“There’s nowhere else in the world that we can go to learn how to be Winnemems. Only there. We can’t go to Navajo. We can’t go to Alaska. We can’t go to Cherokee to learn how to be Winnemems.”

— Caleen Sisk, Hereditary and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu people

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By Judy Silber

When I first met the Winnemem Wintu, the Shasta Dam Enlargement Project was a serious threat hanging over their heads. A federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had built the original dam. It now proposed to add another 18 and a half feet on top of what was already there. The proposal had Winnemem Wintu Chief Caleen Sisk reflecting on future generations. 

She imagined the worst. If the Shasta Dam raise happens, the reservoir that holds water above it, gets bigger. The Winnemem Wintu’s Puberty Rock disappears. Without Puberty Rock, her granddaughter Mya can’t have a Coming of Age ceremony. And then the question becomes, will Mya still feel herself to be Winnemem Wintu? Will she want to visit the sacred spring on Mt. Shasta where they believe the world began?

CHIEF SISK: Will she want to still go there and sing to that spring? Will we still be around enough to teach that?

CHIEF SISK: That’s the struggle that we have right. Will we survive this?  

Will the Shasta Dam raise mean the extinction of the Winnemem Wintu? 

CHIEF SISK: It’s like maybe one day there won’t be any Winnemem to dance on the river. There won’t be any Winnemem to go and sing to the springs anymore. It’s like is that what they are okay with? They’re fine with having that happen? Because we’re struggling.

Shasta Dam threatens the Winnemem Wintu’s future. It’s also the place that defines the tribe’s past for the last 80-plus years. So we’re going to go there today. But before we do, let’s start by considering the dam symbolically, as a place where two cultures collide. 

There’s the larger culture that calls itself America, represented by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. And then there’s the Winnemem Wintu, an indigenous Northern California people. We want to define these two very different ways of looking at the world. To help me out, here’s Lyla June Johnston again. She’s an indigenous scholar, artist and community organizer who studies and writes about indigenous cultures. Hi Lyla.

LYLA JUNE JOHNSTON: Hi. Yeah, I mean, I was able to live with the Winnemem Wintu for two years and I got a pretty deep insight into how they see the world. But really what we see with the Winnemem Wintu is they see water and land as entities that need to be kept in balance and they have all signed, inside of their hearts, this sacred contract with water, land, animals, plants, rocks, mountains to steward them, to be responsible for the health of their homeland. And so a lot of indigenous peoples, not just the Winnemem Wintu, across Turtle Island, also known as America…these groups have similar beliefs that they were all put here by Creator to steward life around them. And they are designated to be the protectors and the keepers of the vitality of their homeland. 

SILBER: Whereas, I think the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, it has a more human-centric mindset, They are, of course, thinking about how to provide water to the entire state of California, which has almost 40 million residents. So many of us, we assume that if we want to live in California, there has to be this elaborate system that delivers water from one part of the state, Northern California, to the other. But what do you think about that, Lyla June? 

LYLA JUNE: Yeah, I think what people don’t understand is that prior to this network of dams and tunnels and water diversions, there was actually a highly functional system here. Indigenous peoples were densely populating California. There were over 80 languages here that we know of. They managed the Bay Area as an extremely prolific fishery where you could get clams and oysters out of the Bay by the basketful and there were fish weirs and all kinds of amazing abundance all around them and the Sacramento River, they say, was so full of salmon, you could walk across the backs of the salmon, and all up the higher tributaries as well. And so really, California as we know it doesn’t really need this whole network of pulleys and levers and dams. It’s actually quite impoverished, I would say, compared to the Eden that indigenous peoples were managing before.  

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Shasta Dam stands at 602 feet. That’s taller than the Statue of Liberty, the Great Pyramid, and many San Francisco skyscrapers. But engineers originally wanted even more, as much as an additional 200 feet. And even after it was completed in 1945, water officials kept returning to the idea of a taller dam. In the 1980s, they formally began to explore the possibility. The Shasta Dam and Reservoir Enlargement Project has come way down in size, but over the years, in fits and starts, it has crept closer to construction. We’ll say more on that later, but first, let’s go to the dam.

