By Robin Meadows
Jamie Ward grew up hearing the stories his people have told for countless generations on the slopes of Mount Shasta, a glacier-capped peak in Northern California. Many of these stories celebrate the bond between his tribe, the Winnemem Wintu, and Nur, also called winter-run chinook salmon. Nur run so deep in the Winnemem Wintu’s lives that the salmon are part of their creation story:
“When we first bubbled out of our sacred spring on Mt. Shasta at the time of creation, we were helpless and unable to speak. It was salmon, the Nur, who took pity on us humans and gave us their voice. In return, we promised to always speak for them.”
―Winnemem Wintu Spiritual and Cultural Belief
This promise has become almost impossible to keep. Government agencies charged with restoring California’s at-risk salmon have long shut tribes out of decision making, even though decades of Western science have failed to reverse the fishes’ precipitous decline.
Winter-run chinook are among the most imperiled, largely due to habitat loss. The 1945 completion of Shasta Dam blocked the fish from their best spawning grounds, especially the cold mountain streams of the Winnemem Wintu’s ancestral homelands along the McCloud River.
“I didn’t think they would ever return,” says Ward, a wildland management graduate student at California State University, Chico, who wants to restore waterways for salmon.
But this winter, for the first time in 80 years, salmon that began their lives in the McCloud are likely coming back from the ocean to spawn.
ENTWINED FATES
Winnemem Wintu means Middle Water People, reflecting the tribe’s homelands along the Winnemem Waywaket (McCloud River) between the Upper Sacramento River and the Pit River. Some 200,000 winter-run chinook once migrated up to Sacramento River to spawn in these waterways each year. The Winnemem Wintu tended those that swam up the McCloud.
When the salmon reached impassable waterfalls and other barriers, the tribe collected the fish in baskets and carried them upstream so they could keep swimming to the colder waters their eggs need to survive. The Winnemem Wintu also lit fires along waterways to mimic stars, which they believe guide the fish upstream at night.
Once the eggs hatched, the tribe created side channels that protected baby salmon from the swift waters of the McCloud. These sheltered waters are much like the shallow, food-rich floodplains that Western science has recently realized make ideal nurseries for baby fish.
The Winnemem Wintu enjoyed their traditional way of life, or lifeway, along the McCloud River for thousands of years and hundreds of generations. The tribe feasted on fresh salmon in summer and fall, and dried salmon the rest of the year. The Winnemem Wintu’s homelands were so rich in the fish that Livingston Stone, who scouted California for hatchery stock in the late 1800s, called the McCloud perhaps the most celebrated salmon stream in the state, according to a 2001 paper by then-University of California, Davis fish expert Ronald Yoshiyama.
In 1875, Stone reported that salmon were so thick in the McCloud that “we counted a hundred salmon jumping out of the water in the space of a minute, making 6,000 to be actually seen in the air in an hour.” In 1878, Stone was astonished by an immense gathering of salmon in the McCloud, saying, “I have never seen anything like it anywhere” and that “if a person could have balanced himself, he could actually have walked anywhere on the backs of the salmon, they were so thick.”
Now winter-run chinook are nearly gone. The fish are restricted to spawning below Shasta Dam, and the number of adults returning often dips to just a few thousand. The Winnemem Wintu have similarly declined, like the salmon displaced from their homelands and lifeways by European settlers.
Beginning in the 1800s, settlers decimated California tribes. Settlers and gold-seekers stole tribal lands and waters, and killed Indigenous people directly by violence and indirectly by introducing disease. Indigenous people had no immunity to these new-to-them diseases―including measles, mumps, chickenpox, smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, pneumonia and typhoid―resulting in widespread fatal epidemics. Settlers also attempted cultural erasure, forcibly taking Indigenous children to boarding schools aimed at eradicating their language and lifeways.
By the early 1900s, the Winnemem Wintu had plummeted from about 14,000 people to just 400. Today the tribe is down to about 120 people. Drawing a parallel between the fate of the Winnemem Wintu and winter-run chinook, Yoshiyama wrote that the tribe’s destiny was “twined with the salmon.” The Winnemem Wintu say the same thing.
