Amy Bowers Cordalis

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

And there's concrete flying, there's rebar flying, and I literally felt intergenerational trauma of five generations flow through my leg in the force of that stomp on that detonator. And I write about this in the book, I think my ancestors are feeling a lot better.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today's guest is Amy Bowers Cordalis, a member of the Yurok Tribe and the tribe's former general counsel. Amy led the effort to un-dam the Klamath River, one of the largest river restoration projects in the world. At its heart, this is a conversation about balance, about how saving nature can also be about saving ourselves. The Klamath, one of the most important salmon breeding grounds on earth has often been a battle: a battle between economic, cultural, and environmental interests. But Amy reminds us that it's really about something deeper: what it means to live in harmony with the natural world and how the trade-offs we face are more complex and more vital than we might think. Amy's new book, "The Water Remembers," tells the story of a struggle that spanned generations. In our conversation, she offers the perspective we urgently need today—one that sees conservation not as protecting nature apart from us, but as restoring our place within it. I think you'll find this one deeply meaningful.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

The Yurok reservation, and this was like the eighties and nineties, was still very much recovering from colonization and feeling very deeply the legacy impacts, which is poverty, domestic abuse, substance abuse, violence, and also the Yurok reservation has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered indigenous women. I remember when I was growing up, my grandma saying, "stay close to me or you'll get stolen." My parents chose very strategically to not raise us on the reservation at that time because it was just dangerous. And that's sad.

Ted Roosevelt V:

You've talked about in your early twenties wanting to honor your own truths while also honoring your family's legacy. Was there a moment that cemented your path forward?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

I knew I was very rooted in salmon fishing. My dad's a hardcore fisherman and fishing always had this strong role in my life. The Klamath River is a beautiful, powerful River. It historically was the third largest salmon-producing river in the whole lower 48 states. And I had an internship with the Yurok tribe. I was a fisheries technician, so I was on the River every day, and this was 2002, and that was the year that the Yurok Reservation suffered the largest fish kill in American history, where about 70,000 adult salmon died within the Klamath River, the lower 30 or so miles, which is all within the Yurok Reservation. And the River was extremely polluted from the dams. And so you had really low, polluted waters, hot temperatures, a bunch of fish coming back, and it was basically like the perfect storm. A fish disease spread throughout the entire salmon run called "ich" and it killed them. So it was this moment for me where I remember being in the tribal fisheries boat and I'm seeing these dead fish surrounding me and feeling very helpless, like I'm witnessing the death of my tribe right in front of my eyes because we are dependent upon salmon for our livelihood, and maybe you relate to this, maybe you've had an experience with your ancestors. I felt like my great grandmother really just kind of came to me and was like, you have to continue our fight. You have to protect this. And it was a very real moment, like goosebumps, the whole thing, and it changed the whole course of my life.

Ted Roosevelt V:

For listeners that might be thinking like salmon is just a species in the river, there is a deep interconnectivity both with your tribe but also with the entire ecosystem. Salmon are nourishing everything in that river.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

For Yurok, in our worldview, we have always been a part of nature and our role is to live in balance with nature and to actually steward and tend nature so that it replenishes each year and the salmon support all the people up and down the Klamath Basin. I mean, let's just start in the ocean. The southern Oregon resident orca whale population is highly dependent upon the salmon runs. The Coho salmon are on the endangered species list, and also the orca whales are on the endangered species list, that southern Oregon resident population, because there is not enough salmon for them to eat in order to really thrive. And then you go in the River when salmon spawn, they die and then their carcasses fuel all the area, the riparian areas, because the nutrients that they bring in from the ocean are then carried up into other ecosystems up the River. So you can imagine then 70,000 salmon dead floating down the River, and eventually their bodies started lining the banks of the River three or four layers deep. They got caught in eddies, and then eventually they started rotting and it smelled like a war zone. So it just seemed like we were witnessing the end of the world, the end of our culture, the end of life on planet earth. It was like what was next? What was going to be next? So...

