Chapter 6. The Delta, A Habitat Destroyed
“The Delta’s probably one of the most altered places you can imagine on the planet. Of that 500,000 acres of inland freshwater tidal marsh, 98 percent of it is gone.”
— Leticia Grenier, scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute
Sherman Island County Park, CA — Wind turbines along the hardscaped edges of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. May 15, 2021. Tom Levy/The Spiritual Edge
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By Judy Silber
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is the next leg of the Run4Salmon. The two-week ceremony is dedicated to reviving Central Valley Chinook salmon populations. the Winnemem Wintu and supporters want to identify all the obstacles, both environmental and political, on the fish’s long migration route from ocean to mountain spawning grounds. So far, we’ve traveled for a few days by foot. This time we’ll be on a boat moving through the Delta.
The Delta is a series of channels and islands, part of a large estuary that starts in the San Francisco Bay, and is formed from the meeting of two great rivers, the Sacramento and San Joaquin.
In the early morning a small crew gathers at a marina near the Delta’s western edge, in a town called Pittsburg.
CHIEF CALEEN SISK: We’re going up the Sacramento River from the Delta. And we’re going to follow that all the way to Sacramento Discovery Park. We should be getting in there around 1:30 or two.
We’re hundreds of miles from Winnemem Wintu homelands. but the health of this habitat is critical for salmon. It's part of an indigenous foodway and it’s highly stressed.
In the 20th century, the Delta became like a spigot for water going south to farms in the San Joaquin valley. Today, it’s a flashpoint for competing interests, including farms, cities and fish. On the boat, we’re about to see how demands on the Delta have left it nothing like it once was.
We walk down the dock to board a small fishing boat with room for six. Most of us came prepared for cold, but instead of jackets, we need sunscreen. It’s a beautiful, sunny day.
CAPTAIN JAMES NETZEL: Do you know about all the levy work they’re doing in Sacramento?
CHIEF SISK: I didn’t know.
NETZEL: You’re going to be shocked when you see.
Captain James Netzel leads guided fishing tours and is passionate about salmon. He keeps an eye out for any changes on the river.
NETZEL: Because the levy in Sacramento, on the West Sacramento side is trashed. They needed to replace it.
Chief Sisk cares because for her, this is all salmon habitat.
NETZEL: Well, let’s probably get going.
CHIEF SISK: All right. Let’s go.
NETZEL: I got to remember how to get out of here.
CHIEF SISK: Oh no. (Laughs.)
NETZEL: Pray that I got salmon sense. I’ll stick my nose in the water.
CHIEF SISK: You will follow the salmon.
***
JUDY SILBER: Lyla June, salmon, of course, were a staple for California, coastal, Native communities. Your doctoral research explores all kinds of Native foodways and ecosystems.
LYLA JUNE: So what I’m really trying to get across with this dissertation is hey, we were not stupid Indians. We were not nomads running around eating hand to mouth. We created anthropogenic systems. We architected abundance. We engineered systems that benefited not just humans, but all life around us.
SILBER: What happens when Native people can’t manage the land in the way that they used to?
LYLA JUNE: Well, when you can’t manage the land. Let’s take California, for example. Oak trees are actually, they developed a fire-resistant bark because Native peoples had been burning these oak savannahs for so many thousands of years that the oak evolved to withstand human fire.
LYLA JUNE: So let’s say you take away this indigenous fire that was there for tens of thousands of years, you have overgrowth, You have brush come in and they start to choke out these oaks. And you have depleted soil systems. You have systems that became pyro-adapted, all of a sudden, go into a state of shock. And that’s actually what’s going on throughout the continent.
SILBER: So what happens when indigenous people lose their authority, their ability to manage these systems?
LYLA JUNE: Well, just like the oak tree became adapted to humans, the humans became super adapted to the oak trees. Or whatever biosystem they’re from. Like my people, we’re very adapted to corn. If we don’t have blue corn, our systems go into shock. And similarly, with Native people in California, if they don’t have salmon, their systems go into shock.
