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<BLOCKQUOTE><B>CLICK URL for images: <A
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47525-2005Jan29.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47525-2005Jan29.html</A></B></BLOCKQUOTE>Tribe
Fights Dams to Get Diet Back <BR>Karuks Trying to Regain Salmon Fisheries and
Their Health
<BLOCKQUOTE><B>(Kari's report in Tomorrow's Washington Post)</B></BLOCKQUOTE>By
Blaine Harden <BR>Washington Post Staff Writer
<P>Sunday, January 30, 2005; Page A03
<P>HAPPY CAMP, Calif. -- Centuries before federal nutritional guidelines told
<BR>Americans how to eat healthfully, the Karuk Indians had figured it out.
<P>They ate wild salmon at every meal -- about 1.2 pounds of fish per person per
day. <BR>Isolated here in the Klamath River valley in the rugged mountains of
northwest <BR>California, the Karuk stuck with their low-carb, low-cholesterol,
salmon-centered <BR>diet longer than perhaps any Indians in the Pacific
Northwest. It was not until the <BR>late 1960s and the 1970s, when dams and
irrigation ruined one of the world's <BR>great salmon fisheries, that fish
mostly disappeared from their diet.
<P>Salmon are now too scarce to catch and too pricey to buy. The tribe caught
100 <BR>chinook salmon last fall, a record low. Eating mostly processed food,
some of it <BR>federal food aid, many Karuks are obese, with unusually high
rates of heart disease <BR>and diabetes.
<P>"You name them, I got them all," said Harold Tripp, 54, a traditional
fisherman for <BR>the tribe. "I got heart problems. I got the diabetes. I got
high cholesterol. I need to <BR>lose weight."
<P>On his first day as a fisherman for the tribe in 1966, Tripp remembers
catching <BR>86 salmon. Last fall, he caught one. "I mostly eat hamburger now,"
he said.
<P>To reclaim their salmon -- and their health -- the Karuks are using the
tribe's <BR>epidemic of obesity-related illness as a lever in a dam re-licensing
pending before <BR>the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In what legal
experts say is an <BR>unprecedented use of the regulatory process, the tribe is
trying to shame a major <BR>utility company and the federal government into
agreeing that at least three <BR>dams on the Klamath River should be knocked
down.
<P>The dams are quite literally killing Indians, according to a
tribe-commissioned <BR>report that was written by Kari Marie Norgaard, a
sociologist from the University <BR>of California at Davis. The report links the
disappearance of salmon to increases in <BR>poverty, unemployment, suicide and
social dissolution.
<P>"We can't exist without our fish," said Leaf Hillman, vice chairman of the
Karuk, <BR>whose 3,300 members make up the second-largest Indian tribe in
California. "We <BR>can only hope that this will be one of those rare instances
where a true look at the <BR>cost and benefits of those dams will be a
compelling argument."
<P>The tribe's demand for nutritional justice presents a prickly new problem to
<BR>federal regulators at a time of major upheaval in the hydropower industry.
<P>Federal licenses for private dams, valid for 30 to 50 years, are expiring in
droves, <BR>especially in the Northwest, where hydropower accounts for about 80
percent of <BR>the electricity supply. In the next decade or so, licenses are
due to expire at more <BR>than half of the country's non-federal dams -- 296
projects that provide electricity <BR>to 30 million homes in 37 states.
<P>The Karuks "have raised something that is novel, and FERC commissioners will
<BR>have to grapple with it," said Mary Morton, a legal adviser to Nora Mead
Brownell, <BR>one of President Bush's four appointees to the commission that
rules on license <BR>renewals for private dams.
<P>Politically, it is hardly a propitious moment for Native Americans to demand
that <BR>dams come tumbling down. Power rates have soared in California and
across the <BR>Northwest in recent years. Bush has repeatedly spoken out against
the breaching <BR>of federal dams on the nearby Snake River, saying it would be
bad for the <BR>economy. His appointees as FERC commissioners are considered
unlikely to force <BR>any utility to remove a dam, and his administration
recently granted dam owners <BR>a special right -- denied Indian tribes,
environmental groups and local <BR>governments -- to appeal Interior Department
rulings about how dams should be <BR>operated.
