by Robin Meadows
The Karuk people have lived in the thickly forested mountains along the Klamath River in Northern California for so long that they simply say since time immemorial. Chinook salmon were intrinsic to their way of life. For thousands of years and hundreds of generations, the tribe feasted on the throngs of fish that rushed upstream to lay eggs. Then, about 100 years ago, European settlers built four hydroelectric dams on the upper reaches of the river, blocking access to prime spawning grounds and pushing the river’s once-bountiful salmon runs toward extinction.
Karuk ceremonial leader and dipnet fisherman Ron Reed embarked on a quest to help his tribe free the Klamath from the dams nearly 25 years ago. But the divide between his Indigenous knowledge and Western science seemed insurmountable.
“I used to speak from the heart—I didn’t have the scientific vocabulary I have now,” says Reed.
Then Reed made the case for dam removal in the language of Western science, shifting the course of the long struggle to revitalize the Klamath. The Karuk Tribe and their allies ultimately prevailed, and one year ago the last of the four dams was finally breached. For the first time in a century, salmon can reach 400 miles of spawning habitat that the dams had obstructed, promising renewal for the fish and for the Karuk.
“It’s been a lifetime of work,” Reed says. “It’s very emotional.”
Today Reed is so fluent in Western science that he has co-authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers, serves on government and academic advisory committees, and teaches in universities.
Reed may seem to be an unlikely player in the realm of Western science. He dropped out of college after one of his professors assigned the class to debate the phrase “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Hard times followed. Reed was overcome by the many wrongs settlers had done to the Karuk and other tribes, from genocide to the forced assimilation that included banning ceremonies as well as separating children from their families and sending them to boarding schools. He was overwhelmed by the resulting social ills of his people.
“I had tears in my eyes, a frog in my throat, and a crack in my heart,” Reed says.
Then Reed met his wife, Hoopa Tribe member Robyn Reed, and reconnected with his heritage. “As a young child, the first things I remember are ceremony and traditional foods,” he says. “My mother’s roots were really embedded in the Indigenous world.”
Reed’s distress at the plight of his people led him to seek work with the Karuk Tribe, which hired him as cultural biologist. “I poured a lot of my grief into my work,” he says. “That’s what drives me to do this.”
THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR THE DAMS
In 2001, Reed became the tribal lead on opposing the Klamath dams, which had just come up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). At the outset, the FERC process marginalized Reed.
“They tried to put me in the culture box but I said culture is in everything—so I got to be in all the dam relicensing workgroups,” he says. “That was my first success.”
But the other workgroup participants dismissed his traditional knowledge as anecdotal.
“Everybody put down their pens and pencils when I spoke,” Reed says.
Reed’s second success came from partnering with University of Oregon sociologist Kari Norgaard, who was then doing unrelated field work in a nearby community. The two met through a mutual colleague who hoped Norgaard could help Reed and the Karuk Tribe take down the Klamath dams.
The dams were upstream of the Karuk’s ancestral homelands and PacifiCorp, the Oregon-based energy company that owned them, claimed they had no impact on tribal culture downstream.
To Reed, the impact on his culture was obvious.
“There used to be a million returning salmon before the dams and now there are almost none,” Reed says.
Salmon are fundamental to Karuk identity. The tribe has a sacred responsibility to protect the fish, which are a mainstay of their traditional diet and vital to their World Renewal ceremonies.
Reed and Norgaard collaborated on a 2004 technical report that proved PacifiCorp wrong in a way Western scientists could understand—and marked a key turning point in the fight over the Klamath dams. The 75-page report used scientific data to document the direct link between disappearance of salmon in the river and the tribe’s spike in diet-related illnesses including diabetes, obesity and heart disease. The resulting rise in healthcare costs, which the report estimated at $2.75 million for diabetes alone, also caught people’s attention.
As the report pointed out, “It is ironic that today doctors around the nation are urging their patients to eat more salmon and adopt the kind of diet that the Karuk enjoyed for thousands of years.”
Reed and Norgaard also framed the Karuk’s loss of salmon as cultural genocide, and tribal access to salmon as religious freedom. “Just as ceremonies surrounding fish and the more everyday activities of fishing, eeling and gathering mushrooms and huckleberries create and maintain community ties and provide identity, so too does their absence and decline lead to further cultural disruption,” the report said.