LYLA JUNE: You can be Winnemem Wintu, but not be eating the things that make you Winnemem Wintu. And as we see in the Winnemem Wintu community, there’s an epidemic of diabetes and people will even say, why aren’t they more healthy? And it’s like, you destroyed their food system. They’re eating, but they’re not being fed. I mean, imagine – I ask people from India this all the time – imagine if you could never eat Indian food again. And they just look at me like, I would die. I’m like yeah, that’s what we go through. And so when you have these salmon populations almost completely disappear. That’s how it feels for California Natives.
***
A small group sings and waves the Run4Salmon crew off, and Captain James Netzel steers the small boat out onto the water. The people onboard will become quite chatty later, but for now, everyone is quiet. It’s a spectacular feeling to be out on the hazy blue-gray water. But there’s also a feeling of emptiness. Scientists tell me this unique habitat is probably one of the most altered places on the planet. Of the original 500,000 acres of freshwater tidal marsh, 98 percent of it is gone. We don't see much wildlife. Just a few birds. The edges of this once-meandering waterway are sharply defined, an indication of how much it’s changed.
CHIEF SISK: I call it a channel instead of a river because it’s got levees on both sides of it. It makes it look like a big channel instead of a river. Because this should be a meandering river. And it should be big and wide, but you know, I guess they didn’t like that.
Once the Sacramento River was big, strong and unpredictable. It would sometimes flood the entire Sacramento Valley to create a giant, inland sea. Then in the mid-1800s, Euro-American settlers recognized the Valley and the area around the Delta as valuable farmland. They piled peat and rocks on the banks to build the first levees. They drained the Delta’s marshland. They cut down trees like sycamore and maple, and removed the tule, a reed important for birds and fish. Then in the 1940s, the Central Valley Project began diverting water from the Delta to farmers and cities in the south. To understand how much the Delta’s landscape has changed, I met up with Leticia Grenier, a scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute.
LETICIA GRENIER: So you take a place that was this enormous, enormous wetland and you take 98 percent of it away, it’s a totally different place now.
She helps me imagine what it was like.
GRENIER: The analogy I’ve used for it before is that it was the refrigerator of California. It was a place for everybody to come and eat because these marshes are super productive. So there were grizzly bears coming. There were tule elk that came. Wolves. And there were these incredible runs of salmon as well as other fish that are only found in the Delta. And there were some really amazing accounts of what the early European explorers found in terms of salmon, as the salmon ran upstream, that they were literally, like their backs were touching each other.
Adult salmon heading upstream don’t eat. They’re focused on getting where they need to go to spawn. But juveniles need to bulk up. A young salmon that’s big and fat is more likely to survive in the ocean. The Delta offered plenty of food.
GRENIER: So there’s algae in the water, phytoplankton and then algae living on the mud at the bottom, and living on the stocks of the plants. It’s easy to eat and you get a lot of nutrition out of it.
Once, the Delta had a ton of tule reeds that grew right in the water. Their dead material turns into something called detritus, which becomes like a soup for organisms at the bottom of the food chain. In turn, they provided food for salmon.
The Delta also offered lots of places where fish could hide or rest in what was an intricate water maze.
GRENIER: So if you think about it, we took a marsh that was kind of like the tissues in your body, with the arteries and the capillaries and the blood going in and out, and what we did was kind of got rid of all the capillaries. But the big vessels are still there.
GRENIER: And this is a big part of the reason why we see salmon doing so poorly. They’re essentially running a gauntlet of high velocity water where there’s nowhere to rest. There’s a lot of predators and there’s not that much food.
On the boat, we continue upstream. Large wind turbines come into view on the left. To the right, is farmland. All around us are signs that the demands of modern-day California are prioritized over the health of the Delta.
CHIEF SISK: On the other side of that bush is a warning sign.
Chief Sisk points to a sign on a pole that rises from water near the river’s left bank. Gary Thomas is here. He’s a steady Run4Salmon presence every year. He reads the sign out loud.
GARY THOMAS: So we’re saying warning, don’t anchor or dredge. Natural gas pipeline crossing.
CHIEF SISK: ...pipelines going under the river right there. See that red and white, that’s what that is.