Ted Roosevelt V:

I mean—a literal sign of the apocalypse. I mean, it's right up there.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

It was almost biblical. You would literally see these adult chinook salmon that range from 12 to 25 pounds, so big salmon.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Yeah.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Not little salmon, big salmon. And they would come up out of the water and almost be gasping for air. And then they would go back down and then maybe a minute or two later you would see them float up to the surface of the water, dead. And not knowing what happened—we didn't know. And so it just felt so helpless. This River has always supported salmon. So how could this be happening here?

Ted Roosevelt V:

There were four dams on the Klamath. They were largely used for hydropower, and they were at least partly, if not entirely responsible for the 2002 apocalyptic situation. But there were a lot of smaller incidents along the way, and there still is quite a bit of algae in the Klamath that is the result of some of these dams. You go back to law school, you become the chief counsel for the Yurok tribe, and you start this project. Walk us through that journey if you can.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

After the 2002 fish kill, there were, and I would call it hordes of people who were motivated to help save the Klamath. It was Indigenous peoples throughout the whole Klamath Basin. It was federal and state officials and scientists and permitting people. There were protests. Indigenous peoples went all over the world—Scotland, Omaha, Portland, Oregon—basically protesting at the power company shareholders' meetings to urge the company to support dam removal. But then also what happened was that the legal proceeding in FERC to relicense the dams then gave the tribal communities, the tribal governments really anyone interested an opportunity to participate in this legal hearing. And for the pro-dam removal advocates, it gave us a legal path forward to dam removal, and we were able to negotiate the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement, the KHSA, which was an agreement to remove the dams. And also there was a companion agreement called the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement that was going to deal with the water issues and habitat restoration. It would've really healed the whole River because we would've had dam removal, we would've had enough water for farmers and for fish. And then there would've been a bunch of restoration projects done. And sadly, this was moving through 2010, 2014, 2016-ish. And that's when the Tea Party basically took over the House side of the Republican party and they would not pass a bill that authorized dam removal because in America, we build dams, we don't take 'em out. So essentially from 2016 through 2022, we were actively in FERC arguing for dam removal.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Well, I think what's interesting is that this is kind of the classic, gradually then all of a sudden story, and that's, you know, 20 years of nothing or seemingly nothing, and then all of a sudden you get to 2022, you do get approval—I assume from FERC—to have these dams removed and they come down., I would say very quickly after that.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

I mean in the context of the River's life, it was like a blink of an eye. And there was also the previous generation of Indigenous peoples on the Klamath, they'd been working too. For Indigenous peoples, this was like a hundred and some multi-generational fight. And that's in part why I felt it was really important to write my book the way I did, was to be able to share with the world that dam removal didn't just happen in even 20 years. It was really a multi-generational effort that started since the arrival of non-Indians. So to have that happen was this massive, massive success. But yeah, it happened super fast. But that's because we were prepared.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And I don't mean to imply that the US government moved quickly on this by saying that they actually came down quickly at the end—they moved extremely slowly. And I think your book starts 170 years prior. I mean, it's like this is a long, long battle, but when they do come down, what is the feeling?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

It was so powerful to see that happen. There are four dams. We took them out almost simultaneously. Between Copco one and Copco two dam, the River had been completely dewatered and they blew a hole in both those dams to send some water through for the first time. And we got to gather and watch the River rise.

So here comes this wave. It was the most powerful wave. It was like Mother Nature had just released this life force that had been pounding on this cement wall for a hundred years to get loose. You're crying, just euphoric, kind of laughing. You can't even believe it. So then later on, and this was on Copco two to remove the remaining part of the dam, they blew 'em up, and it was my birthday and I was like, I can't imagine a better thing to do on my birthday than go watch one of these dams be blown up. And so I go down, and one of my dear, dear colleagues, he was like, you want to blow up a dam? It's like, oh my God, do I want to blow up a dam?

Ted Roosevelt V:

Yeah!

