The next big phase of the Klamath River Dam removal started this week. It's the largest dam removal in U.S. history and is expected to last
If you aren't following the news here in the Pacific Northwest, this is a very, very big deal. Our native salmon numbers have been plummeting over the past century and change. First it was due to overfishing by commercial canneries, then the dams went in and slowed the rivers down and blocked the salmons' migratory paths. More recently climate change is warming the water even more than the slower river flows have, and salmon can easily die of overheating in temperatures we would consider comfortable.
Removing the dams will allow the Klamath River and its tributaries to return to their natural states, making them more hospitable to salmon and other native wildlife (the reservoirs created by the dams were full of non-native fish stocked there over the years.) Not only will this help the salmon thrive, but it makes the entire ecosystem in the region more resilient. The nutrients that salmon bring back from their years in the ocean, stored within their flesh and bones, works its way through the surrounding forest and can be traced in plants several miles from the river.
This is also a victory for the Yurok, Karuk, and other indigenous people who have relied on the Klamath for many generations. The salmon aren't just a crucial source of food, but also deeply ingrained in indigenous cultures. It's a small step toward righting one of the many wrongs that indigenous people in the Americas have suffered for centuries.
Legislation passed last year allows federally recognized tribes to practice cultural burning freely once they reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.
Northern California’s Karuk Tribe, the second largest in California, becomes the first tribe to reach such an agreement.
(Feb. 27, 2025, Noah Haggerty)
Northern California’s Karuk Tribe has for more than a century faced significant restrictions on cultural burning — the setting of intentional fires for both ceremonial and practical purposes, such as reducing brush to limit the risk of wildfires.
That changed this week, thanks to legislation championed by the tribe and passed by the state last year that allows federally recognized tribes in California to burn freely once they reach agreements with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.
The tribe announced Thursday that it was the first to reach such an agreement with the agency.
“Karuk has been a national thought leader on cultural fire,” said Geneva E.B. Thompson, Natural Resources’ deputy secretary for tribal affairs. “So, it makes sense that they would be a natural first partner in this space because they have a really clear mission and core commitment to get this work done.”
In the past, cultural burn practitioners first needed to get a burn permit from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a department within the Natural Resources Agency, and a smoke permit from the local air district.
The law passed in September 2024, SB 310, allows the state government to, respectfully, “get out of the way” of tribes practicing cultural burns, said Thompson.
For the Karuk Tribe, Cal Fire will no longer hold regulatory or oversight authority over the burns and will instead act as a partner and consultant. The previous arrangement, tribal leaders say, essentially amounted to one nation telling another nation what to do on its land — a violation of sovereignty. Now, collaboration can happen through a proper government-to-government relationship.
The Karuk Tribe estimates that, conservatively, its more than 120 villages would complete at least 7,000 burns each year before contact with European settlers. Some may have been as small as an individual pine tree or patch of tanoak trees. Other burns may have spanned dozens of acres.
“When it comes to that ability to get out there and do frequent burning to basically survive as an indigenous community,” said Bill Tripp, director for the Karuk Tribe Natural Resource Department, “one: you don’t have major wildfire threats because everything around you is burned regularly. Two: Most of the plants and animals that we depend on in the ecosystem are actually fire-dependent species.”
The Karuk Tribe’s ancestral territory extends along much of the Klamath River in what is now the Klamath National Forest, where its members have fished for salmon, hunted for deer and collected tanoak acorns for food for thousands of years. The tribe, whose language is distinct from that of all other California tribes, is currently the second largest in the state, having more than 3,600 members.
Trees of life
Early European explorers of California consistently described open, park-like woods dominated by oaks in areas where the forest transitions to a zone mainly of conifers such as pines, fir and cedar.
The park-like woodlands were no accident. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have tended these woods. Oaks are regarded as a “tree of life” because of their many uses. Their acorns provide a nutritious food for people and animals.
Indigenous people have used low-intensity fires to clear litter and underbrush and to nurture the oaks as productive orchards. Burning controls insects and promotes growth of culturally important plants and fungi among the oaks.
Debris, brush and small trees consumed by low-intensity fire.
The history of the government’s suppression of cultural burning is long and violent. In 1850, California passed a law that inflicted any fines or punishments a court found “proper” on cultural burn practitioners.
In a 1918 letter to a forest supervisor, a district ranger in the Klamath National Forest — in the Karuk Tribe’s homeland — suggested that to stifle cultural burns, “the only sure way is to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him.”
For Thompson, the new law is a step toward righting those wrongs.
“I think SB 310 is part of that broader effort to correct those older laws that have caused harm, and really think through: How do we respect and support tribal sovereignty, respect and support traditional ecological knowledge, but also meet the climate and wildfire resiliency goals that we have as a state?” she said.
The devastating 2020 fire year triggered a flurry of fire-related laws that aimed to increase the use of intentional fire on the landscape, including — for the first time — cultural burns.
The laws granted cultural burns exemptions from the state’s environmental impact review process and created liability protections and funds for use in the rare event that an intentional burn grows out of control.