SHERI HARRAL: This road is not open to the public, so this is kind of a special thing that you guys are getting to go on it, but this is the road that they would have driven on every day to get down the river level as they were building the dam. 

I've joined a tour put on by the nonprofit water education foundation. Over three days, we’re visiting some of northern California's most important infrastructure sites. Today's first stop is Shasta Dam.

Sheri Harral, a spokesperson with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation stands at the front of a bus filled with engineers, biologists and policy wonks. As we drive, she points out where the government built dormitories, a mess hall and a hospital for construction workers who started coming here in the 1930s to work on Shasta Dam.

HARRAL: Kind of picture like the Grapes of Wrath, this big migration to the west, the pickup truck with everything all piled on it. They were looking for a place to live and a place to work. 

It was the time of the New Deal, when the country was exiting the great depression and the world was about to go to war. The United States government gave the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation funding to build some of the country’s largest dams: Hoover Dam in Nevada, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, and Shasta Dam, here in California. The agency had been created at the turn of the century to bring more water to dry lands in the west. Now – during a hard time – its successes helped feed a grandiose sense of American resilience and ingenuity. 

The tour bus arrives at Shasta Dam and we enter through a door into the dam’s hydroelectric power plant. Sheri Harral explains it creates enough electricity to power several hundred thousand homes. We walk past the generators and exit to a small, grassy area with a close-up view of a massive spillway. It took creative engineering and six and a half million cubic yards of concrete to build Shasta Dam. I crane my neck back to look straight up. It’s impressive.  

HARRAL: On the spillway, this center section, you’ll see 18 round openings there. Those are what we call river outlets, or outlet tubes. 

This tour took place in October of 2018. There was no water coming through those spillway holes. But had we been here the year before, Sheri Harral tells us we would have seen something different. The early months of 2017 were very wet.

She points upwards to the top of the dam.

HARRAL: We had 13 of the 18 open, which puts out 79,000 cubic feet a second. That’s our legal limit. 

DON BADER: Tami and I were out here every day. We spilled 2.2 million that winter. So that’s why, this thing will fill on a good winter. We bypassed over two million acre-feet of water in about six weeks.

This is Don Bader, Manager for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Northern California Area Office. An engineer by training, he wears glasses with hair neatly combed back. We are in the auditorium of Shasta Dam’s Visitor Center now, the spillway visible through large panes of glass. He tells us Shasta reservoir stores rain in winter months so that it can be released later — during drier times of year when farmers need it the most. But every so often, like in 2017, the rains fall so heavily, the reservoir fills up. Then operators have no choice but to open the spillway holes. 

Don Bader would rather have captured all that water. If Shasta Dam were higher, that could happen. The proposed expansion would increase reservoir capacity by about 13 percent. That's enough to cover more than 600,000 acres of farmland with a foot of water. 

DON BADER: It’s about a one in four or five-year frequency that you get those winters enough that you’d fill this up. So it fills and then those other three years, it’s going to be drawn down, of course. That’s the whole idea here.

Here’s the catch. To fill a bigger reservoir, California needs rain. And with climate change, the state has experienced more drought, which has brought water levels in the Shasta reservoir way down. But people who want the dam raised say they want to be prepared. Because if the reservoir ever does fill, any extra saved could help. 

BADER: So there’s the plumbing that we have. Shasta on the right, Trinity on the left. 

Don Bader continues clicking through his slides. He explains Shasta Dam is the keystone of the Central Valley Project.

BADER: So it’s quite a complicated plumbing system, we like to call it. But it’s very well thought out, very well designed.

It includes 20 dams and reservoirs, 11 power plants and 500 miles of canals sending water to farms and cities hundreds of miles south of where we now sit. 

I’ve done a lot of driving for this series. Through the Delta region just outside the Bay Area. Up and down highway 5, the main route between Southern and Northern California. And of course, between the Bay Area and Redding, where the Winnemem Wintu live. All along those highways and roads are rows upon rows of crops. Water from Shasta Dam and the Central Valley Project supports a lot of it. And yet, right now, there’s not enough. 

