We Are Undammed River Kin

Welcome back to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our Kinship Season, which is dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our more than human kin. In the fall we’ll do a season dedicated to people stories again - our classic Missing Witches stories - and throughout the summer we’ll have Witches Found Interviews and episodes of the Rx, our list of people and of songs and other media to learn from about craft and magic and resistance and re-enchantment is long. But in the spring we need to balance out against people-logic by digging into soil, learning about the plants and animals and rocks and winds and waters that are us too, as we wind our wild ways through the holobiont that we all are here on Earth. These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalist motivational meditations, and we hope you’ll take these offerings in that original sense: seed bombs hurled on the pristine dying lawns of Mondays. Blessed Fucking Be.

Last year Copco 2 came down, the first of 4 dams along the Klamath river that will all be removed by October 2024 in the largest dam removal project in history. 

After a long process of drawdowns both legal and physical - draining water, preparing the basin, bringing people together again and again to tell the truth of what happened here over the last 100 years. When the land was taken and the dams went in, concentric circles of scientists herding decades of research to show that dams are crumbling, that they devastated whole ecosystems, that their reservoirs become methane gas pits and blue green algae machines, that they don’t serve irrigation or drinking water needs or hydro power any more, their main use these days is to maintain lakes for motorboating and lakeside property values which were plummeting anyway as the lakes that should be there sat and rotted - after all these circles and cycles of despair and discussion and dispersal spiraled and gathered and finally broke through, the plug was pulled, the big red button pushed, 33 by 78 feet of concrete that had kept the Ward canyon dry for one hundred years came down, and the whole river let out a rushing breath it had hurt to hold. 

Breathe in and then let out a breath that comes pushing past the things you’ve been holding in. We are undammed river kin. 

Ward Canyon is named for Kitty Ward, a Shasta native woman who married a white landowner, one of many marriages which Sami Jo Difuntorum, cultural preservation officer for the Shasta Indian Nation, suggests were arranged to keep close to the land. 

Gold was discovered near Yreka in 1851, setting off a grim and bloody chapter for the Shasta who lived in the upper Klamath River canyon. While many were killed and some dispersed to nearby towns, a good number found a refuge in the fertile bottomlands along the Klamath River east of Yreka under the leadership of a Shasta chief named Bogus Tom Smith.

Bogus Tom was instrumental in spreading the Ghost Dance, a ritual believed to have the power to drive white settlers away, throughout Northern California and Oregon… By the turn of the century, this group of Shasta had stitched together a land base by obtaining allotments, marrying into landowning families, and through outright purchase.

…This was the tribe itself holding itself together by owning or controlling these contiguous lands.

Difuntorum’s own grandmother, Kitty Grasshopper, married a succession of white landowners, in part, Difuntorum suspects, so she could remain living on the land and near her people.

“They paid a price,” says Difuntorum of the tribe’s women, adding that strategic arranged marriages were not uncommon.” (source).

Here’s to the women who held the land and the people and their language and stories together with their bodies. Here’s to Kitty Ward and to the name she wore before Ward and to all the unnamed who poured their lives out in circle dances and in unseen bedrooms to rescue whatever seeds they could for the future. 

All of those efforts to keep the community intact? Guess what—the land was taken by eminent domain.

…In 1911… California-Oregon Power Company, or Copco, (...) began acquiring land for the project.

A Shasta Indian woman named Kitty Ward, who had married a white rancher named Tip Ward, was living in a log cabin located on the lower end of the future reservoir when John C. Boyle, a surveyor who would go on to become vice president and long-time manager of Copco, delivered the news that she was going to have to move.

She refused to leave her home, insisting she would die there instead, but after a time was convinced to visit a ranch nearby. “(S)he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in the process and never returned home.” (source)

Imagine the water this year returning to the canyon that bears Kitty Ward name, bringing her home. Imagine the river unleashed. 

3 more dams along the Klamath will come down by the end of the year. 

FROM THE AMERICAN RIVERS DAM REMOVAL FACTSHEET:

There are more than 500,000 dams in the U.S. Less than three percent are hydropower dams and less than 17 percent provide flood protection. 

85 percent of the nation’s dams are more than 50 years old, which is the average design life of a dam. 