“The Nur, or salmon, are an integral part of our lifeway and of a healthy Winnemem Waywaket watershed. We believe that when the last salmon is gone, humans will be gone too. Our fight to return the Nur to the Winnemem Waywaket is no less than a fight to save the Winnemem Wintu Tribe,” says the tribe in a statement.
Besides obstructing salmon runs, the construction of Shasta Dam flooded the Winnemem Wintu’s home, submerging hundreds of their ancestral villages, sacred sites, and burial grounds in the depths of Shasta Lake. It seemed that the tribe and winter-run chinook alike would be driven to extinction.
AGENCY TURNAROUND
Then, in a surprising turnaround, government agencies finally gave the Winnemem Wintu the freedom to revitalize their salmon―and, in so doing, themselves.
Winter-run chinook, named for the season when adults return from the ocean, spawn as late as August. The cold water their eggs need to survive was plentiful in their historical high-elevation spawning grounds even during the summer, particularly in the McCloud River which is spring-fed and icy year-round.
But Shasta Dam confines winter-run chinook to spawning in the Sacramento River on the Central Valley floor near Redding. Summers there get brutally hot, with air temperatures as high as 119 ⁰F, and the water from Shasta Lake can be too warm for salmon eggs.
Fish biologists trained in Western science marvel at the resilience of salmon, which so far have managed to survive whatever people throw at them, from the dams that impede migration to water diversions that drain rivers dry. But we may have thrown too much at winter-run chinook.
In 2021, record-breaking heat on top of a severe drought killed three-quarters of the winter-run chinook eggs below Shasta Dam. Agency fish biologists feared a repeat in 2022, California’s third consecutive year of drought and among the driest on record.
“There was a real urgency and concern that winter-run chinook would go extinct on our watch,” says Rachel Johnson, a fish ecologist based at UC Davis who leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Central Valley Team.
Fish and wildlife agencies are famous for seemingly endless studies of endangered species that culminate in five-year recovery plans addressing every contingency they can think of. “Everything has been ‘let’s study this’ but we need to learn through taking action instead of trying to get it perfect out of the chute,” Johnson says.
The extreme weather of 2022 triggered a drought emergency action under endangered species laws that forced agencies to move fast―and to think outside their comfort zones and the narrow box of what Johnson describes as well-trodden ‘solutions’.
For the first time, “reintroducing winter-run chinook to ancestral waters became an option,” Johnson says.
Fish biologists increasingly say saving salmon will require returning them to their historical habitat above dams. For California agencies, this means consulting with the tribes that originally lived along these waterways, thanks to a 2011 executive order by then-governor Jerry Brown directing each state agency to consult with Indigenous peoples on managing sites that are sacred or vital to their cultural traditions and heritage.
In the spring of 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) asked the Winnemem Wintu for input on restoring winter-run chinook to the McCloud River. Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk responded that her tribe had requirements for how to bring salmon back to their homelands above Shasta Dam, and the agency said they were open to meeting these conditions.
AGENCY-TRIBAL PARTNERSHIP
The result was an unprecedented partnership between state and federal agencies and the tribe. “For many of us, this seemed like something we wouldn’t have seen in our careers,” said Cathy Marcinkevage, assistant regional administrator at NOAA’s West Coast Region Central Valley Office, at a 2024 Bay-Delta Science Conference session on the collaboration.
Chief Sisk wanted to reintroduce the salmon where a Winnemem Wintu village once stood on the banks of the McCloud River. The site, now called Ah-Di-Na Campground, is thick with oak, ponderosa pine, and fir trees. It also lies at an elevation of 2,300 feet, where the stunning jade green water rushing downstream is cold and so ideal for salmon eggs.
“It looks like a natural, healthy place for rearing salmon,” says Winnemem Wintu member and graduate student Ward. “It’s a no-brainer that putting them up on the river is the way to go.”