We’ll return to the water tour later, but first let’s dig into some history. So you can better understand the challenges facing California today. 

Before construction had even started on the Central Valley Project, newspaper articles gushed about its importance. It would redesign nature. Ship water to dry land with little rain. And when it was done, agriculture would have the water it needed. California farming had taken off after the Gold Rush. 

MARK ARAX: And what happened is, after the years of the Gold Rush, California shifted from mining of gold and started mining the soil of the huge Central Valley. 

ARAX: My name is Mark Arax. My grandfather, who was an Armenian would pronounce it Mark Arax (soft a). Arax is a great river that runs down through Armenia and Turkey from Mount Arat. So I guess writing about the land and the water comes as part of my patrimony.

His latest book is, “The Dreamt Land, Chasing Water and Dust Across California.”

Now I want you to picture a sock. That's California — long, but fairly narrow with a bend near the ankle. if you color in the middle section, that’s the central valley. about 20,000 square miles. mostly flat. Before the dams, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers overflowed into the valley to deposit sediment that created rich soil.

ARAX: So in the 1860s, you started seeing the development of farmland along the rivers of the valley. 

SILBER: The soil was good. 

ARAX: It’s washed down. It’s rich. It’s fertile. It drains well. 

Wheat was the state’s first major crop. Wealthy people of San Francisco were now…

ARAX: buying land in the valley and then farming that land, huge, vast acres, hundreds of thousands of acres, in wheat.

ARAX: Well, at some point, that monoculture ends up robbing the soil of its fertility. 

So the farmers switched to other crops: grapes, other fruits and vegetables. For water, they built ditches and canals, which got longer and longer as they expanded onto lands where the soil wasn’t as good.

ARAX: So much diversions are happening upstream that it slowly drains Tulare Lake, which was 880 square miles. 

Still, California's farmers didn’t stop. They started pumping groundwater from the aquifer beneath the soil. 

ARAX: At some point, the overreach of agriculture, the greed of agriculture is such that the rivers aren’t enough to satisfy the lust to farm. And the groundwater pumping isn’t enough. 

Droughts in the 1920s made the situation worse, especially in the Central Valley’s southern part. It's also known as the San Joaquin Valley and it doesn’t get much rain. 

ARAX: There is a movement in the San Joaquin Valley, an agrarian movement that basically shouted that they were drying up and they needed to bring water in from afar.

ARAX: And here was the shout of steal us a river. 

A man by the name of Colonel Robert B. Marshall came up with a plan to ship water from north to south. The plan proposed construction of a series of levees and dams for the north. Reservoirs would hold the water. Canals would carry it south. In 1931, the State’s Engineer endorsed a similar proposal. 

ARAX: And this was the beginnings of the Central Valley Project. And this was an audacious attempt at re-engineering California. 

At first, the state intended to finance the project with bonds. but this was the Great Depression. They didn’t sell. So California turned to congress for help. With federal funds, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation started construction in 1937. It completed Shasta Dam in 1945. The footprint of farms continued to grow. More state and federal water projects damned more rivers. Mark Arax says ultimately, agriculture went too far.

ARAX: And today we see this at a kind of level that’s really madness. Where we’re farming far beyond the reach of our water, going deeper and deeper into the ground to make up that difference, even as climate change is hitting, even as more droughts are hitching onto previous droughts. 

He says there are Central Valley farmers who understand the need to respond differently today. But as California has faced long years of drought, others have loudly demanded that California provide more water. 

Talking about this history with Mark Arax helped me understand the forces behind this push to build Shasta Dam higher. California agriculture wanted water however it could get it. planning for the enlargement project started decades ago. But it got fresh momentum in 2016 when Congress passed the Water Infrastructure Improvements Act. Donald Trump's presidency gave it even more traction.  

As a candidate, he’d made big promises to Central Valley farmers.

DONALD TRUMP: We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. 

TRUMP: It is so ridiculous. Where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea. And I just met with a lot of the farmers who are great people. And they’re saying, we don’t even understand it. Nobody understands it. 