Aging dams are at increased risk of failure, at least 87 dams have failed in South Carolina during storms and hurricanes since 2015.

 Hydropower dams and reservoirs are a source of methane emissions, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

Seven dams on the Coosa River in Alabama have caused more than thirty freshwater species to go extinct – making it one of North America’s worst mass wildlife extinctions on record. 

But we come to you now at the turning of the tide, “more than 2,025 dams have been removed with benefits for river health, fish and wildlife, and public safety.”

My family lives on a small lake in the Laurentian Mountains on unceded Anishinaabe territory, we are at the top of a watershed, a tiny tributary flows from here into the Riviere du Nord, which finds the Outaouis or Ottawa depending on which side you’re on, which goes to the St Laurence River which goes to the Atlantic ocean which goes everywhere, all the oceans are one ocean with imaginary boundaries and made up names. 

Up here at our small lake, before the water winds slowly down the mountains gathering snow, I imagine we can come close to knowing the feeling of a source. We can reach for the feeling of a river undammed, the way the river longs to wind and gather, heal and clean, and run and run and run playing with the rocks and the wind and fishes. 

These running waters are our kin, don’t you think so? can’t you feel them in the way blood pours and pumps through your veins, the way tears overwhelm your eyes some days, the way we learn about navigating, floating and steering, spinning like a leaf, tipping and righting into a gentle tenuous balance just when things feel way beyond our tiny body control. 

I want to reach for that kinship, that river power and river knowing. I want to close my eyes and in the wind and rainstorms of the spring, listen for the water that runs clean from the source, undammed, circuitous, rich in its wandering, the source that keeps the keystone species making its way like a light flickering through every being in the webs between, all the way through to the sea of us all. 

The dams of the Elwha were removed before the Klamath, and the salmon population is slowly returning - from 2020 to 2021 the population of Coho salmon doubled -  and with them come nutrients that return depth of life to every species in the river run. “400 different species in the river rely on the salmon, (scientists are) even picking up their signal in the trees next to the river. Marine-derived nutrients from the salmon just filter out into pretty much any corner of the ecosystem you can think of.” (source)

All over the web, weavers of all kinds are ripping out old stitches to let blood flow and heal the wounds beneath. Taking apart lies and distortions, lessons and structures that no longer serve, dams and berms that kept us from our liminal places, our nutrient-rich meanderings, old loved ones and our more than human kin and our own fertile flourishing lifeways that know how to serve more masters than the always hungry maw of capital. We are taking off the constraints of puritan and other religious frameworks that saw us as weak, the playthings of the devil, just for being in these bodies, systems of thought that missed the forest for the trees. We are running past and up around over and under, we are breaking levees, we are coming free. 

In our coven circle, Nicole wrote:

“To me, a witch is a label that was given out to (and since reclaimed by) those who defied the institutional co-opting of the organic expression of devotion to Spirit which existed among the people prior to the development of organized religion. That is me. I am more comfortable on the margins of society.”

Here is to the organic expression of devotion, here’s to the undamming of spirit, here’s to those at the margin meeting places of the living and rich nutrients of our folktales, archetypes, ancestors our loving mycelial dead. Here’s to bursting through.  We have been ankles deep in the marsh watching these concrete channels that separated Us from Them as they age and show their frailty, and we are here to steward the end of these cycles that have become dangerous, creating cesspools of toxic faith that don’t connect with the needs of the living world.

I grew up mourning rivers. Choked by pollution and centuries of concrete, we lived to witness the biggest fish die-offs in recorded history. My parents' generation lived through dam failures that washed away whole cities, whole schools. 

And when they weren’t allowed to witness them I imagine the world still felt them - the largest dam failure in history happened in 1975 when the Banqiao dam broke and 230 000 people died and the Communist State kept it a secret for decades, state documents were only declassified in 2005:  

Workers stood along the top of Banqiao Dam, some 150 feet above the valley’s floor, desperately trying to repair its crest as rain from Typhoon Nina fell for a third straight day. After battering Taiwan, the storm had moved inland where it was expected to dissipate, but Nina turned north instead, reaching the Huai River basin on Aug. 5, 1975, where a cold front blocked its progression. Parked in place, the typhoon generated more than a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours.