In contrast, agencies typically mass-produce baby salmon in hatcheries, transport them in tanker trucks, and then shoot them through pipes into rivers. It’s hard to imagine anything more artificial.
Chief Sisk also wanted to give the fish a better start in life, which to her meant recreating their experience in the wild as closely as possible. She envisioned raising baby winter-run chinook along the McCloud River rather than in a conservation hatchery as is currently done.
Johnson recalled seeing a low-tech streamside incubator―which circulates river water over fish eggs and lets baby fish go into the river on their own―at a conference, and thought it would be a good fit with the Chief’s vision. Johnson and other agency biologists then scrambled to get everything in place at Ah-Di-Na Campground in time for the winter-run chinook’s summer spawning season.
In July 2022, biologists drove 20,000 winter-run chinook eggs from Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery, which is at the base of Shasta Dam, to the camp. “It was a good atmosphere up there because everyone wanted to restore the salmon,” Ward says, who, upon meeting Johnson at the camp, joined her team as a liaison between agency biologists and his tribe.
Chief Sisk led a riverside ceremony of song, dance and prayer to welcome the salmon back. “We are asking that the river receive these eggs. We are asking that the old-time ways continue and that they grow in that way,” she said in an agency news release. “We put down that song so they have a fighting chance.” Then Winnemem Wintu children gently placed cups of eggs in the streamside incubator.
Then, just a few days later, a massive mudflow shot down the McCloud. “The water was like chocolate milk,” Johnson says. “It was super brown.”
Worried that sediment from the mudflow would clog the streamside incubator and suffocate the eggs, CDFW biologists transferred them in stacked trays, which hatcheries use to produce fish and are easier to keep clean. The team cared for the eggs 24/7, sometimes brushing sediment off the eggs with a turkey feather through the night.
The agency’s fear of mudflows frustrated Chief Sisk. “The McCloud river is a naturally turbid river,” says Rebekah Olstad, project manager for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe’s salmon restoration efforts. “If water for egg incubation systems is sourced from deeper in the riverbed where salmon eggs normally would have spawned, it will be less turbid even in mudflows.”
In August, a second batch of 20,000 winter-run chinook eggs was delivered, this time by air. The distance from the hatchery to Ah-Di-Na Campground is only 80 miles, but the drive takes three hours because the road is so twisty and bumpy. Chief Sisk, concerned for the safety of the salmon eggs during all that jostling, wanted them to be helicoptered in and prevailed. However, this batch, like the first, was reared in hatchery trays.
The 40,000 eggs incubated along the McCloud River in the summer of 2022 yielded about 35,000 baby winter-run chinook. These babies were released from the hatchery trays to the river in September, and 1,600 were later captured as they migrated downstream toward the ocean and transported to the Sacramento River below Shasta Dam. Those fish, now adults, could be making their way back toward their natal waters this winter.
The agencies and the Winnemem Wintu formalized their partnership in 2023, signing an agreement that gives the tribe equal say in decision-making for winter-run chinook above Shasta Dam.
INDIGENOUS-LED STEWARDSHIP
In the summer of 2023, the second year of the agency-tribal partnership, the first question was how to raise the eggs. Still fretting about mudflows, the agencies again favored hatchery trays. “The agency people were kind of stuck on them,” Johnson says. “But Chief Sisk did not feel joyful about them.”
The Chief’s objections included that space in the trays is so tight that newly-hatched fish barely have room to wriggle, let alone swim. Moreover, people control when baby salmon in trays enter the river, releasing them all at once rather than letting them decide when to leave on their own.
Agreeing to disagree, the partners compromised. Half of the 40,000 eggs went in hatchery trays, and the other half went in a nature-based incubator that Chief Sisk devised.
Chief Sisk’s incubator, called the Nature-based Nur Incubation System, is a microcosm of the McCloud River. As with the hatchery trays, cold water is piped into the nature-based incubator from the river. But there the similarities end.
Just as salmon bury their eggs in gravel, the Indigenous-designed system protects eggs in gravel-filled enclosures on the periphery of the incubator. When the hatchlings are ready, they swim from these enclosures to a central pool lined with gravel and edged with small willows and bear grass.
