The River Remembers: How a Tribe Brought the Salmon Back A Conversation with Amy Bowers Cordalis

[00:00:01] Everyone loves a David versus Goliath story where the little person takes on the big powerful person and winds up winning. Well, today you're going to hear one of those real life stories with major implications for our society and our relationship with nature. It's the story of how one woman, Amy Bowers Cordalis and her tribe, an indigenous community on the coast of California, took on the powers that be, the government and the power companies to have major dams removed on the Klamath River and to let the city.

[00:00:31] Salmon Run after a hundred years. It's a story of the regeneration of nature, about the power of nature coming back and the power of all of us to make a difference. You don't want to miss this compelling story. Let's get started. Hi, I'm Dr. John Izzo and I want to welcome you to this episode of the Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast where we take on the big issues of our time and explore the future of humanity and planet from a regenerative perspective.

[00:01:01] I'd like to welcome you to this episode. And I'm super excited about this episode. Just a few weeks ago now, I was at the Marquee TED event in Vancouver where, you know, several thousand change agents and thinkers and leaders from all over the world gathered for a week. And I heard a lot of talks, but one of the talks that I heard really riveted me and even more touched me deeply in my soul.

[00:01:26] I got to hear Amy Bowers Cordalis, who you're going to get to know deeply today, talk about her journey as a lawyer and activist and a member of the Yurok indigenous community. Talk about an amazing journey in which they got some dams removed that had been there for a century. And as I was listening to her story, and I won't get into that because you're going to hear about it.

[00:01:52] A couple of things came to my mind. I was thinking of David Attenborough's work, and many of you are probably fans of David. And he talks about it's no longer enough to protect nature. We actually have to rewild. We have to create the environment, the opportunity now for nature to regenerate itself. So we actually have to rewild the world. And in many ways, this is a story about rewilding.

[00:02:18] But it's also a story about a people and a culture and the way we see the world and how it changes things. You're going to want to listen to this episode. Trust me. Alain, so I know you're really excited about this one, given your respect and how you've been such a scholar of the indigenous communities. Yes, I'm very excited to hear you, Amy.

[00:02:42] We have a program called the Regenerative Elder Process, and it's mostly inspired by the indigenous worldview. And so what I've heard you say is so wonderfully illustrating what we are about in this program. So, Amy, I'd like to welcome you into our podcast today. It's great to have you here. Well, thank you. So, Amy, I'd like to start, take us back to your earliest memory in childhood about the Klamath River.

[00:03:12] And just your earliest memory of that river and what it meant to your people. Okay, well, thank you. And I'm going to start with an introduction in my language, because that will take us to the river, to the culture, through our words. So, I accue, neck now, Amy Bowers Cordalis, New Walk, Reckoy, Hitchkeld, Rewoy, Numite Wah, Walk, Lao, Walk, Lao, Walk, Lao.

[00:03:41] Wow. So, I just introduced myself in the way that my tribe introduces ourselves to other indigenous peoples from the Klamath. And that is to say what my name is and the village I'm from and the river I'm from. So, I'm from the village of Reckoy, right on the mouth of the Klamath River in what is now known as Northern California. And I'm very happy to be here and thank you.

[00:04:10] In Yurok, there's a few different ways to say thank you. But Walk, Lao was the word that I chose to use this morning because it shows deep appreciation and gratitude to be in the present moment with you. So, Walk, Lao. And so, taking us to my first memories, what I remember about being on the river is its abundance.

[00:04:40] It was a place that I felt so safe and like everything that I ever could need or want was right there. My family has been in the village of Reckoy since the beginning of time. We were never relocated during colonization. We've always been there.

[00:05:04] And so, it's a neat place because our relationship is so deep with it and it spans generations. The village is set on the north side of the mouth of the Klamath River. So, it overlooks the Pacific Ocean. And the Klamath historically was home to the third largest salmon runs in the continental U.S. And so, we had salmon in the river almost year-round.

[00:05:34] There were also other aquatic species, sturgeon. Older than the dinosaurs, sturgeon and eels and steelhead. And we had on the land deer and elk and acorns and all kinds of different nuts and berries. And there was always water. We are like situated right in sort of the heart of the redwoods. And of course, the ocean was right there. So, we had ocean resources.

[00:06:04] But it's a place of just water in all its different forms. And of course, what does water bring? Water brings life. And so, there was all that amazing life and abundance. And even as a child growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I still deeply felt that abundance. And in many ways, the way that the village looks is still historic in the sense that there's not a lot of development.

[00:06:33] Things look largely the same as they looked when my ancestors were there. Of course, you know, species, water quality, things like that have changed. But visually, it looks the same. And so, that's what I experienced as a child was just this wildly abundant, beautiful, almost like a big playground. It's beautiful.

[00:06:55] Now, we're going to get to the story, which again is such a beautiful story of this journey to this moment of rewilding of this river. But give us a little history, a history of your people and the river and the struggle around the river with the government over these and the power companies over these many years. So, just paint the picture for us of the context before I get to that moment when you said, I want to be involved in this fight.

