re on a journey to bring back our salmon, to sing to the salmon, to bring them home again, to clean the waters up and down the state, so they can continue to be here. They are more than just a food source. They are the indicators of how healthy our world is, how healthy our waters are.”
The Fight Over Shasta Dam
When Shasta Dam was erected, the Winnemem Wintu not only lost their salmon, but also lost their villages and sacred sites on the lower McCloud River. The Winnemem were spiritually as well as physically and culturally connected to places that now lay deep beneath the reservoir’s surface.
To the Winnemem, the McCloud River still remains their hallowed place of worship, little different from where other groups carry out their faith, whether in mosques, temples, or churches. To them, a pool on the McCloud is as sacred as a cathedral is for others. Yet more possible losses of their sacred sites confront them. In the early 2000s, the Bureau of Reclamation started planning for the enlargement of Shasta Dam, mainly to increase water supplies for agribusinesses and urban areas. As further justification, the bureau stated that the project would benefit the salmon. The most likely scenario is an increase in the dam’s height of 18.5 feet. This would enlarge Shasta Lake by 13 percent and flood another one and a half miles of the McCloud River, along with a similar stretch of the upper Sacramento River.
The Winnemem Wintu argue that even a minimal boost in the reservoir’s capacity jeopardizes their ceremonial grounds on the lower McCloud. The higher lake would flood sacred places, including a site where 42 Natives were massacred 150 years ago; tribal burial grounds; Puberty Rock, where girls pass into adulthood by swimming across the river; and Children’s Rock, where the adults bring the young to achieve goodness. To the Winnemem, these sacred sites are vital to their very identity as a people. Without them, they could no longer be Winnemem.
In September 2004, the tribe staged a war dance — H’up Chonas — a four-day, round-the-clock ceremony carried out by their few remaining warriors. At the beginning of the ceremony, Caleen Sisk stated: “We pray that the spirit beings hear us and bring all of our helpers, from the high mountain meadows all the way to the ocean. Our concern is the health of the waterways. We are here at the dam that blocks the salmon on a river that should be full of salmon.”
The war dance — the first one for the tribe in over a hundred years — was not a call to arms, but a promise to resist the raising of the dam and the destructive forces behind it. According to Caleen Sisk: “The war dance itself is a message to the world that we can’t stand to put up with this again. We’ve already lost too many sacred sites to the lake. If there were only a few hundred people left who practiced Islam or Judaism, would the country support knocking down the last mosque or the last temple? To have true religious freedom in this country means every religion must be respected.” She described the dams as “a horrible archaic idea,” and said that Shasta Dam is “a weapon of mass destruction against the Winnemem Wintu.”
The Bureau of Reclamation is still studying the proposed project and its potential environmental impact. And in an ominous move, the Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most unbridled seekers and users of Northern California water, has purchased 3,000 acres of land along the McCloud River in anticipation of a larger reservoir. The Winnemem are not alone in opposing the raising of Shasta Dam, of course. California Trout, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and the California Water Impact Network, along with other conservation organizations and North State citizens and businesses, vigorously oppose it.
Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a report concluding that there would be no gains for fisheries from a higher dam. In fact, it would harm the salmon fishery. Tom Stokely of the California Water Impact Network commented: “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report documents the Bureau of Reclamation’s own data that shows the project will not benefit Sacramento River salmon. We knew all along that the bureau had a phony economic justification to enlarge Shasta Dam. Now we have another federal agency agreeing with us.”
Stokely said it is clear that any water that would result from the enlargement of the dam “is intended for the poisoned lands of the Westlands Water District south of the Delta. This is just another BOR deception to provide more subsidized water under the guise of a public benefit.”
The USFWS report further stated that if salmon restoration had been a true priority, the Bureau of Reclamation would have considered several options that were removed early in the consideration process. These include repairing the Shasta Dam temperature-control device; restoring the riparian corridor along the Sacramento River; increasing cold-water storage and minimum flows; changes in the flow regimen of Shasta Dam; more efficient use of water in canals; and considering conjunctive use of other existing and planned water-storage facilities in the Central Valley.
Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, stated: “It’s instructive to note that all these actions would cost a fraction of dam enlargement. This isn’t just an environmental and fisheries issue. It’s about the squandering of taxpayer dollars. It’s about pork barrel politics, about public money flowing from the public coffers to the handful of corporate farmers in the San Joaquin Valley who control water in California.”
For their part, the Winnemem will fight against this project by every means they can muster. As Caleen Sisk notes: “We can’t be Winnemem any place else but the McCloud River. The dam raise is a form of cultural genocide.”
Note: The above quotes by Tom Stokely and Bill Jennings were published in a summary of Shasta Dam issues compiled by Fish Sniffer columnist Dan Bacher in January of this year.