Baby salmon stay in the pool as long as they want, swimming around and eating invertebrates that come in with the river water. Then, whenever they like, the little fish swim out of the incubator and into the calm waters of a small side channel that the Winnemem Wintu made for them along the McCloud.
“The nature-based incubator is more like a river, and the fish are acting more like fish,” Johnson says.
Baby salmon raised in hatchery trays along the McCloud are small and scrawny and weak swimmers, making them slower and less prepared for their long migration to the ocean. They also orient toward people’s shadows, expecting to be fed. This maladaptive response sets them up to be easy pickings for the many predators in the wild.
Baby salmon raised in the Indigenous system are big and fat and strong swimmers. They also behave the way fish do in the wild, schooling up as well as hiding in the gravel and bear grass when birds fly overhead. Chief Sisk was not surprised, telling Johnson this is what happens when you give fish what they need and then let them do what they want instead of making them do what people want.
In 2024, the agency-tribal partnership’s third year, Chief Sisk made her incubator even more like a river. She wanted the baby salmon to be able to swim against the current because she knew that in the wild they swim up streams that connect with the McCloud, a behavior that Johnson says is new to Western science. Accordingly, the updated incubator has an incline that the baby salmon climb against the flow.
“I just love brainstorming with Chief Sisk,” Johnson says. “She is so clever and wise.”
Anne Todgham, a colleague of Johnson’s at UC Davis who studies early life stages of fish, also helped Chief Sisk realize her vision of giving baby salmon the best start in life. And, again like Johnson, Todgham is a fan of the Chief’s approach.
“The Nur nature-based system is a good place for the fish to begin to accumulate the knowledge they’ll need in the McCloud,” Todgham says. For example, salmon imprint on the unique water chemistry and geology of their natal streams, which then help guide them back home to spawn as adults.
This summer, Todgham hopes to document the benefits of the Indigenous incubator by comparing fish raised in it to those raised in hatchery trays. “Agency biologists are trained in Western science, and we need to provide data they can understand,” she says.
Likely metrics include comparing how fast the baby salmon grow, how big they are when they enter the McCloud, and how chunky―heavy for their length―they are. Biologists think chunkiness may boost the resilience of young fish to environmental stresses such as parasites and poor water quality.
Todgham also wants to compare the behavior of fish raised in the Indigenous incubator versus the hatchery trays. “Anecdotally, we feel salmon from the nature-based system are better swimmers and avoid predators better,” she says. “Their behaviors are more wild.”
BRINGING NUR BACK HOME
Olstad, the Winnemem Wintu’s project manager for restoring salmon, says it’s no wonder Chief Sisk knows what the fish need to thrive. “The work for salmon started long before NOAA and CDFW signed the agreement,” Olstad says.
Chief Sisk grew up with the knowledge that her tribe’s elders passed down through generation after generation. She also gained a deep understanding of salmon firsthand from a lifetime of subsistence fishing. “You have to think like a fish to catch them,” Olstad says. “You have to know how wild fish will act.”
Likewise, Chief Sisk knows every inch of the waterways the salmon swim up and down. In 2016 she founded Run4Salmon, an annual prayer journey that follows the route that winter-run chinook once took from their natal waters to the ocean.
“We see it from beginning to end,” Olstad says. “It starts with the crystal clear water of the sacred spring on top of Mount Shasta; goes over Shasta Lake, which is disturbing because it’s supposed to be a river and we’re paddling over village sites; and ends in algae and concrete.”
This wealth of Indigenous knowledge tells the tribe what their salmon need. “Western scientists rely heavily on data and previous results while our data is growing up with stories―it’s a big way of transferring knowledge,” says Ward, the Winnemem Wintu member on Johnson’s team. “We don’t need all these facts to know what salmon will do best with.”