[00:07:25] But let's go before 2002. We'll hold the audience in suspense because something happened in 2002 that got Amy into this fight. But give us the context pre-2002 so when we talk about that moment, people have a sense of what came before. Yeah.

[00:07:42] In my book, The Water Remembers, I went to great lengths to set up the history of this place and my family so that people could feel just what you're talking about, the victory, right, and what it means.

[00:07:58] And so that people could go through this wild experience of a multi-generational fight just to protect who we are and the river and species that support our way of life. And I start the book with the creation story because that's actually where it starts. If you want to really talk about how it all came to be, it starts with the creation story.

[00:08:27] And I won't go into deep detail, but what I will share is that when the earth was created, there were spirits out in the universe who were lonely and they wanted to be together on a place. And so the creator made the earth but told these spirits, you have to take care of this. And if you take care of it, you will never want for anything.

[00:08:47] And the spirits agreed and then they came down to earth and became humans, became sacred sites, rocks, water, mountains, also species. And so what that did was essentially create a relationship between the humans, the species, and the ecosystems to all live in balance and to all take care of each other.

[00:09:11] And specifically, the instructions given to the people were that, you know, sure, you can have a fishing way of life, for example. You can live off of these fish, but you can't take more than you need to support your family. And if you do that, the fish will come back every season and you can rely on them. And so my ancestors for many generations lived in balance with the natural world.

[00:09:38] And at Yurok, we have Aboriginal law that protects that balance, that limits when we can harvest, how we harvest. Also, we have religious principles and ceremonies. They're called world renewal ceremonies that happen biannually. And they basically are a way of the community coming together to give thanks for the balance, give thanks for all the abundance that's around us,

[00:10:06] and then also work to renew the balance by praying and setting that intention of, in the future, we will have this good thing, this good balance. And then colonization happened and newcomers arrived in Yurok country. And it was fairly late because we are late in terms of the history of colonization.

[00:10:29] The Yurok tribe, which is the largest California tribe, our Aboriginal territory includes about a million and two acres in what is now known as the very, very, very northern coastal tip of California. And so it took a long time for settlers to come over, but eventually it was people in the gold rush. Also, you know, I mentioned we are in the redwoods and so it was people mining.

[00:10:59] And in 1855, some of my ancestors, and in fact, it was my fourth or fifth great grandparents and great uncles and aunties, participated in treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. A treaty was secured, but California adamantly opposed it. And so it was never ratified by the Senate. And instead, the Yurok reservation was created by an executive order in 1855.

[00:11:27] And that secured a mile on either side of the Klamath River from the mouth at my village up to the village of, they call it Witch Post, 40, what is that? River Mile 45. And what that was supposed to be was a place for us to continue to live our fishing way of life, continue operating and living underneath that Aboriginal law,

[00:11:53] those religious ceremonies, that whole way of life of being in balance. But instead, in 1892, there was an act that was passed that opened up the reservation. And the state of California interpreted that to terminate the reservation, meaning that we no longer had special rights. And in 1933, the state of California passed a law that prohibited all Yurok people from fishing.

[00:12:20] And this was like making breathing illegal. I mean, can you imagine? Like, it's like telling people they can nowadays they can no longer eat chicken. That's what it was like. And so we had no choice but to fish. And in the second part of my book, I go through this history telling the really remarkable stories that of what my family went through in order to survive that time.

[00:12:46] Essentially, it came down to the California state game wardens would chase my family and other family members trying to prevent them from fishing. My great uncle was arrested 19 times just for fishing, just for salmon fishing on his home waters where we always had.

[00:13:05] And his final arrest led to a Supreme Court case that affirmed that the Yurok reservation was still Indian country and we still had our special rights to fish and to have what we call inherent sovereignty within that land so that we could continue to practice our way of life. And that decision came down in 1973. And that really should have been the end of it.

[00:13:30] But then the state of California was back at it again and called up the secretary of interior and said, you got to regulate these Indians. They're going to wipe out the whole fishery, even though we had nothing to do with wiping out the whole fishery. But in response, the federal government put a full moratorium on all Yurok fishing. So once again, we were prohibited from just practicing our culture, our fishing way of life.

[00:13:57] And I think the important thing to understand about that is, you know, for us, fishing is when I say it's our way of life, it's not being allowed to fish is a way of it's almost like a state sponsored termination of a people. It is, you know, the criminalization of a way of life that is used as a means to erase people.

[00:14:24] And so even in the late 1970s, when all this was happening, the state of California was still, you know, pursuing these kinds of unjust policies against us just because we were Indian people. And so we kept fighting and that launched the salmon wars.

[00:14:47] And they sent out full federal marshal teams with riot gear and large jet boats to kick us off the river. And it got violent. But from our perspective, you know, the people who fought in that were our freedom fighters.