In 2018, Congress approved $20 million for design and planning. It looked like the Shasta Dam and Reservoir Enlargement project would move forward. 

A few months later, I'm on the water tour. We’re leaving Shasta Dam and heading over to Shasta Reservoir, also known as Shasta Lake. All around the perimeter is what’s known as a bathtub ring, bare, denuded earth that sticks out above the water line. Waiting for us at a dock is Chief Caleen Sisk.   

NICK GRAY: So, I’d like to introduce everyone to Chief Sisk of the Winnemem Wintu tribe. 

Tour organizer Nick Gray.

NICK GRAY: She advocates for the inclusion of traditional ecological knowledge in federal, state and local environmental research and planning. So everyone, your attention for Chief Sisk.

CHIEF SISK: On the other side of that bridge right there is where our rivers come together. 

It’s late in the afternoon. The sun is low, and the wind blows off the lake. Chief Caleen wears her basket hat, beads and skirt. She starts by calling our attention to the landscape behind her. 

CHIEF SISK: It’s the confluence of the Sacramento, the McCloud and the Pit River. And for most people, they don’t really think about that, what is a confluence? What happens at a confluence where water comes together? For us, It’s a very sacred place. It’s a powerful place. It’s a place that doesn’t exist anywhere else on that river system. 

These three rivers help define a watershed. The McCloud runs up the middle, a source of Winnemem Wintu culture and spiritual traditions. The name Winnemem means middle water. Their ancestors lived there. Their way of life evolved there. But now… 

CHIEF SISK: We own no land on the McCloud River. All of our sacred places are there that make Winnemem people Winnemem. There’s nowhere else in the world that we can go to learn how to be Winnemems. Only there. We can’t go to Navajo. We can’t go to Alaska. We can’t go to Cherokee. To learn how to be Winnemems.

She tells the group, indigenous people are hardly represented in Washington D.C. With few to defend their rights, she’s afraid of what will happen if Shasta Dam is built higher. 

CHIEF SISK: So we’ll be saying, at that time, to our youngsters. Right here there was a big dance ground. We used to dance and down there was a puberty rock, the last puberty rock for our young girls to become women. It’s going to be 60 feet underwater if it happens the way that they want it to. 

CHIEF SISK: It’s like I’m not sure what the solution is. Other than, we fight.

Thinking back to the moment, I can remember how stressful this time was for Chief Caleen. Backed by powerful political forces, the Shasta Dam Enlargement Project was becoming ever more real. But she always maintained a sense of humor. For example, as she speaks at Shasta Reservoir a crow lands on someone’s head.

CHIEF SISK: Now that guy is blessed. [Everyone is laughing.] The Bird Man. He’s the Bird Man of Shasta Dam. He’s been touched. [Laughter continues.]

Touched by the unexpected is a good metaphor. The people listening to Chief Caleen are not necessarily natural allies. It’s a mostly white audience. A few work for the Bureau of Reclamation. But they listen intently.

CHIEF SISK: By 1910, there was 395 Winnemem people left. 

She says the Winnemem Wintu barely survived the settler colonialism of the past 200 years, a point she has to keep driving home to all the federal agencies she interacts with.

CHIEF SISK: And so it’s a miracle that we’re even here still today. And that’s what we tell the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management all the time. We say, you should be happy. When we’re dancing and singing on this river, you should be protecting our rights to do so. You took all of our land. You pawned it off to other individual private owners. You kept the bulk of it for yourselves. And you have no place for us.

A taller dam would take even more away from the Winnemem Wintu . Chief Sisk could project into the future and she didn’t like what she saw. 

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A Prayer for Salmon is a project of The Spiritual Edge at KALW Public Radio. Support comes from the Templeton Religion Trust, California Humanities, the Kalliopeia Foundation, Save Our Spirits and The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder. We are produced on Ohlone and Coastal Miwok land.

Thank you to the Winnemem Wintu and the Run4Salmon community for welcoming us, our microphones and cameras into their midst. To contribute to the Winnemem Wintu’s nonprofit, go to sawalmem.io.