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

I was like, yes! I want to blow up a dam! And we do the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, fire in the hole! And I got to yell all this and then stomp with my foot that red detonator and then boom—[laughter] and there's concrete flying, there's rebar flying. And I literally felt intergenerational trauma of five generations flow through my leg in the force of that stomp on that detonator. And I write about this in the book, I think my ancestors are feeling a lot better. I think our ancestors, we have that connection with them, and I feel like we've released through all of this.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I love that this journey started with your ancestors reaching out to you, your great-grandmother reaching out to you in 2002, and that you felt their presence at the culmination of the journey as well. I don't think a lot of people get to experience that.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

I'm dying to ask you if you've ever had that experience with your ancestors. You also have environmental champions in your background.

Ted Roosevelt V:

It's probably complicated for a lot of reasons, in that Theodore Roosevelt's a caricature in a lot of ways. He's a larger than life human being. And I mean, I feel deep connectivity to nature, and I do feel that that's something that's been passed down to me through generations, and that very much resonates with me. In your book, "The Water Remembers," I noticed that throughout the book, you capitalize "River" when talking about the Klamath. Can you explain why you did that?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

For us, the River is like an ancient relative that we have had a symbiotic relationship with since our creation. And so we treat it that way. I wanted readers to really, through the book, come into Yurok culture and join me on the River bar next to a campfire with the gill net out and listen to the story. And in order to do that through writing, you need to be able to manipulate the English language the best it can be to reflect Yurok values. And that is hard, right? In the Yurok language, we have concepts and ways of thinking and words that don't translate. But one thing I could do is to elevate the importance of the River by capitalizing "river." And for Yurok, the River, along with the planet, is a relative. It's not a resource. In Yurok law, and this was while I was general counsel out at Yurok, declared personhood rights for the Klamath River, and it was the first River in North America to have personhood rights. And what that does is essentially increase the level of legal protection for the River to put it on par with a human, and it's like a higher standard of protection than what is currently offered. So in the book, I capitalized River because it is a way of showing the reverence that we have for it. Also, the River is a character in the book. So that's why I did that.

Ted Roosevelt V:

It makes me a little bit sad to hear you describe it as, and I know you don't mean it this way, but to have it sort of as like—isolated to the Yurok, I'm sure other indigenous communities, because it is a really important message for everybody to understand that you can try to move away from nature, but it's going to end badly.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

And it has ended badly.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And it has ended badly.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Right? I mean, we're in a climate crisis. The afterward of the book, I essentially make a call that all of us have that obligation to live in balance with the natural world and never take more than what we need. So for me, a big part of writing the book was being able to share that different perspective and that different relationship with the world. Because you don't have to be be an indigenous person from the Klamath to decide that you're going to live in balance with the natural world. We can all decide that. It's just a choice about how we live our daily lives and then also how we do our business. So I'm so glad you asked that question because you are absolutely right. It's not just limited to Yurok people, this notion of living in balance. We all could live that way.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And I wonder how you think about the competing interest component. So you talk about farmers that need water to be able to farm, and I think they see it as their livelihood. I mean, it's a big reset for our country in particular to start thinking about living in balance with the natural world.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

So to the farmers, and we've had these conversations for, I don't know, 10 years with the farming community about sustainability and also adjusting expectations about what is possible. And it's also about adjusting your values and your worldview rather than be in conflict. And so what that means is, one, this deep empathy for the other's way of life