[00:15:05] And they laid the foundation for the rise of the modern Yurok tribal government, the rise of our fishing rights, the rise of our culture and that sort of regeneration. So then you can imagine here I am in 2002. It's about 22 years after 24 years after the salmon wars.

[00:15:28] And, you know, I'm growing up as a kid in the 80s, listening to Madonna and watching, you know, cable TV and having the best of times. And then 2002, we experienced the largest fish kill in American history. I should say the largest salmon kill in American history on our reservation.

[00:15:49] And it was caused by an order of the then vice president, Dick Cheney, who as a political scheme to get votes in southern Oregon, which is where the top of the Klamath Basin is in the beginning of the headwaters of the river, basically diverted a lot of water from the river to support farmers in that state as a way of getting elected.

[00:16:12] And the result was the lowest flows on the bottom part of the river within the Yurok reservation in history. And a fish disease spread through the entire fall Chinook salmon run and killed most of them. There's an estimate of somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 salmon died that year.

[00:16:34] And I was home working for tribal fisheries then and watched it all and had this really profound moment in a tribal fisheries boat where I was witnessing the carnage. And there were dead salmon, you know, lining the banks of the river. They were floating on the water. You know, their bellies were bloated and rotted.

[00:16:59] It smelled like a war zone, you know, and you just felt so helpless because there was nothing you could do to stop it. And we also didn't understand what was going on because nothing like that in Yurok's history had ever happened. And so here I am. And I just felt my late great grandmother just sort of move through me and very clearly told me it's your turn to fight. Yeah.

[00:17:29] And then my next thought was, I'm going to go to law school and try to prevent this kind of ecocide from ever happening again. So that's what I did. And that was a defining moment for you, obviously. Yes. I've got very clear direction from my ancestors of what I was supposed to do. And I guess I had the good sense, enough good sense to follow their lead. Amy, I want to go back to a couple of things you said before we said.

[00:17:56] So now we're in this key moment, the fish kill in 2002. I want to go back to a couple of things that I've heard you say before, and then we'll go on with the story. I've heard you say there was a myth in your history that when the fish died, that the tribe would die as well. Yes. When I heard that, I was thinking, I'm a presidarian minister was my original career that I went on to this journey. That's true.

[00:18:26] So I'm a real student of the spiritual tradition. And I was thinking to myself that, you know, the thing about myth is we tend to think of myth as some untrue fable. And people forget that underneath myth, the stories are often hard truths. And I was thinking, that's not a myth. That's the truth for all of humanity, isn't it? When the fish die, if nature dies, we die. Right? Oh, yes.

[00:18:53] I love what you just did, which is to apply that myth or that truth to all humanity. And that's a big part of my message, right? Is like, hey, guys, guess what? We can't live. We won't survive if the planet can't support us. Yeah. And so that truth is pulled down in the myth.

[00:19:16] And the language is, if the Klamis salmon die, so too will the Yurok people, because there will be no more purpose for us on Earth. Because we're, yeah, yeah. And, you know, one of the things we forget is we who are colonizers or come from the, you know, our ancestors are colonizers. Forget that we, too, were at one time indigenous people.

[00:19:41] Brian McLaren, who was on our show, who was a Lutheran minister and now, you know, a writer, you know, talked about the fact that the Jewish scriptures are the story of a nomadic indigenous people. The Jewish people were not conquerors. They were conquered, dominated.

[00:20:01] So in the Old Testament, in the Genesis story, when it says, you know, you shall have dominion over the Earth, which colonizers interpreted as God saying, you know, go and do whatever the heck you want with the Earth. The Hebrew word is actually the same word for a good king, meaning you shall be stewards. So ironically, the colonizers tradition was also an indigenous tradition, but long ago forgotten. Yeah. And so I just think it's an interesting kind of circle that brings us.

[00:20:30] I agree. And there's so much wisdom available to humanity. And I just wanted to uplift the point that you're making, which is a point that my dad always makes. We are all originally from a village. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to share, which I bet you don't know about me, is my mom is non-native and her father is, well, was, he's retired now, a Methodist preacher. And so she was very much raised in the Methodist church.

[00:21:00] And one thing that's been really empowering for me is that, you know, my father is Yurok and very much raised in Yurok religion worldview. But then also my mother was very much raised in a spiritual sort of Methodist upbringing.

[00:21:21] But the two of them came together in this deeply spiritual way, recognizing that, you know, there is, and this may be controversial, but this is how they believe. And what they taught us is that, yes, there is sort of a higher being. And there's so many wonderful, good principles and all kinds of different faiths. And that's what we should lean into and recognize the good in humanity, which is what I hear you uplifting. Yeah.

[00:21:50] Well, you know, the problem for those of us came at the Judeo-Christian tradition is that that tradition got hijacked by those in power. The power structure co-opted the religion to its own aims. But let's now get back to the next podcast. Go along. Go ahead. Yes. So I'm sure you're going to go back to that.