By the time night fell on Aug. 8, as many as 65 area dams had collapsed. But despite the fact that water levels at the Banqiao Dam had far exceeded a safe capacity, and a number of sluice gates for controlling water flow were clogged with silt, authorities felt confident they’d skirt disaster. After all, the Soviet-designed dam had been built to survive a typhoon — a once-every-1,000-year occurrence that could dump 11 inches of rain per day. Unfortunately, Typhoon Nina would prove to be a once-every-2,000-year storm, bearing down with enough force to cause the world’s deadliest infrastructure failure ever…

According to an account of the Banqiao Dam by a Chinese journalist writing under the pseudonym Yi Si, on Aug. 8, as workers stared curiously at the retreating water level of the reservoir, a voice in the dark called out: “The River Dragon has come!” And suddenly the dam ruptured, unleashing 600 billion liters of water and destroying an entire village. By Aug. 17, reports Si, 1.1 million people remained trapped by flooding with 50 to 60 percent of food air-dropped into the area floating in the murky waters. It would take weeks for the waters to drain...(source)

Listen, before the River Dragon comes. 

The dams on the Ottawa river were designed for a one in 350 year rainstorm, what is 350 years to a river dragon? 

Here at the top of this watershed, I assert that we are river kin, kin to the dragon that cannot be contained, who gets stronger and more deadly the longer we deny their pathways, and we’re not going to live in that choking constraint with its sense of mounting rage threatening to devastate our banks anymore. We are undammed and our future is as yet unwritten. 

Out here in the winding wild margins, we are part of a vast and many-tongued movement away from stifling systems that no longer serve, we are reaching for each other as rigidity traps come down, all across social and ecological systems. 

In the surprisingly poetic “Evolving conceptions of the role of large dams in social-ecological resilience” by Mia A. Hammersley, Christopher Scott and Randy Gimblett for the Journal of Ecology and Society

“Approximately 85% of dams in the United States will reach the “end of their operational lives by 2020” (Doyle et al. 2003:453). As more dams age, the benefits of removing them before they fail may outweigh the costs in order to restore the river ecosystems that they have altered (Whitelaw and Macmullan 2002). Dams have many negative effects on river and riparian ecosystems, including habitat fragmentation, decreases in species richness, alteration of sediment dynamics and water temperature, and changes in geomorphology, all related to disruption of the natural flow regime" (Doyle et al. 2003, Poff et al. 1997).

… they continue… 

"When a system is strongly connected, it is more resilient to external variability. The more rigid a system becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes. In institutional terms, older, more structured and hierarchical organizations, e.g., large federal agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation, are particularly prone to rigidity, making them even more prone to crisis and reorganization. A dam is perhaps the most apt metaphor to express this concept; dams become less stable over time and threaten to, literally, collapse. By decreasing the resilience of a river (social-ecological system) dams also make the system more vulnerable to other disturbances such as climate change and growing water demand (...) the movement to decommission dams represents a way to remove an outdated and rigid technology in order to eliminate these points of rigidity from the social-ecological systems that they have altered.”

A record-setting 325 river barriers were removed from 16 European countries in 2022, while 65 were removed in the US. 

Beyond rigidities of thought, of movement, of social and ecological systems that have been over-hierarchized and become brittle, you can listen for the waters that move, and for the people who have kept faith with the river, dragons and all. 

Amy Bowers Cordalis worked for tribal fisheries, saw the largest salmon die-off in history at her summer job and became a lawyer to fight for the river and her people. 

She says:

Dam removal is not a test, it will work, because the water remembers where to go, it remembers where it’s been, it remembers what it felt like to thrive. As humans we remember too, we have in our ancestral blood that knowledge of what it was like to live on a healthy planet.

We have in our blood the memory of a healthy planet. We remember where to go. 

Amy says: “How we got through it was working as a coalition.”

In “A ROAD MAP TO RESTORING RIVERS: HOW THE KLAMATH BASIN RESTORATION AGREEMENT MIGHT INFLUENCE FUTURE DAM REMOVAL AND RIVER RESTORATION PROJECTS” James C. Ish writes: 

The story of the Klamath River’s restoration agreement offers an opportunity to create a template for other projects. The bullet points (...) are: 1) continuous widespread stakeholder involvement; 2) combining dam removal with watershed and river restoration efforts; 3) building trust between invested parties; 4) recognizing the long-term value and benefits gained by all stakeholders associated with a healthy river; 5) creating governing bodies that can oversee the funding and progress of the removal and restoration; and 6) creating incentives for dam owners by transferring liability and permitting to willing parties so the process does not slow down as a result of attempting to further economic gains.