And almost a vulnerability about, here's what this means for me, but then also accepting compromise on all ends so that we can get to that more sustainable worldview. So that's what I would say to them. But what's interesting is also we're getting to a place with technology, with science so that we can produce sufficient crops without as much water or land, whatever it might be. And so what I think about it is we need to leave behind this culture of scarcity. We are really in this culture of the haves and the have nots. And oftentimes it's communities like mine, BIPOC communities, marginalized communities, lower incomes that don't have—we don't have to think about it that way. If we can get out of that box and start thinking instead, how do we collectively work together to create a culture of abundance and getting back to using our resources, to using the gifts from this planet in more efficient and more effective ways, which does mean looking at different ways of doing business.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Something that's been getting incorporated way too late, but more into conservation conversations is tribal knowledge.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Yes.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And we're starting to realize that there's huge value in tribal knowledge that is maybe not well understood by the scientific community. And so it had been overlooked for so long. Are we still just only scratching the surface of it? Where are we on that?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Traditional knowledge is key to finding solutions to the current climate crisis. And here's why, is: essentially Indigenous peoples have thousands and thousands of years of anecdotal knowledge about how ecosystems worked. Why would you leave that out of the analysis? And the reason it's been excluded is because historically traditional knowledge, tribal values, tribal ways of life were thought to be going extinct. The role of the US here, and that the official federal policies towards Indians was initially genocide, then it turned to assimilation, and then it wasn't until 1975 that the federal policy changed to self-determination to try to support tribal cultures. But that history essentially meant that the federal government, state governments, were working toward ridding tribal people, tribal ways of life, tribal knowledge from the planet. And so now we are entering an era where it's clear that tribal nations are here to stay. And in the Klamath Dam removal situation, it was really the indigenous leaders who knew how the River, how the fish, how even the riparian areas, how it all worked together pre dams, because they had the myths, they had stories on how everything worked together. They knew with utmost certainty that if we remove those dams, that nature would start healing itself.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And there's a very specific example in this case where with the dams, there were a lot of people saying that the fish were not going to return upstream. And so the last dam came down in the fall of '24, I think is right?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Yep.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So it hasn't been a lot of time. And what's happened with the fish?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

Oh, the fish are jumping for joy. They're spawning, they're coming back in numbers that no one expected. I mean, it was remarkable. So I mean, just imagine these fish for the last hundred years have been trying to get back to their historical spawning grounds that they just couldn't access anymore and they died trying. So then last year they cleared out the rest of the dam and the timing of it worked. So that almost like three weeks from when the River was cleared and reconnected, fall adult Chinook salmon came and went into creeks at tributaries that they had spawned and historically went all the way up into Oregon. And then more came thousands and thousands of salmon just went home and did what they've been trying to do for generations, which was spawn and generate. And that's also why the book is called "The Water Remembers," because it does, right. It remembers what it was like to flow freely and it remembers what it's supposed to do. And also so do we as humans. We remember what it was like to be on a healthy planet, living close to nature. And I think there's a big piece of us that are all trying to get back to that.

And one of the most exciting things post-dam removal is there are people doing this kind of work around the world collectively. We need to elevate those stories. So does become a movement so that people have hope that we can live differently, we can do this differently, and so that we feel empowered by one another. So the book is invitation to think a different way. And I also hope to give people hope that we don't have to continue to exploit and to destroy nature. We can collectively as humans have a different relationship with nature and use it in different ways that will help it heal and that will heal ourselves in doing so. And that's certainly what we have seen and experienced on the Klamath.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Amy, we ask this question of everyone, and you are really the living embodiment of it in a lot of ways. What does it mean to you to be a good citizen?

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

I love this question. It means living in balance with myself, with my community, my tribe, my professional life, my family, and with the earth and treating the earth as a relative, not a resource. And also making sure that my daily practices reflect self-love and love for my family, for my tribe, my community. And it's about being authentic. It's about taking what the creator has given us in this current manifestation of life and trying to create things that make the world better for people and for the earth.

Ted Roosevelt V:

One, I want to flag this concept that's come up a couple times, which is this idea of a relationship with nature as opposed to nature as a resource. I just think that's so fundamentally important and is lost in a lot of corners of our society right now. But thank you so much for joining us today. I really, really appreciated this conversation.

Amy Bowers Cordalis:

It's really an honor to be in relationship with you and this podcast. And thank you for allowing the time to be here, to have this discussion, and thank you for your family's work. Really just honored to be here. Wokhlew.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Amy, it was an honor to have you. Thank you for sharing your story, your passion, and your insights. They are so important, and I especially appreciate your enthusiasm for our final question on good citizenship. Listeners, the book is out now. Please pick up a copy of "The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life." It's an inspiring story that traces Amy's fight alongside the journey of her ancestors and their enduring connection to the River. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the future of storytelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.