[00:22:13] But through all the years of fighting for the river and your people, what have you learned about yourself? Your resilience, your limits, your purpose. So you may want to give some more details about what you did. But that's the question, one of the questions we had. And I'm very intrigued by it. Yeah. And I wonder, let's do this. Let's hear about, let's hold that question. Important question.

[00:22:39] Tell us now about, fast forward, you go to law school, you come back, you become the chief legal counsel for the tribe. Tell us about the battle now that ensues, that leads to the dams being removed. And then let's talk about what you learned. So I got a call from the Yurok tribal chair and he said, Amy, it's time to come home.

[00:23:05] And I was working for the Native American Rights Fund, which is the oldest and largest legal defense fund for Indian tribes. And so I had been representing tribes across the country on all kinds of different matters. And now the chair was calling me and he said, you know, we have an opening, the general counsel left, and we'd like you to fill that seat. And to be honest, I had very young kids.

[00:23:33] I had an almost one-year-old and a three-year-old. And I thought to myself, this is not the right time. But nonetheless, you go to purpose. So after the fish kill, I was on a mission. You know, I don't come from a place of privilege. And no one in my family had, you know, had got a law degree or a graduate degree. I was the second person in my family to go to even college.

[00:24:00] And so I was just on a mission. And I got through law school, got some training at the Native American Rights Fund. And, you know, so I was sort of going through life with this mission, yet also understanding, like, I wanted to have a family. And so it was, again, this sort of idea of, like, how do we balance these two things? Because I feel strongly about being a mother. I feel strongly about serving the river.

[00:24:26] And so I was able to negotiate so that I could be home two days a week with the kiddos. Still working but home and then in the office three days a week. And I went off to Yurok country and took that job. I was the first woman and then the first tribal member to hold the position. And arriving there, I have to say, things were dire. Following the large 2002 fish kill, there were a series of fish kills of the baby salmon.

[00:24:56] There was another disease in the river called Saranova Shasta, which was in part caused by the conditions that the dams were creating. And it was essentially wiping out 80 to 90 percent of the baby salmon every year. So one of the first things we did is the coho salmon in the river are listed on the Endangered Species Act.

[00:25:20] And so we teamed up with Earth Justice, which is a pretty powerful environmental litigation nonprofit. And we filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation to get more flows in the river to support the baby salmon. Because more flows would naturally just flush out that fish disease. And so less would be infected. And we were successful there and got more flows in the river.

[00:25:48] On the dam removal piece, there was an agreement that had been reached and they were trying to push that through. There were two separate agreements, one for dam removal and then one that had habitat restoration and water allocation issues. There were a lot of political issues with the habitat and water agreement and it ended up terminating. And so when I came in, we had to renegotiate an amendment to the dam removal deal.

[00:26:19] And it felt like you were fighting for your life. It was definitely still an existential crisis. In 2016, which was right around when I started out at Yurok as general counsel, the smallest salmon run in history returned to the river. And about, it maybe was a month or so later, the Yurok tribe declared a suicide emergency on the river.

[00:26:48] Because young people, people between like 18 and 27 and 30, 27, 30 tribal members were taking their own lives because they just didn't see a future without the river. And so the work within the tribe really did feel like you were fighting for your family's future, for the future of the river and the salmon. And so failure was not an option.

[00:27:17] And you can also imagine, too, though, I felt very privileged to be able to have set my purpose back in 2002 on the boat that day and have done all this work to be able to put myself in a position to be able to be helpful to the dam removal effort and to serve my tribe, to serve the river and the salmon. And so it was a go. We just went as hard as we could go. And I took the babies to meetings with me.

[00:27:46] They were on calls with Pacific Corps, who was the owner of the dams, you know, with their executives at 8 a.m. in the morning. It was just how I did business. And we ran into trouble. So fast forward to 2020. The dams were supposed to have been out by then. By then. But there were several delays in the regulatory process to approve everything to get to dam removal.

[00:28:16] And then we didn't have the final approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, to actually do the dam removal. So we pushed, pushed, pushed. There was a lot of putting the tribal leaders, the tribal people in front of the regulators to basically share how the dams were harming the river.

[00:28:38] And that was so powerful, like so powerful, because these are people that live and die by the river. And so they were eloquent. They were powerful. And they convinced, eventually, the regulators that removing the dams was in the public interest. So by 2020, though, we get an order from FERC based on all that hard work.

[00:29:02] And there's a little bit of a curveball where the power company had to stay on the dam license through facilities removal. And that was not consistent with the settlement agreement. And so the power company threatened to pull out. I hope you're enjoying this amazing conversation with having with Amy Bowers Cordalis. And we'll get back to it in just a moment. But first, I want to take a moment and thank you for being a part of our listening and viewing community. You mean so much to us.