THOMAS: CPN pipeline company. 877-432-5555.
Between here and our final stop in Sacramento, more natural gas pipelines will cross beneath the water. As we continue on, we see oil rigs set up on land that’s dry and stripped of most vegetation. According to a California Public Utilities Commission map, this part of the Sacramento River has over a hundred active oil and gas wells. All of this infrastructure makes wetlands restoration difficult and expensive. Thomas says after Standing Rock in 2016, where protestors questioned the safety of an oil pipeline, he also thinks about leaks.
THOMAS: Anyone that has plumbing problems in their own home knows that every pipe will leak.
On the Run4Salmon’s first year, Thomas was the one who noticed the pipelines and oil rigs. He tells me he used to work on a rig for Malcolm Drilling in South San Francisco. As the boat speeds up, we almost have to shout to be heard. Thomas says one day, he woke up to what he was doing.
THOMAS: I kind of had an epiphany about destroying the earth, drilling in the earth. So it was kind of like, I don’t think I should be doing this anymore. It was a conscious decision.
Participating in the Run4Salmon has inspired Thomas to consider his ancestral connections to Chinook salmon in Lake County, about 100 miles northeast from here. Restoration efforts have returned salmon to the lower part of a waterway called Putah Creek. When Thomas heard about the fish there, he started to connect the dots.
THOMAS: ...and then I realized that Putah Creek flowed all the way into Lake County, actually. And then started asking around and then a lot of the elders said, yeah, there were runs one time when they were younger.
He tells me because he didn’t grow up with salmon, he’s had work at developing a taste for the fish.
THOMAS: At first I didn’t really have a taste for salmon. And you realize the diet we have nowadays. We don’t have that consistency of having salmon in our diet, So that was pretty, real disheartening,
Removing salmon from the diets of indigenous people has had serious consequences. Karuk people in the far north of California have helped to document the harm. I spoke by Zoom with Karuk ceremonial leader Ron Reed.
REED: My colonial name is Ron Reed. My Karuk name is Em Kau Xaa.
Karuk territory is in the Klamath River Basin where salmon runs were once prolific. All of that changed in the course of Ron Reed’s lifetime.
REED: I'm a traditional dip net fishermen. I used to fish for the ceremonies for elders, for a community but more importantly, I used to fish for my family. My extended family. Now I'm unable to fish my extended family, unable to fish for my family, unable to fish for the ceremony, unable to fish for the elders, unable to fish for the community. That puts us in the same situation as the Winnemem Wintu right now.
He and a University of Oregon professor teamed up to do some research. They collected data that indicated increases in diabetes and obesity, and strains on mental health, all caused by the salmon’s decline. What happened to his community gives Ron Reed empathy for other Native people who have experienced similar losses.
REED: You know, I feel for the Winnemem Wintu, I feel for other tribes up and down North America because they've been forcibly removed from their lifestyle, and put in existence that we are less than human.
For everyone on the fishing boat, pondering the state of salmon is painful. These waters once supported one of the most diverse and plentiful Chinook fisheries in the world. Captain Netzel tells me that even in his lifetime, the numbers of salmon on the Sacramento River have gone down.
NETZEL: We used to have 10-mile long schools of fish. Just one school of fish, 10 miles, from here to Sacramento. It would just be a solid line of fish going in.
NETZEL: And now we’ve got little pods of 50 or 60 fish.
Chief Sisk says salmon shouldn’t be so scarce.
CHIEF SISK: Really, we should have a paradigm shift where we are, the economy of California should be based on the salmon and not on GMO farming.
When I first heard Chief Sisk say this, I was blown away. The California I grew up with is known for Silicon Valley technology and Central Valley produce. But before dams took over the state’s major rivers and streams, we were a salmon state. Salmon could be found from the mountains to the sea.
CHIEF SISK: That’s why we’re saying, what are the effects of this waterway? And considering what could be done. So if people knew. And if salmon were important enough, what could we do?
NETZEL: ...We’re going to turn our engines off and we’ll see which way the river takes us.
