“We are reclaiming our river, reclaiming our sport,” said Williams.
“We are getting justice,” Wiki, who is from the Yurok Tribe, added. “And making sure that my people and all the people on the Klamath River can live how we’re supposed to.”
The Klamath River runs deep in the cultures of the native peoples living in its basin, who historically used dugout canoes to travel along it. They view it as a living person, a relative, who they can depend on — and in turn protect.
“It’s our greatest teacher, our family member,” said Williams, who is from the Karuk Tribe, which occupies lands along the middle course of the Klamath. “We revolve ceremonies around it, like when the salmon start running (the annual migration from the sea back to freshwater rivers to spawn), we know it’s time to start a family.”
Historically, it was also a lifeline, providing them with an abundance of fish. The Klamath was once the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast of the US. But between 1918 and 1966, electric utility company California Oregon Power Company (which later became PacifiCorp), built a series of hydroelectric dams along the river’s course, which cut off the upstream pathway for migrating salmon, and the tribes lost this cultural and commercial resource.
For decades, native people — such as the Karuk and Yurok tribes — demanded the removal of the dams and restoration of the river. But it was only in 2002, after low water levels caused a disease outbreak that killed more than 30,000 fish, that momentum really started to build for their cause.
Twenty years later, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finally approved a plan to remove four dams on the lower Klamath River. This was when Paddle Tribal Waters was set up by the global organization Ríos to Rivers to reconnect native children to the ancient river. Believing that native peoples ought to be the first to descend the newly restored river, the program started by teaching local kids from the basin how to paddle in whitewater. Wiki and Williams were among them — neither had kayaked before then.
In the fall of 2024, the last of the four dams was removed – completing what has been called “the world’s largest dam removal effort” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Upriver (beyond where the Klamath River technically begins), two smaller non-hydroelectric dams remain, where the paddlers had to disembark and carry the kayaks overland; there are currently no plans to remove them despite an ongoing campaign.
Wiki recalled feeling giddy when she heard that the last dam had fallen. “So many of our elders and our aunties and uncles… fought so hard to get these dams down,” she said. “It was a really long, hard fight, and a lot of people thought — even my grandma thought — they would never see the dams come down in their lifetime.
“So, for us to paddle down the river… it’s very surreal. I think we’re all just so grateful, knowing that the salmon can finally go from the mouth to the headwaters, and that we can go from the headwaters to the mouth too.”
Weston Boyles, founder and director of Ríos to Rivers, who is also on the journey, said that it was critical that native people lead the first descent.
“Historically, ‘first descents’ have been a colonial idea: outsiders staking claims on waterways that indigenous communities have navigated for millennia,” he said. “We’re reclaiming a stolen narrative. It matters because those waters flow through ancestral homelands, and these young paddlers are reasserting sovereignty, healing cultural trauma, and honoring their tribes’ deep connections to the river.”
“Remarkable resilience”
The ecological impact is also something to celebrate. Within a few days of the final dam being removed, chinook salmon (the largest of the Pacific salmon species) were seen swimming past the former location of Iron Gate Dam in northern California — a spot where no fish had passed in 60 years, said Dave Coffman, director of northern California and southern Oregon for Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the company working on the Klamath’s restoration.
“We were hopeful that within a couple of years we would see salmon return to Southern Oregon. It took the salmon two weeks,” he told CNN. “No one saw that coming — the response has exceeded our wildest hopes. It demonstrates the remarkable resilience of these fish: if we give them a chance, they will make their way back home.”
But there is no denying the landscape has changed dramatically since before the dams and it will take years to recover, according to Coffman. RES is working to accelerate the natural process by reshaping channels, excavating sediment, planting billions of native seeds along the riverbanks, and even using helicopters to place downed trees in tributaries to provide crucial cover for fish and wildlife.
“Sometimes we give nature a gentle nudge, but sometimes we give it a great big shove in the right direction,” says Coffman.
Wiki and Williams have already witnessed the results. “It’s been so cool to paddle through where the old reservoirs were and see all the new growth,” said Williams. “I got to see it earlier this year and it was kind of looking sad, and then I paddled through a couple days ago and it looks like a completely different river.”
After completing the epic journey, the girls will go their separate ways. Williams will head off to college in fall and Wiki is starting her final year of high school. But despite living on different sections of the river and being from different tribes, they are confident their paths will cross again. Both strongly believe their futures are grounded in the Klamath.
Williams dreams of coming back in her college breaks and becoming a paddle instructor, while Wiki sees herself doing advocacy work for her community.
“We are celebrating (now), but there’s still so much work to be done in the United States and also globally around dams and dam removal,” said Wiki. “(I want to) create a larger global community.”
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