[00:29:31] And I have a couple of specific asks for you. If you love what you're hearing, please subscribe on whatever channel you are on. It means you won't miss the next episode. Please comment and share this with others. When you comment, it engages others in this important conversation. And when you share it, it grows the listeners and viewers for these important ideas. And please go to our website, wayforwardpodcast.com, and join our community. Go to our link tree where you'll get lots of information about us.

[00:30:00] And if you love what you're hearing and want to support us, you can also buy us a virtual coffee. And that's on our link tree in the show notes as well. So thank you for being a part of our community. Please, we'd love to hear from you. And we'd love your support. And now let's get back to that important conversation. And so we called them to the river. And these power company executives, this is actually at Berkshire Hathaway.

[00:30:25] So, you know, Warren Buffett owns that, one of the richest men in the world, massive power company. So we called them out to the reservation. And they send their number one and number two guys. Actually, Greg Abel, who is now taking over for Warren Buffett. He was one of them. And they're coming from Omaha. I'm not sure they had ever, maybe they had been to wild places like the lower Klamath. But in any event, they show up and they're dockers.

[00:30:53] But we take them up, or we took them up river. And we basically told them we were never going to stop fighting. That no matter what, we would continue to push through and those dams would come down. And there are some more details in there. But long story short, I get a call from the number two guy that following Monday. And he said, okay, let's do this.

[00:31:19] And then that led to a new memorandum of understanding that added about $50 million to the dam removal deal. And that set our path to dam removal. I'm curious if you're willing to say, do you feel like it was just a pragmatic decision? Or do you think also something happened when they came and actually saw the place? What's your instinct?

[00:31:46] My instinct is that the river saved the dam removal deal. And I write about it in this way in my book. There's a whole chapter titled Blue Creek versus the Dams. And I've seen the river speak for itself so many times.

[00:32:07] Really, it's just the human's job to put the people in the place that they need to be in order for the river to speak to that individual creature being and get done whatever needs to get done. And so we met at the mouth of this place called Blue Creek, which is the entrance of the tribe's high country, our sacred country. It's a salmon sanctuary. It's a carbon forest. It's a deeply powerful place.

[00:32:37] And we literally had the meeting there. And we saw eagles. You know, the water was clean and blue. There were salmon jumping. It just was such a powerful, gorgeous place. And so 100%, I think that the river spoke to those folks. And it helped, too, that they had worked with us over 20 years and knew that we would protest.

[00:33:02] They knew that we would launch a media campaign, that we would litigate as hard as we needed to, that we would never give up. And they also knew that they had a pretty decent deal in the settlement agreement and that they just needed to understand some of the liability issues and have kind of a sweet little blanket in case something came up. And that was the 50 million. It was 45 million, to be exact. But, yeah, the river spoke for itself.

[00:33:31] That's beautiful. I remember your talk at the Bioneers Conference, I think it was, you showed a video of one of those dams being blown up. And slowly, you know, as each explosion happened, the river started to explode forward. And I have to admit, I started to cry. Yeah.

[00:33:54] Because it just was such a beautiful thing, going back to that idea of nature rewilding itself, right? And that progress was something very different than how we have come to define, you know, progress in that moment. And then you also had shown a picture of the salmon swimming upstream. And you said something that really riveted in my memory. You said, and the salmon went back to a place to spawn that they hadn't seen in 100 years.

[00:34:24] That they hadn't seen in 100 years. And then you said something that really struck me. You said, I want to get it right. You said something like, if the river can heal, so can I. And maybe so can humanity. And now maybe let's go back to Alain's question. How has this changed you? How has it healed you? Alain, you look at me about to say something as well. Yeah, I would like to add one thing.

[00:34:48] I heard you say also that having the river recognized in its rights played a role in maybe you can add that and then go back to. Yeah. So along the journey in our effort to heal the river, when I was general counsel, and I think it was 2019, the Yurok tribe declared personhood rights for the Klamath River. It was the first river in North America to have personhood rights.

[00:35:18] And essentially what we did through tribal law was first through a resolution declared that the river, you know, consistent with Yurok culture was alive. And that it was our or is our ancient relative and this powerful being. And then through tribal ordinance, we set out specific rights of the river. And they're very powerful. Things like the right to exist, the right to have clean water, the right to have sufficient flows.

[00:35:47] But think about even just declaring that in law, how powerful that is and how different that is from the rights of the legal protections that rivers or even other ecosystems have now under federal or state law. Like there really isn't that kind of a right to exist. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:12] And so we knew that it was an appropriate expression of the tribe's sovereignty and our values to declare that. You know, all the law is, is it's a reflection of societal values. We make legal things that we want to protect and behavior we want to encourage. We prohibit behavior we don't want. Right.

[00:36:33] So I think the rights of nature movement is really important in protecting ecosystems because they expand the amount of protections offered under the law for ecosystem in a way that's comprehensive. And one of the things I'll say is so I run a nonprofit with my co-founder, Molly Myers, and it's called Ridges to Riffles, Indigenous Conservation Group.

