The Water Remembers
Amy Bowers Cordalis
Little Brown & Co., $30
In September 2002, between 34,000 and 78,000 adult Chinook salmon perished in the Klamath River, located within the Yurok Reservation in Northern California. This crisis was triggered by the U.S. government’s diversion of river water for agricultural use during a drought. The result was dangerously low water levels and high temperatures, alongside an influx of toxic blue-green algae from the reservoirs, creating an ideal environment for “ich,” a destructive gill rot disease, leading to one of the most significant fish kills in U.S. history.
This ecological disaster sparked an Indigenous-led initiative to remove the dams that had obstructed the river, preventing fish migrations and degrading water quality for over a century. In The Water Remembers, Amy Bowers Cordalis, a member of the Yurok tribe, activist, and attorney, offers a personal perspective on her family and the tribe’s lengthy struggle to rejuvenate the Klamath and safeguard their cultural identity — a fight that culminated in the largest dam removal and river restoration effort ever undertaken.
The Yurok community holds a strong belief in their obligation to coexist harmoniously with nature. They actively care for the Klamath and its ecosystems, receiving nourishment physically and spiritually from the river. This sacred relationship is echoed in Yurok narratives, as Cordalis notes, which teach that the demise of the Klamath salmon and river equates to the demise of the Yurok people.
Cordalis’ deep admiration for the river, the salmon, and the art of fishing permeates every page of this memoir. She captures the exhilaration felt by her and her fellow Yurok Nation members as salmon return from the Pacific Ocean to spawn in the Klamath River. Fishing from a boat, with gill net in hand, enveloped by trees, water, and wildlife, becomes a spiritual ritual.
Every page is infused with narratives of historical wrongs. For almost two centuries, colonization and genocide have endangered the Yurok’s way of life, from the theft of their land in the 19th century by the United States to California’s mid-20th century prohibition on Yurok fishing, which supported non-Indigenous logging and fishing interests.
Through these challenges, Cordalis’ family has shown resilience. Her great-grandmother, Geneva Mattz, along with her sons, fished and sold illicit salmon during the fishing ban. In the late 1960s, her great-uncle Ray Mattz initiated a legal battle against California for infringing upon his Indigenous rights, a case he won in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. The fish kill of 2002 reignited their legacy of resistance. At the time, a 22-year-old Cordalis saw the devastation firsthand as an intern in the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department. Her haunting depictions of lifeless, decaying salmon on riverbanks resonate with the Yurok community’s emotional response to what she labels an “ecocide.”
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This experience set Cordalis on her journey to law school, eventually becoming the general counsel for the Yurok Nation and a pivotal figure in the groundbreaking “Undam the Klamath” movement. After two decades of protests and delicate negotiations involving tribal, corporate, and federal entities, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decided to remove the dams and restore the Klamath River in 2022.
Currently, the river flows unobstructed, with the last dam completely taken out by October 2024. That year marked the first opportunity for salmon to migrate and spawn further up the river, past the former dam sites, in over a century. Restoration efforts for the Klamath Basin’s ecosystems are set to continue until 2028.
The Water Remembers stands as an impactful and deeply personal narrative detailing a unique environmental triumph — one that shows the potential for cooperation between Indigenous peoples, corporations, and government bodies, despite their differing motivations, to restore a critical river ecosystem. While the book illustrates the Yurok people’s quest for justice, it also serves as a beacon of hope, suggesting that ecological solutions to climate challenges are attainable. “All humans carry within them ancestral wisdom about what it was once like to inhabit a healthy planet,” Cordalis asserts. “The remedy still exists, within each of us. We have the power to restore equilibrium. We can rejuvenate our world.”
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