These are steps in reconciliation with the river, these are dance steps around the guilt and finger-pointing, the biases of capital wanting to accumulate when it really needs to flow. Get everyone involved, over and over. All are welcome in the circle.  Don’t just remove rigidities but draw on history to actively restore life that was there before. What did your ancestors’ ancestors know of flowplains, flowers, spirit, community? How can you reseed your banks and floodplains with life when evangelical or other systems that were imposed to constraint spirit are gone, when you have said not anymore and let your truth come and rode its wave to somewhere new? Build trust. Draw out the truth of what healing will look like in each other’s languages and perspectives. Find ways past the choking blockages of century-old shame and mistakes by focusing together on what it takes to get the work done and the waters to run. 

The loudest voices against dam removal were those folks who had sunk costs into homes along unnatural waterfronts. Communities that had been around for over 100 years and felt rooted - but from the view of the river, of the canyons, of the people who had lived in such close reliance and communion with the salmon for so many hundreds of generations that they knew their genes were intertwined, dancing river helixes of relationality, who felt physical pain watching the fish beat their heads against the dams until they died just trying to get home, from all those eyes, the power boats and lakefront properties were always temporary. 

For more than a hundred years, dams have stilled the Klamath’s flows, jeopardizing the salmon and other fish, and creating ideal conditions for (..) parasite to spread.  

But now these vestiges of an early 20th-century approach to water and power are being dismantled: The world’s largest dam removal project is now underway on the Klamath River. 

By the end of 2024, four aging hydroelectric dams spanning the California-Oregon state line will be gone. One hundred thousand cubic yards of concrete, 1.3 million cubic yards of earth and 2,000 tons of steel will be hauled out of the river’s path.

…

Polmateer is (...) a traditional fisherman and a fatawana, which he describes as a medicine man. He’s been protesting the dams for years, after a massive fish die-off on the lower Klamath in 2002 catalyzed the movement to restore the river. 

“That’s still the water that runs through my veins. We only want it to be taken care of,” Polmateer said...

“It’s more than just a river to us. It’s more than just something that harbors fish,” Polmateer said. “It’s who we are as a people. We’re fix-the-world-people, Karuk people are.”

The river is the lifeway, the river is both how the-fix-the-world-people make their living and make meaning.

We are kin to the undammed river, we declare our allegiance to fix the world people. We are looking for the helpers and we are taking apart what no longer serves. 

Our covenmate Stephi who studied river and flood science in grad school wrote: 

I offer the idea of lateral and longitudinal connectivity in river systems/river connectivity. Dams obstruct the longitudinal connectivity of rivers. I've spent a lot of time studying the lateral connectivity of rivers, or the connection of a river to it's floodplain. Things like levees and berms can constrict our rivers and increase their destructive power during storms. We can think of freeing a river by removing a dam, but we can also free a river by removing levees, lowering berms and other lateral obstructions. The river is allowed to slow down and spread out and add nutrients to the land when it can access it's floodplain. There are so many important nutrient cycles and other ecological processes that happen when a river can access it's floodplain. I also love exploring the magic and liminality of floodplains and riverine wetlands. They can exist as both land and water and the plants that thrive in floodplains have adapted to existing in this liminal space.

They continue:

Our rivers have become disconnected both longitudinally and laterally. Specifically where I'm from in Vermont, we have very rugged topography and the flattest areas to build our roads and our railroads have been in river valleys. Because of this, road and railroad berms have been built up and have constricted our rivers. In places like the Mississippi River Basin, berms have been constructed specifically to prevent flooding (which certainly happens here in VT too). When we constrict our rivers to a narrow corridor, it funnels the water into a smaller area when it floods. With our rivers confined to smaller channels and valleys this increases the velocity of the flow and increase the destructive power of rivers during major floods. Not only does this lead to more property damage, but it also starves the floodplain of essential nutrients and processes that these ecosystems need to be healthy and provide proper habitat for wetland and floodplain dwelling species.

