On Friday, a caravan of cars streamed out of Chiloquin, winding around the long eastern shore of upper Klamath Lake and filling up the streets of downtown Klamath Falls. Horns blared, drawing attention to the dozens of messages written across car windows and signs.
I was four cars back, filed in between two trucks. Behind me, “Stop Stealing Water” was scrawled across one side, “save the C’waam and Koptu,” said another. In front of me, Natalie Ball, a co-organizer of the rally and a newly elected Councilmember of the Klamath Tribes, maneuvered a large flag from the back up a white pickup. “Honor the treaty!” she yelled, periodically, as the caravan moved through main street.
Friday’s rally focused on the imperiled C’waam and Koptu, two endemic suckerfish whose populations have steadily declined as water availability and quality have worsened in the upper Klamath basin. “We want to bring awareness to the fate of the C’waam and Koptu,” said Tribal member Charlie Wright, who co-organized the event. “They fed our people for a millennia. They can’t speak, so we are their voice.”
The fish, protected under the endangered species act and treaty rights, sustained the Klamath Tribes for thousands of years. But due to a century of extraction from the basin’s ecosystem, their unique habitat is unable to support once abundant populations. Large trees that held streambanks together — protecting the water from sediment runoff — have been clearcut and then trampled on by cattle herds. In addition, the watershed has been managed primarily for industrial agriculture, including groundwater mining and large diversions from streams and rivers.
During the one of the county’s driest year in over a century, Klamath Irrigation District, which delivers irrigation water to basin farmers, recently voted against receiving federal drought relief and in favor of pursuing “all available avenues which are legal, moral, and ethical to acquire and deliver irrigation water.”
“We remain incensed by the United States’ failure to enforce its own law,” the Klamath Tribe’s leaders said in a press release response. “We have to wonder what would happen if, as Native people, we engaged in such blatantly unlawful action?”
At the rally, the caravan of trucks and cars filed into the parking lot of the headgate of the federally owned irrigation project. A circle formed outside the chain-link fence, and members of the tribe took turns sharing speeches, poem, and song.
“I’d like for folks to have a deeper understanding, to understand history,” said Clay Dumont, the chairman of the Klamath Tribes, pointing out that too much gets made of the ‘conflict.’ “This is our homeland, we were the first people, and we will defend it.”
“We want to fight for our fish. We don’t want to fight against other people,” said Charlie Wright later, after the event. “This was about coming together, because collaboration is everything.”
