The Hoopa Indians of Northern California
are a tenacious people. In the mid-19th century, when the U.S. Army
tried to drive them out of their villages along the Trinity River,
the Hoopas waited them out, camping in the nearby hills until the
soldiers gave up and left.
One hundred years later the
government started draining their river, damming it and diverting
most of its waters through mountain tunnels to farmlands to the
south. For the past 40 years, the Hoopas have struggled in the
courts and in the halls of Congress to bring their river and its
fishery back to life.
Up until now, this has involved a
lopsided battle between the impoverished 2,500-member Indian tribe
and Westlands, the largest irrigation district in the United
States, one whose farmers grow crops worth roughly $1 billion of
crops every year. But the balance of power is beginning to tilt in
favor of the Indians — a seismic shift in California water
politics that has been a couple of decades in the making.
Last July, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
ordered the permanent restoration of nearly half the Trinity’s
historic flows. The increased flows are part of a broader Trinity
restoration program launched four years earlier by then-Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt. It had been blocked until now by a lawsuit
filed by the Westlands Water District, representing the farmers of
the San Joaquin Valley, who may still make a last-ditch appeal to
the Supreme Court.
The judges’ decision bodes well not
only for the Hoopas and their river but for the cause of restoring
ravaged watersheds throughout the West. The decision, stripped down
to its essentials, says that minimum standards for the health of a
river take precedence over the demands of water consumers.
The Hoopas are looking out for their own interests, to be
sure, but with their growing clout they’re adding a new perspective
to the debate over California’s water supplies. They view their
river as a life-sustaining force, not a commodity to be drained.
The San Joaquin Valley farmers, by contrast, began siphoning off
the Trinity only after they’d depleted their groundwater and tapped
out the rivers in their region. In their view, a river that flows
to the sea is a waste of water. In the Indians’ view, a river that
flows naturally to the sea produces a healthy fishery. For all but
40 of the past 10,000 years, that has been the basic tenet of their
survival.
The next big task facing the Hoopas is
restoring their river, whose configuration was dramatically
transformed by four decades of minimum flows. Heavy equipment will
be needed to remove brush and sediment that filled up the old
river’s side pools. These quiet pools are crucial to the rearing of
juvenile fish.
The seeds of the Hoopas’ victory were
planted back in the 1980s, when they began hiring some
well-connected and highly respected advocates, including
Seattle-based attorney Tom Schlosser, who specializes in tribal
law, and Washington, D. C., lobbyist Joe Membrino, who helped
shepherd through a series of laws that put the Congress on record
in support of the Trinity’s restoration. That, and countless
studies by federal biologists, led to Secretary Babbitt’s order to
dramatically increase the river’s flows to 47 percent of their
historic levels — the minimum needed, the studies showed, to
increase fish populations to sustainable levels.
The
environmentalism of the Hoopas, like that of West Coast commercial
fishermen who fight for clean, free-flowing streams, grows out of
their livelihood and their way of life. But the Hoopas’ commitment
goes even deeper than that of the fishermen: The salmon the Hoopas
fight for is a centerpiece of their culture, one that involves
elaborate ceremonies celebrating the fish’s return to the
Trinity each year.
Native Americans’ deep reverence for
the natural world has given them a mythical, iconic status within
the environmental movement. In the real world they often live in
the shadows, struggling with poverty and alcoholism. In this
context, the Hoopa effort is all the more remarkable — an
attempt, against great odds, to restore the basic values of their
culture to a central role in reservation life — and a refusal
to allow themselves to be defined, and marginalized, by the larger
society.
The Hoopas, through a combination of geography
and cultural tradition, have tied their hopes and their future to
the natural resources of their region — they’ve always
been too far off the beaten track to capitalize on the casino craze
sweeping other reservations. Theirs is an important contribution to
the public debate over California’s increasingly scarce supplies of
fresh water.
Not a moment too soon, they’re bringing a
healthy dose of sanity to a society that sometimes seems hell-bent
on exhausting what we have left.
Tim Holt is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is an environmental writer who
lives in the Mount Shasta region of Northern
California.
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