<P>Still, the aging dams on the Klamath River are, at best, marginal producers
of <BR>power. They were built without fish ladders (unlike most major dams in
the <BR>Northwest), and there is widespread scientific agreement that their
removal <BR>would revive several salmon runs.
<P>California, which could block a renewed federal license for the dams under
<BR>provisions of the Clean Water Act, seems decidedly unenthusiastic about
keeping <BR>the dams in the river. The state Energy Commission has said removing
them <BR>"would not have significant impact" on the regional supply of
electricity and that <BR>replacement power is readily available.
<P>The State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates water quality and
could <BR>veto a renewed license, blames warm, sluggish reservoirs behind the
dams for <BR>"horrible" algae blooms in the river, said Russ Kanz, a staff
scientist for the board.
<P>In addition, the National Academy of Science and local officials in Humboldt
<BR>County agree that dam removal is an option that should be examined to bring
<BR>salmon back to the Klamath.
<P>But PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, did not list dam removal as
an <BR>option in its application last year for a new long-term license.
<P>In the Clinton era, when tribes and environmental groups used the
re-licensing <BR>process to force utilities to pay hundreds of millions of
dollars to retool or remove <BR>dams, PacifiCorp agreed to remove a hydro dam
from the White Salmon River in <BR>Washington state -- at a cost of $20 million.
The company, which is owned by <BR>Scottish Power, has 1.6 million electricity
customers in six western states.
<P>As part of its re-licensing application for dams on the Klamath, PacifiCorp
is trying <BR>to negotiate a separate settlement with the Karuks and other
stakeholders along <BR>the river. Dam removal is now "on the table" in those
talks, said Jon Coney, a <BR>company spokesman, adding that the tribe's health
argument is part of the <BR>negotiations.
<P>Coney, though, said that the tribe's health claims are difficult to
substantiate in a <BR>scientific or legal way.
<P>"How do you separate the health problems out from all the other societal
things <BR>that have happened to the tribe?" Coney asked.
<P>To make their case, the Karuk Tribe offers tribal health statistics and
stories of its <BR>people who have grown ill in the years without salmon.
<P>Diabetes and heart disease were rare among tribal members before World War
II. <BR>Part of the reason was the super-abundance in their salmon-rich diet of
omega-3 <BR>fatty acids, which research has linked with reduced risk of heart
disease, stroke <BR>and diabetes.
<P>"We do know that the nutritional values of subsistence fish are superior to
<BR>processed foods and convenience foods," said William Lambert, an
environmental <BR>epidemiologist at Oregon Health & Science University in
Portland.
<P>With subsistence fish all but gone from the Karuk diet, the percentage of
tribal <BR>members with diabetes has jumped from near zero to about 12 percent,
nearly <BR>twice the national average, according to the tribe. The estimated
rate of heart <BR>disease among tribal members is 40 percent, about triple the
national average.
<P>A number of studies of Native Americans across the United States have shown
that <BR>the loss of traditional foods is directly responsible for increasing
rates of <BR>obesity-related illnesses.
<P>Steve Burns, a physician for three years in the tribal clinic in Happy Camp,
said <BR>that diabetes and other obesity-related illness are "a huge and growing
problem."
<P>"What is happening to the Karuk people is like something you would read about
in <BR>a book on the destruction of a minority group in the old Soviet Union,"
he said.
<P>The change in the tribe's diet in the past generation has been so great that
many <BR>Karuk concede that it will be difficult -- even if the dams are knocked
down and <BR>salmon runs are revived -- for them to return to their traditional
healthful diet.
<P>"Of course, we won't be able to eat salmon all the time like we did," said
Ron Reed, a <BR>traditional fisherman and tribal representative to FERC hearings
on the dams. But <BR>he said everyone in the tribe would eat vastly more than
they do now and that <BR>children would once again be able to grow up with the
staple food that has <BR>traditionally kept the bodies and spirits of the Karuk
healthy.
<P>Last year, because of the record-low catch, tribal elders did not have enough
<BR>salmon for religious ceremonies. So they bought some. <BR>
<P>© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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