[00:37:00] And the idea is that in order to restore ecosystems and restore the balance, you have to work from the highest ridgetop to the lowest riffle because ecosystems, just like our bodies, they function all together. You know, and so often, and this is, I think, a problem with natural resource law and management and policy is that we pull out like clean water.

[00:37:30] Okay. So we want clean water. We have the Clean Water Act, which basically prevents some kinds of pollution, but we're not talking about the rest of the river itself. And so, so anyways, so we need to be looking at things as a comprehensive ecosystem. And that's one way that the rights of nature can better protect the whole ecosystem, not just part of it.

[00:37:54] So to your knowledge, has it spread in the United States as it has in New Zealand or some other countries? It is spreading. I think it's slow going. One of the most recent efforts is down on the Colorado River. There is a tribe that is considering, and they may already have, passed rights of nature laws under tribal law for the Colorado River. Yeah.

[00:38:19] You know, one of those things, and by the way, I just read this morning, good news story that in Europe now over the last, in 2025 alone, 633 barriers in 25 countries in Europe taken down to reunite rivers, a total of 2,400 miles in 2025 alone of rivers being reunited.

[00:38:43] And, you know, I was thinking of what Alon was saying there too about there's something powerful about giving nature a name. Because when something has a name, you know, Martin Buber, the Christian theologian, talked about having an I-thou relationship as opposed to an I-in relationship, right? So now our relationship is more personal. And back to that myth, right? We've just lost this sense that our destiny and nature's destiny are entwined.

[00:39:11] Or as I like to put it, we think we are apart from nature rather than a part of nature. And when we lose that relationship, something profound is lost, not only practically, but spiritually. Yes. And so think about the history of the United States. So there were indigenous peoples throughout this whole area. And at least at Yurok, our worldview is that we are put here to steward it, you know, the land. And that's what we did, right?

[00:39:41] We took care of it. And so the abundance that was here when the colonizers arrived was because of our relationship, our stewardship, our work, and even our fishing, our hunting practices, all of it. You know, there's this line of thinking that somehow like, oh, humans weren't a part of nature. But we are. We always have been, right? And so then when you sort of separate that through extractive economies, right?

[00:40:10] You mine, you gold, you take the water, you redo the plumbing on these ecosystems, whatever it might be. You're absolutely right that you sever that a part of relationship between nature and the humans and then also that stewardship role. And I think that's when that disconnection from the spiritual connection starts. And then that's how we end up where we are now. You know, so the healing process is much like what we did on the Klamath, which is to restore nature.

[00:40:39] And through doing that, that's how you heal yourself. You know, and that kind of gets to Alon's question of like, how have I healed? And it's been remarkable. It's been unexpected. It's been so powerful. And I took a long time to really think about this and write carefully about it in my book, The Water Remembers.

[00:41:05] Because so much of my family, you know, every generation since colonization started has fought, has fought for this river just to exist, right? To keep the salmon runs healthy, to keep the water healthy, to keep, you know, the whole ecosystem healthy. And they lived hard lives, you know? And I am the generation that got to witness the fruits of their labor and the healing of the river.

[00:41:30] And so it's not, in some ways, you know, through my sort of visual experience of being here, my physical experience of being here, I like to think that in some ways there's still that connection with the ancestors and that they're able to also heal and maybe rest a little deeper in peace knowing that the river has healed and that there's a future, you know?

[00:41:57] So it's deeply profound in ways that I didn't expect, but I'm truly grateful for. Yeah. You know, it's such a great reminder to, for those of us who sometimes get frustrated with progress that we've made on issues, whether it's peace or equity or in nature, that this often is generational work. You know, and those of us who are a little older realize that a lot of these things are not going to be solved in our lifetime.

[00:42:25] But trust me, we will rest easier when we go because of the work that the next generations, you know, will do. And, you know, you said something else really struck me. I want you to say something about this. My friend Rex Weiler, who was one of the founders of Greenpeace, and actually he's the one who came up with this crazy idea of going out in rubber zodiacs and confronting the Russian whaling fleet in the Pacific Ocean, which created this mind bomb across the world.

[00:42:55] And children started writing their prime ministers in Finland and Norway saying, you know, Japan, we have to stop hunting whales, etc. But one of the things he said was, the good guys only have to win once. We have to win every time. But I heard you in a talk say something that really struck me. You said, after all those no's, all we needed was one yes. And I thought it was such a profound reminder that even if we lose, so you could argue in 2002, we lost the fight, right?

[00:43:24] The water is diverted for political reasons. But after all the no's, sometimes all we need is one yes. Talk a little bit about that. So it was such a profound insight. You only need one yes. We only needed one path to dam removal. Now, it took a lot of, you know, mispaths. It took a lot of no's. It took a lot of failing.

[00:43:48] One of the things that the former vice chair, Frankie Meyer, the Buroc, who was real critical to the negotiations, always says is, we got really good at failing. And you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to explore, try something that doesn't work, but then get back up again and keep working. Because as long as you keep working, you will get to your yes. You will figure out your yes.