Reed says the report was the first time his voice as an Indigenous knowledge advocate was heard. “It woke up the colonial world,” he says. “I’m still riding that wave.”
The report made national news, notably on the front page of The Washington Post. Even more importantly, FERC accepted the report as a scientific publication in the case against relicensing the Klamath dams.
Norgaard attributes the report’s impact to its blend of Indigenous science and Western science. Indigenous science takes a holistic worldview while Western science tends to compartmentalize, focusing on small parts in isolation rather than on the whole.
“The report really was based in Ron’s immediate understanding of the world,” Norgaard says, adding that her role was to translate Indigenous knowledge so it was intelligible to Western scientists and that “it was only due to racism that Western science was also needed.”
Reed takes a pragmatic view of weaving his traditional knowledge with Western science. “We have to be able to maneuver in both worlds,” he says. “We’re taking Indigenous knowledge from anecdotal to science.”
The report’s positive reception encouraged Reed to keep speaking out at the many dam relicensing meetings he attended. “It provoked me to dig deeper and talk more,” he says. The other participants finally listened to him this time, “asking questions and scribbling harder.”
Norgaard attributes Reed’s success in bridging the gap between Indigenous knowledge and Western science to personal qualities grounded in his traditional culture. “Ron brings a quality of presence that has changed the game,” she says. “He cares about his people and the Earth, values respect and reciprocity, and has the capacity to touch people’s hearts.”
FIXING THE WORLD WITH FIRE
Reed and Norgaard’s collaboration continues to this day, often focusing on the key role of fire in Indigenous stewardship, culture and social renewal. “Indigenous fire is Indigenous hydrology, and water makes the world go round,” Reed says.
Before the era of fire suppression and consequent heightened risk of catastrophic wildfires, the Karuk periodically burned particular plants and places. As just one example, they burned meadows in the high country to keep fir trees from taking over. Grassy meadows are like sponges, soaking up snowmelt and releasing it gradually throughout the summer dry season. But when fir trees replace grasses, the snowmelt runs off all at once.
“Without Indigenous burning, you’re not admitting water at the proper time of year, when it’s hot and fish need water,” Reed says.
The Karuk World Renewal ceremony is called pikyávish, which stems from the word for “to fix it” in Karuk. “We fix the world every year by use of fire,” Reed says. “We put good fire on the landscape to create and sustain life for our non-human relations and for us over time.”
HEALING THE KARUK BY HEALING THE KLAMATH
In 2008, Reed launched a second longtime collaboration, this time with Stanford environmental scientist Sibyl Diver, who was then a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. The two met through the Karuk-UC Berkeley Collaborative, which Reed had just co-founded.
The collaborative brings together Karuk cultural practitioners and academic researchers to advance ecocultural revitalization of the Karuk people and their ancestral landscapes. Definitions of “ecocultural” vary but one is that people with an ecocultural worldview see their identity as ecological as well as cultural: they are both part of and responsible for the natural world.
As Bill Tripp of the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources said in a recent study, “When I use the word I mean revitalizing our human connections and responsibilities to the land, the animals, the plants, the water, each other, and the spirit world.”
To Reed, the term “ecocultural revitalization” is “another way of describing Indigenous sovereignty in Western science” and the most important thing is Karuk identity as a whole.
Before joining the collaborative, Diver had spent nearly a decade as a translator on Indigenous salmon and natural resource management issues in the Russian Far East. “I learned about this in Russia and came home to find that it was happening right in my own backyard,” she says.
Reed and Diver’s most recent work is on the impact of the Klamath dam removal on the Karuk. “Decommissioning the dams was a transformative moment,” Diver says. “And one of the research questions we are asking is, how does it affect tribal community well-being?”
Reed, Diver and colleagues took a “before” snapshot to get a baseline of the Karuk perspective on that question just prior to dam demolition. The team will take an “after” snapshot in a few years to assess aspects of healing for people and place as the Klamath River runs freer and the salmon begin to return.
