Tribes Say Injustice Flows With Water for Farmers

Just shy of the Oregon border, not far from fields of dust and weeds, someone has planted a homemade sign. “Call 911, some sucker stole our water.”

It is one of the angry jokes of this angry season in the Klamath Basin, where the needs of two endangered species of suckerfish, along with a threatened downstream salmon, have forced shut federal irrigation gates.

The joke isn’t funny to Allen Foreman, the chairman of the 3,300-member Klamath Tribes. The big fish with the inglorious name fed his people for thousands of years. Suckers were once so thick and plentiful in the basin’s rivers and lakes that their backs formed silver blankets in the water.

Now the basin’s Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Snake Indians catch only one sucker a year, in the early spring. They cremate the fish in a religious ceremony, returning its ashes to the river to encourage plentiful runs.

Spurred by drought and the requirements of the federal Endangered Species Act, this summer’s water cutoff has often been portrayed at its most simplistic: bottom-feeding fish versus farmers.

But for the tribes of the high desert basin straddling the California-Oregon border, the water issue is part of a crusade to regain some of their former natural riches.

When irrigators sued last spring to stop the water shut-off, the tribes intervened, arguing for it. “We’ve got to undo the damage of the past 100 years,” said Foreman.

The Endangered Species Act is like a gas gauge, he said. It’s an indicator. You can throw it away but that won’t fill up the tank. It won’t restore a once-thriving system of lakes, marshes and rivers that has for a century been drained, dammed and diverted for irrigation and flood control.

The tribes’ support of the water cutoff has enraged the basin’s farmers, who raise hay, cattle and potatoes in small family operations.

“I think the tribe has created a tremendous amount of ill will within the agricultural community that will not be forgotten for a very long time,” observed Debra Crisp, executive director of the Tulelake Growers Assn.

The greeting on her home answering machine makes her feelings clear. Crisp invites callers to leave a message--as long as they are not radical environmentalists, spineless bureaucrats or tribal council members.

“Right now, the [tribes’] position--whether they realize it or not--is to eliminate the ag community,” she said.

Pointing out that only a portion of basin farmers lost water deliveries this year, tribal leaders say that is not their aim.

Tribes Also Lost Resources

Moreover, they say they can appreciate the farmers’ lament of ruin. Basin tribes are painfully familiar with the language of dispossession. The federal water project on which the farms depend helped destroy their way of life, they say.

With irrigation came farms and the loss of wildlife that had sustained the tribes.

“We’ve lost resources for years and years and years,” said Foreman, who at 54 is old enough to remember when sucker runs filled the basin’s small rivers.

His voice carries a hint of bitterness when he notes the millions of dollars in federal disaster aid flowing to basin farmers whose fields were left cracked and dry this summer.

“When we lost our salmon fishery we didn’t get any compensation,” Foreman said. “When we lost our sucker fishery we didn’t get any compensation.”

So central were the waterways to basin Indians that the native name for the Klamath tribe meant “people of the lake” or “people of the marsh.”

They used marsh tule reeds for baskets and clothing, hunted the abundant waterfowl with arrows designed to skip across lake surfaces, gathered water lily seeds and caught salmon and suckers, which they called C’wam.

Salmon were gone from the basin by 1920, the victim of dams, overfishing and irrigation. The decline of the Lost River and short-nosed sucker took longer.

Settlers called them mullets--though they are not related. A 1909 local newspaper account tells of Indians catching them by the wagonload to dry for winter eating. A commercial fish plant operated on the Lost River in the early 1900s.

By 1986, their numbers had fallen so low that the Klamath Tribes stopped fishing them. Two years later the two sucker species were placed on the endangered species list.

The current size of the population is debated. “We don’t have any good estimates,” said Ron Larson, fisheries biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Klamath Falls, Ore. Indeed, a private biologist who analyzed data for local irrigators says there are enough suckers to take both species off the endangered list.

But there is no dispute that Upper Klamath Lake--where the bulk of the suckers live--and other water bodies in the basin are in bad shape.

“Everything you can think of that’s not good for a watershed or lake is happening to Klamath Lake,” Larson said.

The shallow remnant of a huge ancient lake, the Upper Klamath has lost many of its wetlands. Rivers that feed and drain it have been dammed and diverted. Runoff from farming and cattle grazing has pushed up nutrient levels.

As a result, the lake is plagued by a blue-green algae that clogs the water with grass-like filaments, increasing the lake’s alkaline levels. When the algae decays it gobbles up oxygen, creating lethal conditions.

“This lake is close to killing these fish about every summer,” said Larry Dunsmoor, research biologist for the Klamath Tribes.

Along with wetland and river restoration projects, the tribes and environmentalists say the amount of irrigation water taken from the system has to be reduced to protect lake levels and river flows.

Water users say they support ecosystem restoration efforts. But their biologist, David Vogel of Natural Resource Scientists Inc. in Red Bluff, Calif., says the 7-foot water level the federal government is maintaining for the suckers in Upper Klamath Lake is unnecessarily high.

A federal judge, after refusing to stop the irrigation shut-off, ordered the government, farmers and tribes into mediation, which so far appears to be fruitless.

Water Plan Could Alter Distribution

Looming in the background is a complicated state adjudication of water rights predating 1909. The process has been going on for years and could dramatically alter the pattern of water distribution in the basin.

The tribes are among the pre-1909 claimants. Courts have previously ruled they have rights to enough water to protect fishing and hunting rights guaranteed in their 1864 treaty with the U.S. government. It is now up to Oregon to decide how much water that involves.

In the 1950s, the federal government ended formal recognition of the Klamath Tribes. The U.S. Forest Service took over much of their roughly 1-million-acre reservation. The tribes, who say the termination was the product of a misguided assimilation policy, regained federal recognition in 1986--but not their homelands.

“We’d like to get it back,” Foreman said of the former reservation lands.

“It’s more than just about economics,” he said. “There’s a spiritual connection. In order to heal the people we need to heal the land.”