Stephi continues with perspectives from “disturbance ecology” and I feel the Morrigan in me rubbing her hands, witches and the archetypes that guide our practices of latitudinal and longitudinal connectivity stand in the waters of disturbance where everything is stirred up and we hold our arms outstretched and listen for the story, the trauma, the hope in the moment of illusions crumbling, the life that lives in communion with death and disturbance rather than trying to control and constrain it all until holding it back becomes impossible and the river dragon comes. 

Stephi continues:

In the U.S. we have had this European colonial mindset that ecological disturbances need to be strictly controlled. The Indigenous people of turtle island worked/work with their landscapes, managing them with disturbances, like fire, because they acknowledge that disturbance is an essential part of ecosystems functioning properly. The prairie and many western forest ecosystems in the US and Canada rely on fire to be healthy. There has been a huge campaign in the U.S. to suppress fires which has caused debris to accumulate, and of course coupled with climate change, we now have these mega fires. Just like many ecosystems rely on fires, our floodplain and wetland ecosystems rely on floods to be healthy. And european colonization has lead us to straighten and berm our rivers to prevent floods, which just makes floods worse and more destructive in the long run. Just like suppressing fires makes them more destructive. There are so many wetland plants that transport their seeds via floods and flood waters deposit nutrient laden sediments on the landscape that can add phosphorus and other vital nutrients to the landscape. Disturbances are essential, though they cause destruction initially. Not only does this help with nutrient cycling on the land, but it also helps remove sediments from the riverine system and can help alleviate nutrient pollutants in our lakes and other river outlets. 

(...)In the state of Vermont there has been a big push to conserve river corridors and floodplains to help lessen property damage during floods, but also to allow our rivers to move naturally and take up space and be reconnected to their floodplains. I work in conservation and we focus on conserving and restoring wetlands mainly along river corridors for wildlife habitat. We help restore hydrology to altered landscapes and remove berms to reconnect rivers, along with planting trees and shrubs. Overall, by conserving land along rivers and allowing the river to connect to it's floodplain and move and meander, we can ensure proper habitat function in floodplain ecosystems, and also it can make a real impact on the resiliency of our towns given that our climate in the Northeast is only getting wetter and floods are becoming more frequent. The current management focus in my state is to just give rivers the space they need to move, expand, and meander. Occasionally for streams that have been straightened, engineers can design new channels based off of historic imagery to mimic their old shape, and over time the river will adjust back into its own equilibrium. With river channel restoration we are trying to free the river from the channel that early colonization set it in, and allow it to find its natural path once again. I sometimes like to think of restoration as a way to de-colonize the landscape. Removing dams and berms and levees helps decolonize our rivers in a way.

The process of finding our way back to the source continues, the negotiations, the work of coalition building, the work of gathering in eddies and pools and knowing our place in the flood plains of coming climate catastrophes continues.

But this year, the first of four dams in the Klamath has come down, and “After decades of waiting for two dams to come down on the Elwha River on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, and another decade of monitoring salmon populations, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT) was finally able to open a small ceremonial and subsistence Coho salmon fishery” (source) and I lean my closed eyes toward this feeling, I touch the lake here that’s broken past its edges and is creeping up the stairs.

In its urging I feel you all, hello coven in the cauldron of the dark between our ears, I hear us pushing past the concrete that has held us and telling our true stories, I feel it all, in our gathering power. I see you telling the truth, telling the truth, telling the truth. About mistakes and attempts that didn’t work, about ideas that we’ve outgrown, and about abuse and those who protected abusers. The complicated effluvial truth. You are there taking down berms, conjuring the drawdown, calling forth the ceasefire, cracking through outdated walls and embankments and getting into the reeds and the weeds of mourning and stories and letting ourselves become part of destruction ecology. A wave that heals even as it breaks. We are kin with a muddying nitrogen-rich mess.  We are telling the truth of leaving in the night, telling the truth of our brutal brilliant survival.

We are undammed river kin and we are the flood. We are the half a million unhoused in the US, the 110 million forcibly displaced people in the world. As these old concrete systems fail we are pouring out onto the streets.