[00:44:16] You know, and that kind of goes back to like that moment at Blue Creek with the power executives where they knew that we had picked ourselves up so many times and came up with a new solution that when we said we will never stop, we meant it. And so you got to get okay with failing and sort of like, you know, it's who says that?

[00:44:39] It's like a sports analogy of you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, you know, so show up, take the shot, do it with some enthusiasm. And, you know, because I also think like having joy in this moment of of so many different crises is almost radical.

[00:44:57] But what joy does to your body is give you fuel, it gives you fire in the belly so that you can keep going, you know, and I think that for me raises the importance of building deep relationships with the people you're in the fight with, right? You know, people that you can joke around with or you can fail with, but they help you keep going. Because we got to have joy as we go through these really hard times.

[00:45:25] And also that faith of like, we will get through this and it's going to get to a better place. We just have to keep fighting. Yeah, I was thinking when you said that, you know, about faith, Robert Greenleaf, who wrote the book, The Servant as the Leader, he became famous for starting a whole movement in business around servant leadership.

[00:45:44] And he said that faith was the most important quality of the servant leader because he said the hypothesis of the noblest outcome often happens outside of your purview. So the whole idea was that in order to be a servant leader, it requires a certain faith in goodness, in the ultimate arc of justice.

[00:46:09] Right. And you have to understand there will be all these no's along the way to the big yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we did not get to the world, like to world history's largest salmon restoration project by not believing. We believed. We did. We did. And, you know, it's funny. I have a friend and he's this kind of a sarcastic lawyer.

[00:46:36] And when his youngest son was like starting to doubt Santa Claus and they were at the store and he said, Dad, I'm thinking maybe there isn't really a Santa Claus. I don't think I believe in Santa Claus anymore. And my friend Brian just turned to him and said, well, son, all I can tell you is those that don't believe don't receive. Brilliant. Yes. And that applies to so many things. So many things. Yeah. So what's next for you?

[00:47:03] Sometimes you want it's kind of like I'm thinking I'm a sports fan. So you've won the NBA finals. You've removed these dams, right? You did this TED talk. There's still a young woman with a lot of life ahead of you. Thank you. What's the next frontier for you? Well, in the immediate future, through my work at Ridges to Riffle, you know, that's a nonprofit and we provide pro bono legal representation to Europe.

[00:47:28] We're also a full service shop in the sense that we have scientists and grassroots people and comms people. And we continue to work on the Klamath. There is still a big struggle to find sustainability with respect to water use. And the Trump administration has amplified those problems. And so we are still in litigation, but also working really hard to try to find solutions with the people who are also dependent on the basin. You know, some of the farmers.

[00:47:58] And I think a big piece of that work is to end these historical narratives of, frankly, cowboys versus Indians or fish versus farmer. These are divisive, you know, fear induced messages. And our collective future is grounded and leaning in towards our commonalities and also understanding that we all are dependent upon the vitality of the Klamath Basin.

[00:48:28] And so if we can rebuild that ecosystem through these nature based solutions, then it will be stronger and it can support many different ways of life as it did. But we do have to figure out how do we make agriculture sustainable, for example. And that just requires some adjustments because we've been operating under this historical value system of like extract, extract, harm, harm so that I can make a dollar.

[00:48:57] So there is a transition and we're really working on on that. Also working with indigenous communities really around the states on dam removal, these regenerative economies on the Snake River, which is a tributary to the Columbia, which is one of the second largest rivers in all of North America or not North America, but the U.S. They're looking at dam removal. We're trying to support them as well.

[00:49:24] And what I will say, too, and I didn't expect this, but someone told me and it was right on that telling the story about this work is almost just as important as the story itself.

[00:49:37] Because what we've done is potentially a model for the future of how we can pull ourselves out of the climate crisis by using nature based solutions to rebuild ecosystems that then have more resiliency that then can better support us, you know, heal the land, heal the people, heal these economies.

[00:50:01] And I think that when you have that kind of certainty, right, that foundational certainty of clean water, clean air, right, healthier people, right, that that then helps our democracy because everybody is coming to the table in a more healthy, grounded place. So really trying to just get that message out.

[00:50:24] And to speak to that, you know, I should say, you know, so Klamath Dam Removal, largest salmon restoration project in world history. We removed four dams on the Klamath that did not have fish ladders and were basically polluting the water, polluting the bottom of the riverbed and blocking salmon from accessing habitat. We were down to about one to three percent of our historical salmon runs.

[00:50:51] And so we had to get those dams out in order to save those salmon runs and those salmon support in today's dollars. And I hate to we don't really quantify our our salmon, but they do support about a five hundred million dollar commercial fishery offshore in California and Oregon. So, you know, we're not talking small beans, but in any event, remove those dams.

[00:51:15] Now we are restoring thousands of acres within the former hydroelectric project area. The Yurok tribe and other indigenous nations have planted about 20 billion native seeds. And, you know, with that, all the critters are coming back together, all the ecosystems coming back together. We're returning land back to the original stewards of that area, the Shasta Indian Nation, which is really powerful.