The team is taking an approach called two-eyed seeing, a concept described by Mi’kmaw elder Albert Marshall as “learning to see from one eye with the best in the Indigenous ways of knowing and from the other eve with the best in the mainstream ways of knowing, and most importantly, learning to see with both eyes together—for the benefit of all.”
By honoring multiple perspectives, two-eyed seeing can free research from ingrained biases that may be unrecognized and unintended. “We use two-eyed seeing to bring a more open mind to our day-to-day collaborations—striving to engage across knowledge systems even if we are trained to think in one way, or are skeptical about approaches coming from dominant society,” Reed, Diver and UC Berkeley anthropologist Carolyn Smith, who is Karuk, wrote in a 2023 publication.
Reed and Diver’s current study on the impact of the Klamath dam removal included asking members of the Karuk Tribe—such as cultural practitioners and ceremonial leaders as well as tribal council members and youth leaders—about the physical and spiritual health of both the tribe and the ecosystem that is inextricable to their sense of self. In a 2024 study, the team found that, essential as salmon are to the physical and spiritual health of the Karuk, the tribe’s vision for dam removal goes far beyond restoring the fish.
“Participants expressed their hope that the entire ecosystem would benefit from dam removal, including human communities living in relation with the river. Restoration focused on single-species management runs counter to the interconnectivity and relationality centered in Karuk Traditional Environmental Knowledge,” the team wrote in the study.
The many benefits of free-flowing rivers to tribal community well-being include carrying sediment to form sandbars where willows, which are used for basketweaving, grow. And periodic flooding washes away old willows so the young stands prized by basketweavers can grow. Rushing water also transports large wood the Karuk use to build structures as well as large rocks they use to grind acorns.
Dam removal also helps right the historical wrong of excluding the Karuk from natural resource management. “My collaborators have taught me that it’s very hard to be an Indigenous activist working in very bureaucratic natural resource spaces,” Diver says. What I’ve heard from talking to colleagues is that they feel invalidated by agency representatives who disregard their way of being as Indigenous peoples.”
The Karuk hope dam removal will restore their stewardship of the Klamath River, the plants and animals that depend on it, and the lands it traverses. The team found that including the Karuk in the restoration process is critical to tribal community well-being. The Karuk need to be “on the river and doing the work of restoration, or ‘fixing the world’ themselves, in alignment with Karuk World Renewal philosophy,” the team wrote.
Engaging young tribal members in hands-on stewardship of the Klamath is particularly important to the Karuk. In the study, Karuk Education Director Scott Aseltine shared his worry that tribal youth “don’t really understand how all of this could have magically worked—how life revolved around the river and the salmon.” Reconnecting Karuk youth with the Klamath is key to staving off cultural loss.
Reed, working with his family and his tribe, is doing everything he can to keep his culture alive, drawing on both his scientific and traditional knowledge in his collaborations. “Western science is a systematic approach of learning about patterns and giving them meaning that can link up to Indigenous science, informed by Indigenous knowledge systems and rooted in a set of relationships and place-based practices, both spiritual and subsistence,” Diver says.
“Centering Indigenous knowledge and reflecting it back through Western science helps the conversation move to the policy sphere and a larger set of researchers,” Diver continues. “It’s been a gift and a privilege to work with Ron—I think about his impact and it’s just incredible.”
LEAVING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE
The contribution that means the most to Reed is his children. “They are my high point in life,” he says. Four of the six have college degrees, and his youngest son, Ryan, is an Indigenous fire practitioner and wildland firefighter who is now pursuing a UC Berkeley master’s degree in forestry and fire. Ryan Reed also serves on the advisory committee to the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan, which governs natural resource management in the region. Like his father, he hopes to restore Indigenous land stewardship practices.
Reed’s children also embrace their Karuk identities and heritage. Several of them take active roles, including medicine man and spring salmon priest, in the ceremonies he leads. “My children have blended their two worlds in quite a magnificent fashion, and each one feels like they can make change,” Reed says. “I didn’t always believe it myself.”
That Reed kept pushing as an Indigenous activist through the heartbreak and hurdles—and that he and his allies have made such headway—is a testament to the strength of his persistence and vision. “I’m doing it for my children and community,” he says. “I want to leave the world better than I found it.”
Reporting for this article was made possible, in part, by a workshop with the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