 Massive movements of people have been pushed to crisis points by the failures of rigid systems and the walls are coming down, and each wall will require negotiation, peacemaking, new ways of mapmaking and great depths of empathy. We’ll need to reach for a source deeper than we might remember now. But there are lessons in the floodplain.

Stephi wrote:

…the beauty of connected floodplains is that it allows the river to slow down and nurture the land during the flood. The water can spread, drop nutrients, carry seeds, and (in a way) find rest during a flood event. To access our floodplains is to allow ourselves the space we need to spread out and nurture our environment and slow down when we're undergoing great change. While there is always a destructive component to the flood, the plants and animals who dwell in the floodplain have adapted to this disturbance and can grow from the aftermath. On the day of the eclipse I pulled an oracle card from one of my botanical decks that symbolizes "Fortitude". We watched the Eclipse along the Winooski River floodplain in Burlington VT and as we walked around the woods I reflected on the Boxelders along the river. Boxelders are known for falling down and often are seen as messy trees. When the soil is saturated during a flood they can tip over, but they continue to grow. They may not be seen as the strongest trees because of their tendency to fall, but they always right themselves and continue to grow sideways and out over the river creating new habitat structures and holding the bank in place. Their strength lies in their recovery. 

When we connect our rivers back to our floodplains and restore our lost hydrology we can allow these beautiful ecosystems to flourish and there is so much we can learn from the plants and critters that inhabit this ever-changing space. The entanglement of land and water shows resilience, strength, beauty, and versatility. Floods are both beautiful and destructive. When we are stewards to the land and allow our rivers to have space to experience this natural disturbance, we protect ourselves and the plants and animals that call this ecosystem home.

Once, in Utah, I followed what began as a dry riverbed in the desert. There is a message about water long before the water comes. As the days went by we walked deeper into the cavern which water has carved in the red stone. The water begins as a scritch, trickle, and hum and slowly widens and comes up to your ankles flickering gold. The walls are marked with black lines above your head showing where the water has been. You could spend your life deciphering the markings of where water was before. This was in the upper basin of the Colorado River, a river which has been massively dammed to create the enormous reserves of water at Lake Powell and Lake Mead upon which 40 million people rely. A river which is drying up, reservoirs so low they threaten to become dead pools. 

We broke from the trail to follow a trod path, footpath, up the canyon wall and there were figures there, carved in the blood red stone, coral stone, rust stone and we kept on following a sound. Sharp inhales of green and then we found it. A natural singing bowl, a small hollow of black walls, a black basin holding a sacred cup of water big enough for us to sit at the edge with the moss, and watch light hit the water that dripped from a secret source above, high up at the floor of the desert above our heads.

People and animals have worshipped at this black bowl of life in the desert carved by ancient rivers for a long, long time. 

Water is always a river, in a way, isn’t it? It gathers in atmospheric rivers in the sky, it winds through animals and humans and plants and clouds and the earth before it came to you, it is an ancient traveler, and it will go through you too, and give you what you could not live without, and you will carry on until you don’t, but the water still will. Water makes the sacred and the serpent, it is one and the same, and water is an artisan of the holy, it carves sacred places out of stone, it nurtures sacred groves of sacred trees, it falls from the sky like a benediction. 

Breathe in and out gently and picture the water in the air, in the clouds, in the plants and people around you, see how life moves, see yourself in the river. See yourself in the matrix of rivers, the headwaters, the floodplains, and in the distance feel the dams holding tight, the berms telling you where to flow, feel the arid dry places where the water hasn’t run in generations, tighten all your muscles and feel the feeling of a river contained, feel the serpent gathering its power. take a deep breath and hold it in the place where you hold your deepest sorrow or shame. And then light a match and set off the dynamite, watch the fire travel down the line and then watch the dam explode and crumple and let your breath come out with a sound like a roar as the water runs free. 

Rainbow trout never grow into steelhead if they can’t swim their wild rivers, and we can’t grow into our true power when we are dammed by limitations imposed against our will or consent either. 

But we are the turning tide, winding past old rigid systems, taking out thousands of tons of concrete and carefully replanting flowers and trees. 

All the oceans are one ocean.  All rivers are connected. All people have a right to be free.

We are undammed river kin, we have set ourselves loose, and we are coming home.

Blessed Fucking Be.