“The generous interpretation of it is recognizing cultural burn practitioner knowledge,” said Becca Lucas Thomas, an ethnic studies lecturer at Cal Poly and cultural burn practitioner with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region. “In trying to get more fire on the ground for wildfire prevention, it’s important that we make sure that we have practitioners who are actually able to practice.”
The new law, aimed at forming government-to-government relationships with Native tribes, can only allow federally recognized tribes to enter these new agreements. However, Thompson said it will not stop the agency from forming strong relationships with unrecognized tribes and respecting their sovereignty.
“Cal Fire has provided a lot of technical assistance and resources and support for those non-federally recognized tribes to implement these burns,” said Thompson, “and we are all in and fully committed to continuing that work in partnership with the non-federally-recognized tribes.”
Cal Fire has helped Lucas Thomas navigate the state’s imposed burn permit process to the point that she can now comfortably navigate the system on her own, and she said Cal Fire handles the tribe’s smoke permits. Last year, the tribe completed its first four cultural burns in over 150 years.
“Cal Fire, their unit here, has been truly invested in the relationship and has really dedicated their resources to supporting us,” said Lucas Thomas, ”with their stated intention of, ‘we want you guys to be able to burn whenever you want, and you just give us a call and let us know what’s going on.’”
Our Trailblazer series continues with Pamela Sanderson, the first Native American author to write contemporary romance about Native characters in Native community. Pamela joins us to talk about her writing journey, about her decision to write and independently publish romance, about the need for more Native American romance in the world. We so enjoyed this conversation, and we’re grateful to Pamela for joining us to tell her story.
Returning prescribed fire to California forests is the focus of a new climate-adaptation plan from the Karuk Tribe, but the federal government will need to play big role.
Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:
The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.
This summer the tribe, one of the largest in the state, released a climate-adaptation plan that calls for a return to a more natural fire regime. According to the plan, using prescribed burns at appropriate times of the year in place of the current policy of fire suppression would reduce the possibility of high-severity fires, which have proven deadly and costly for California in recent years and are expected to worsen as the climate warms.
“Climate adaptation is about restoring human responsibilities and appropriate relationships to the natural world,” says Bill Tripp, deputy director of Karuk Natural Resources Department and a co-author of the plan.
Wildfires have always been a part of the ecology of California, and “Karuk people have long been part of the ecosystem,” says Tripp. Prescribed burning, in particular, has been a key part of cultural practices of Indigenous people for millennia. As the Karuk climate plan explains, “Due in part to these thousands of years of purposeful fire management, the forests of this region are ecologically dependent on fires that are low in heat production, or ‘cooler’ fires.”
But much of that historic burning was snuffed out with the arrival of white settlers and a century-long U.S. government policy of fire suppression. In the Karuk territory and many other areas of the West, ecosystems are adapted to burn frequently, but suppression disrupts those natural processes. Instead, forests end up with dense, homogenous stands of trees, meadows are crowded out and dead materials accumulate on the forest floor — all of which can contribute to high-intensity fires that are now being supersized by warmer, drier forest conditions.
The Karuk people hail from the rugged and remote Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California, along the Klamath and Salmon rivers. Most of their aboriginal territory of just over 1 million acres is currently managed by the federal government as national forest, although the tribe never ceded the land.
The ECOreport reposts story of how the Klamath Watershed Salvage Logging Hits Roadblock
Originally Published on the Daily KOS
by Dan Bacher
In the early morning hours before daybreak on May 2 in the fire-impacted conifer forest near Seiad Valley in the Klamath River watershed, 27 people including Tribal youth, river advocates and forest activists blocked the road leading to the Klamath National…
Karuk Tribe & Allies Add Klamath National Forest to Westside Lawsuit
Karuk Tribe & Allies Add Klamath National Forest to Westside Lawsuit
BY NATIVE NEWS ONLINE STAFF MAR 2016Published March 20, 2016HAPPY CAMP, CALIFORNIA – Today the Karuk Tribe, along with the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center (KS Wild), Center for Biological Diversity, and Klamath Riverkeeper, expanded their complaint over the Westside Post Fire logging plan to include the United States Forest Service and the…
The ECOreport reposts the story of why the Karuk Lawsuit Expands To Include Forest Service
Originally Published on the Fishsniffer & Daily KOS
By by Dan Bacher
The Karuk Tribe and four environmental groups today expanded their complaint challenging the Westside Post Fire logging plan to include the United States Forest Service and Klamath National Forest over allegations that they violated…
Conservationists And Karuk Tribe Sue to Protect Wild Salmon
Conservationists And Karuk Tribe Sue to Protect Wild Salmon
The ECOreport reposts the story of how Conservationists and Karuk Tribe Sue to Protect Wild Salmon
Originally Published on the Fish Sniffer
By Dan Bacher
The Karuk Tribe and conservation groups yesterday filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a post-fire logging plan in the Klamath National Forest. The press release was issued just a day after federal and state fishery managers releasef…