[00:51:42] And then the salmon runs are thankfully, you know, on the rise. And as you mentioned earlier, three days after the lowest dam was gone, the salmon came home and about 7000 salmon passed that former dam site, places they hadn't been in 100 years. This year, about 13000 salmon came home and they went further up into that 400 miles of spawning habitat. And so they're rebuilding.

[00:52:12] And the economics of this is interesting, too. So the settlement agreement was about it was 500 million dollars. The agreement itself equally valued the rights of nature, indigenous peoples and business. And dam removal was done on time within the budgets. And one of the world's largest construction companies did the actual removal and made money from it. You know, and now with the with all that restoration I was speaking to,

[00:52:40] the Yurok tribe and others are providing living wage jobs to tribal members, non-members restoring the land. And so essentially we're building that regenerative economy using nature based solutions. So it's just a win win dynamic project that I hope the world will hear about and embrace and we can replicate it to pull ourselves out of the climate crisis.

[00:53:10] Yeah, there's three things you said there that really struck me. One is telling the story is as important as the thing itself. And I agree with you, right? That's one reason we wanted you on the podcast because thank you give hope and energy to others. So amen to that. Yes. The second thing you said is these false narratives.

[00:53:27] A lot of our podcast is about polarization and these false narratives that keep us from finding common ground, economy versus ecology, you know, colonizers versus indigenous, the rich versus the poor, you know, the West versus the rest of the world, right? Whatever the immigrants versus the people who live here now. And all of these false narratives, because the truth is, you know, to use that old analogy, when the sea rises, all the boats rise.

[00:53:53] And when the sea sinks or in this case rises, all the boats get drowned, right? And so, you know, it's just such a great reminder of this synergy that we've just lost and we can find common ground. And that's the only way we'll be able to go forward, isn't it? It is. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. We all came from a village. We all came from a village.

[00:54:18] And one of the things that Klamath Dam Removal has taught me, and I believe this deeply, is that we all have ancestral knowledge in our bones about what it was like to live on a healthy planet. And we all have a deep desire to return to that.

[00:54:34] And so when you can reconnect, when you reestablish that spiritual connection, that I think is the path toward really finding, like, your purpose, your own sort of truth and almost, I know for me, joyfulness, right? Like, I get to go and do this important work. And it feels so good and satisfying. And I think it would for others, too. You know, and you don't have to be a lawyer. You could be the person who answers the phone.

[00:55:02] You could be the person, the scientist, the, you know, grassroots organizer, the performer, whatever it is. But all of that knowledge is there. And it's sort of just like bubbling around. And we just need to tap into it. Beautiful. Well, Amy, we could talk for hours, but time touches slightly. You must get her book, The Water Remembers. Watch her TED Talk when it comes out. You'll really enjoy it. Thank you.

[00:55:25] Amy, if you just had one sentence of wisdom to share for other people who are in a fight of some kind now, for nature or for the rights of people, what would be that one sentence you'd want to leave with that? Keep going with joy. I love it. Keep going with joy. Some of the times we keep going, but without joy, with a scowl. We got to have that joy. Laugh. Just laugh. Laugh it off and go do a cartwheel or something like that. I love it.

[00:55:54] Well, Amy, first of all, thank you for your work. We honor the work you're doing and the work of your tribe on behalf of all of us. And we thank you. And, of course, you are listeners. We thank as well. I was thinking of something that Pope Francis said that was really apropos to our whole conversation. Before I get to that, I want to go back to that moment of the salmon remembering to go to the river. Because sometimes people say it's too late.

[00:56:22] It's too late for nature and such a great reminder that if we will work with nature, it wants to come back. Just like we do. It has that same spirit that Amy and her tribe have. All of nature has that. And if we just let it, it wants to come back. And therefore, give us everything that we need. Pope Francis said a beautiful thing. He said there are two great dangers for humanity. The first is to think that we are completely different than everything else in nature.

[00:56:50] He said the idea that the rest of nature doesn't have the spirit that we have doesn't make sense. Of course, God gave this spirit to everything, including humans. The second thing he said is to think that we aren't different than nature. He said because what makes us different is our ability to see what we're doing, to see the future we're creating, and to choose a different one. So we are all a part of nature.

[00:57:16] But nature gave us one thing the rest of the species don't seem to have, the foresight to see what's coming and to decide on a different future. And as we always say at the end of every one of these podcasts, history is not a destination waiting for us to arrive. What we will one day call history will be the result of what we choose to do collectively and individually today. And we'll see you next time on The Way Forward.

[00:57:43] Thank you for joining us in this episode of The Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast. I'm Jim Burke, the producer. If you found this conversation as enlightening and motivating as we did, please subscribe to our podcast and YouTube channels. Your subscription helps us continue bringing these vital discussions to a broader audience.

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