Waylon 6

I’m honing in on what I want to work on for my documentary, and grants to fund it. At first I was thinking I’d just work on something silly like chemtrails. But, then I realized I could make this project into something with a real social use. And there are no grants for chemtrail movies anyway. As a Karuk person, I am very interested in issues of Native self determination in culture and economics, two things that are more related than maybe a lot of people realize. So, what I’m thinking about documenting is either the ongoing process of un-damming the Klamath River, or the controversy over the MLPA.

The Klamath River is the ancestral homeland of my people, as well as the Yurok, Shasta, and Klamath peoples. Unlike Indo-Europeans, who came to Europe and the Americas from somewhere else, and who seem to take migration for granted, we have always lived in our villages on the Klamath River until a minor diaspora around the 1930s and 40s. This was nothing of the magnitude of the Trail of Tears, or the Long Walk. It was individuals and individual families moving away from the River to pursue better economic opportunities elsewhere, primarily in the Bay Area. Salmon have been and still are part of our subsistence. In fact, where jobs are lacking in Northwest California, salmon make up a substantial part of the diet, or did. The damming of the Klamath for irrigation water for farmers around Klamath Lakes and electricity has had an adverse impact on salmon populations, and thus on our traditional way of life and local economies. There has been a movement to get the dams removed. PacifiCorp, the owner of the dams, has grudgingly agreed to take down the dams by 2020, I believe.

MLPA, or the Marine Life Protection Act, is a newer phenomenon that was just signed into law by Gov. Schwarzenegger. It prohibits Indian people in California from gathering food and regalia material on the beaches, but it does nothing to stop problematic industries like wave energy and oil drilling that helped push the Act through. News from Native California published an article in their last issue about a Pomo response to the Act that seemed fairly pessimistic. Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke, however, has threatened passive resistance. I quote from News from Native California: “We will continue to exercise our right to harvest seaweed and fish as we always have. You will have to take us to jail until you go broke and you fix this law.”