The Long View

An abyss of remoteness separates contemporaries from the geohistory that shaped the Klamath Basin. Although geography is shaped by geological events, it challenges the imagination to think in terms of geohistory. “The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future,” observed biologist E. O. Wilson. “For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring—even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal.” It is precisely a larger awareness of place and a longer view of processes of change that these times require, as people become increasingly able to make changes on a geological, Earth-altering scale.

Such changes have occurred and are occurring in the Klamath Basin. Today, it is clear that the farmers are not the only ones who have suffered from competing demands on water and other resources. For their descendants to maintain their way of life in one of the last places where family farms still exist on the continent, for fishing people to prosper off the coast as well as along the river, for tribes to maintain cultural practices that are inextricably bound with the wildlife of the region, a shared vision must come into focus. That vision, while requiring imagination, would incorporate multiple perspectives that have reality in common rather than myth.

The alternative is a future that almost no one within the Klamath Basin wants—a place whose rivers, lakes, mountains, and clear skies are merely scenery, no longer sustaining an abundance of life; whose soil is a paved platform for residential developments where people have lost their connection with the past and with life itself even here, a place where that connection can be readily grasped. Such a future would take from the people of the Klamath their deepest heritage. Those who know the Klamath as a river in time understand that the links between Euramerican history and Indigenous history and between human history and geohistory are visible and relatively unbroken here.

The western mountains—known as the Klamath Mountains, the Siskiyous, and the Trinity Alps—were, according to geologists, once part of the Sierra Nevada. Probably originating as an island chain in the South Pacific, these mountains came to California on a tectonic plate that carried them into a slow-motion collision with the plate that bears North America. Naturalist David Rains Wallace describes the Klamath ranges as “an exceptionally rich storehouse of evolutionary stories, one of the rare places where past and present have not been severed as sharply as in most of North America, where glaciation, desertification, urbanization, and other ecological upheavals have been muted by a combination of rugged terrain and relatively benign climate.”

East of these mountains rise the less wizened Cascades, with Lassen Peak and Mount Shasta at the southern end of a chain of magnificent snow-topped cones that continues for 600 miles into Alaska. The volcanoes are juveniles among mountains, having emerged within the last million years. The neighboring mountains in the chain are also newcomers, geologically speaking. A mix of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rock, they are about 25 million years old.

The Pacific Northwest arc of the volcanic Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific Ocean helps to explain the extraordinary biodiversity of the Klamath Mountains west of the Cascades, where exists, according to the National Geographic Society, “one of the four richest temperate conifer forests in the world.” The place is a refuge. Some of its species come from lava-strewn highlands to the east and north. The sulphurous fumes that spew from Shasta’s peak, the lava beds that border Tule Lake, the black-glass mountain near Medicine Lake, and Crater Lake, that emerald within a cinder cone in Oregon, are reminders of violent geological events in the region’s past. These cataclysms include the explosion that blew the top off Mount Mazama about 7,000 years ago and the less spectacular eruption of Mount Lassen in 1915 that made fauna flee and flora migrate from lands riven by molten rock.

Ice as well as fire drove creatures to the Klamath. When a thousand-foot glacial sheet covered Puget Sound during the Ice Ages, many species, plants and animals alike, migrated to the forested mountains in the south. The combination of complex mountainous terrain and temperate climate provided a multitude of niches for newcomers to inhabit.

Salmonids evolved within almost all of that region’s aquatic habitats—from the ocean to the estuary and main stem of the Klamath River into the tributaries and creeks, up to the lakes and streams of the headwaters. Salmon, wrote Jim Lichatowich, are “woven deep into the fabric of the Northwest ecosystem.” They are a prime source of its abundance of life. Bringing nutrients from the ocean into the river, they are not only food for people, bears, eagles, and other fish-lovers but also nitrogen for forest soils, nourishing the growth of plants.

The power of the myth of the salmon may derive from the fact that wild salmon spread out across the Pacific Northwest about the same time that human beings did, at the end of the last Ice Age. So fundamental have salmon been for the peoples of the Klamath that the Yurok word for salmon, nepu, means food itself, “that which is eaten,” and the Karuk word am is both a noun and a verb—“salmon” and “to eat.” Both the Yurok and Karuk creation stories speak of a divine being who gave the people salmon, along with other foods, for their survival.

Since the last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago, human beings have traveled along the Klamath and its tributaries; and many, finding an abundance of food, have stayed. The three major tribes of the Klamath River and its major tributary, the Trinity, have languages of three distinct linguistic subfamilies: Algonkian, Hokan, and Athapaskan. That suggests that the ancestors of the Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk made separate migrations, at different times and from different places. The language of the Shasta Tribe was native to Southern Oregon and the Klamath Basin. They may have been the earliest inhabitants. Over millennia, the Shasta learned to live with people whose languages were entirely different from theirs, until, in the nineteenth century, English-speaking miners and settlers waged a “war of extermination” against them.

During many centuries of cultural diffusion, the tribes of the Klamath developed a cycle of annual and biannual ceremonies. Karuks call these events, which include the Jump Dance and White Deerskin Dance, pikiawish, which means “fixing the world.” Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber called them “the World Renewal cult system.” Conducted on sacred grounds beside the Klamath and Trinity rivers, these dances, performed over several days, ritually bring the world back into balance. The coordination of salmon fishing with these ceremonies—the building of weirs at special spots on the Klamath and Trinity, then taking them down after ten days so that large numbers of fish could continue upstream—is additional evidence of the tribes’ long habitation of the area.

Non-Indigenous people have lived on the Klamath for a comparatively short time. The Yuroks of the lower river were among the last of North America’s Native people to encounter non-Indians. In part due to the lateness of this first contact, which did not occur until the 1840s, a Yurok village on the estuary, Rekwoi, has remained continuously inhabited from times beyond the reach of memory to the present.

Although the peoples of the Klamath Basin have a bioregion in common, they do not perceive a common history. In this situation, myths of the Other hinder a mutual recognition of reality. Yet with the sharing of oral histories, the telling of narratives linked to place, and ongoing inquiry, the past can become open to all. That is particularly the case in the Klamath Basin, whose history gives another dimension to Wallace’s idea that past and present have not been severed as sharply here as elsewhere on the continent. Only two long lifetimes separate contemporaries in the early twenty-first century from the era when non-Indians arrived as explorers, gold-seekers, and settlers. The people who transformed this region by mining, canning, logging, ranching, and farming, and by building roads, bridges, and dams, not only left letters, memoirs, and other writings but also photographs, sound recordings, and films. From those sources as well as from the land itself, which bears its own signs of the changing relationship between humanity and nature, come a long view of history and a perspective on potentialities for the future.

What members of all Klamath Basin communities hope the future will bring is renewal. Some put their emphasis on habitat restoration, others on economic revival, and many consider those goals to be interdependent. Already the Klamath is a river of renewal in several respects. Every river renews itself through the annual and perpetual water cycle driven by gravity, climate, and the energy of the sun. Going to any wild river, one experiences refreshment of the senses and a renewed connectedness with life. Any salmon-producing river is a spectacle of renewal as runs come in, drawing birds, otters, bears, and other wildlife; enriching the forests with nutrients brought from the sea; attracting people who like to fish back to the water; and reviving the industries and activities that support them. 

When Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk tribal members celebrate the return of the salmon with their cycle of ceremonies, they dance to renew the delicate balance between land and water, between the diversity of life and the unity of spirit that their world depends on. Were the Klamath Basin to be restored ecologically as well as economically, its renewal would deserve the admiration of the world at large, for this project would revive the crucial connection between humanity and nature.

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