Ultimately, the Winnemem Wintu want to reintroduce wild salmon to the McCloud rather than the hatchery fish currently being raised in their nature-based incubator. Fish are more than their genes, they’re also their experiences and those in hatcheries easily lose the behaviors that make them wild. “Hatchery fish swim around in barrels waiting to be fed pellets,” Ward says.
Twenty years ago, the Winnemem Wintu learned that Nur still exist in the wilds of New Zealand, of all places. Ward tells the story like this: “In the early 1900s, McCloud River eggs were sent all over the world and the only place they took was New Zealand. In 2004, we did a war dance in opposition of raising Shasta Dam. Our prayer went out and New Zealand heard us. They contacted us, saying, ‘We have your fish.’”
“They’re still completely wild,” Ward continues.
The Winnemem Wintu also want their salmon to be able to travel between their natal waters and the ocean on their own. Fish biologists call this volitional passage, and winter-run chinook have not been able to do it since Shasta Dam went up.
Under the partnership agreement, the agencies pledged both to support reintroducing salmon from New Zealand and to explore options for their volitional passage to and from the McCloud. Agency stipulations include that the New Zealand fish be free of pathogens, and that volitional passage be feasible as well as possible to fund.
In his role as liaison between the agencies and his tribe, Ward connects his Indigenous knowledge with his Western science training to help the partners understand each other better. “We already know it’s going to work but there are data we have to collect to appease hoops and regulations on the science side,” he says.
“I can see both sides, and studies bring in money,” Ward continues. “Today’s world is not what it used to be, we have to adapt.”
OPENNESS TO INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Fish biologists partnering with the Winnemem Wintu have adapted too, as Chief Sisk questions longstanding practices so ingrained that many fish biologists accept them without thinking.
“I feel like my blind spots are so blind,” Johnson says.
Incubating salmon eggs in hatchery trays is just one example. Another is measuring baby salmon, which typically entails taking them out of the water and putting them on a board. Being touched can stress fish and damage their skin’s protective mucus coating.
Biologists also often sedate fish before measuring, in hopes of reducing stress. “This was super contentious,” Olstad says. “Chief Sisk said, ‘Absolutely not―can you prove it’s safe?’”
In 2024, the Chief suggested a kinder way to measure fish and, as with the nature-based incubator, fish biologists helped her realize this vision too. The new method is a fish viewer that determines length and weight based on photographs. Fish stay in water the whole time and are never handled.
“It’s a win-win,” Johnson says. “The data are more accurate and it’s less impactful to fish.”
Like Johnson, Todgham now sees the biases built into Western science. “Chief Sisk challenges me to open my mind to all the ways we could do things better,” she says.
Tina Bartlett, manager of CDFW’s Northern Region, echoed this sentiment at the conference session on the Winnemem Wintu-agency partnership. She advised Western scientists to ask themselves two questions: why have they always done something a certain way, and how can they intervene less with wild fish? Bartlett also suggested that they get out of their own way, adding that this is “really difficult” for Western scientists as well as for her agency.
“Don’t get stuck in the same old way of doing things or feel challenged whenever a different possibility is suggested,” Bartlett said. “Think about it. Consider it. There are no set rules.”
Fish biologists partnering with the Winnemem Wintu also value the tribe’s spiritual relationship with salmon. “It’s had a huge impact―I feel a connection with individual fish and want them to come back,” Johnson says. “I’m forever changed by this partnership, for the better.” Todgham feels the same way. “Ceremony allows you to channel an emotional piece that ties you to the salmon,” she says. “You don’t usually get that in science, it’s pretty void of emotion.”
Todgham sees people like Ward, with one foot in the Indigenous world and the other in Western science, as the future of salmon restoration. “I think that’s where we’ll make huge steps,” she says. “They have traditional ecological knowledge and are trained in Western science, and can balance these two ways of knowing.”
“We’ve been excluding an important voice and salmon have suffered,” she continues. “Hopefully it’s not too late to turn things around.”
For the first time in his life, Ward shares that hope. “I’m now realizing this could actually happen, it’s really amazing,” he says. “It feels right that we could spear salmon on our river.”