Our small boat is approaching our final destination in the city of Sacramento. We’re maybe 100 yards from the entrance to what’s called the Delta Cross Channel. It’s a channel that diverts water from the Sacramento river and sends it south and an important example of the way water is routed away from the Delta. Captain Netzel turns off his motor. He has a point to prove. That the channel can pull young salmon off their migration path.
NETZEL: I’ll tell you 99 percent of the time, if there’s no wind blowing us the wrong direction, we’ll get sucked into the channel. And we’re a 23-foot boat. Think about a little salmon smolt that’s an inch long.
The Delta Cross Channel’s gates aren’t always open, but when they are, salmon can get sucked in from the force created by pumps. When this happens, the young juveniles never make it to the ocean. They never return to lay eggs and reproduce. It’s one of the more controversial aspects of how the feds and state handle Sacramento and Delta waters.
CHIEF SISK: This water right here is being diverted. See the gates right there? They’re up and so that means the Delta pumps are on. So it’s pulling water down this channel and that’s how the fish get confused.
Dan Bacher is another journalist on the boat. He says this is where California’s water systems get really crazy.
DAN BACHER: Aqueducts, canals, you know, pumps, channels…gates, I mean, it’s really complex. It is so complex, you got to look at the map of the Central Valley Project and all the different facilities. It’s mind-boggling. They take water from one river, they divert that, dry it up and then recharge that with some water.
I've done a lot of staring at those maps. The way human engineering re-routes the flow of water is mind-boggling. But the biggest takeaway is this: today, only about 50 percent of waters that should flow through the Delta makes it out to the ocean. That’s what’s left to maintain this habitat and the San Francisco Bay. The rest goes to cities and farms.
As we continue upstream, we see Irrigation pipes casually plopped into the water. Also, construction of new levees. And an invasive plant that’s choking tall trees that shade the water. All stresses on a river that’s still home to salmon.
SILBER: Does it make you crazy that people do all this work to create what Nature already knows how to do?
CHIEF SISK: Right! And it creates these, I don’t know, people look at that as jobs. Those are people’s jobs to do all of that nonsense.
CHIEF SISK: We’re doing more destruction than we are doing help.
We disembark at a dock in the city of Sacramento. The state capital and the place where so many of the current laws and regulations controlling this river got a start. A group of Winnemem Wintu and Run4Salmon supporters greet us with a song.
The song says they’re getting ready to win. To win the battle to bring salmon back. To see them thrive again on the Sacramento River. To once again become part of the ecosystem on the McCloud River, where the Winnemem Wintu’s ancestors lived.
Chief Sisk says they don’t know how it will all turn out, but despite the obstacles they observed on the boat, they have to play to win.
Over the next few days, the Winnemem Wintu will rest and then continue up the river on another boat. When this human journey gets hard, when bodies get tired or personalities collide, or when they realize how hard it will be to bring about change, Chief Sisk reminds the group of the salmon’s travails. From ocean to spawning grounds, they swim hundreds of miles. They navigate the natural and human-made obstacles. They expend all their energy so their progeny can repeat the cycle of life. They never give up, she says.
***
The Run4Salmon is only two weeks, but during the rest of the year Chief Sisk is still thinking about the fish. Like on this fall day, when she’s traveled 80 miles to visit a nondescript meeting room where decisions about water get made,
ATTORNEY: These contracts are across-the-board irrigation contractors, and so, ...on page 31, paragraph 46 of your exhibit. That would say, no changes there.
In the small town of Willows, about halfway between the Bay Area and Redding sits the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority. In a public meeting, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and irrigation districts are finalizing contracts for water that flows out of Shasta Dam.
ATTORNEY: On paragraph 27, just a notice...most of these guys are local government with the exception of the usual water company and so, we’ll some differences across the system there, according to that. (Shuffling of paper.)
Bureau of Reclamation officials and irrigation district attorneys sit at white folding tables arranged in a U-shape. In the audience are about a dozen district representatives. And Chief Sisk. And me. We are the only members of the public. This meeting is mostly procedural, but Chief Sisk has come to learn what she can.
DON BADER: We’re still committing...we are hoping to get the contractor’s specific version back within 30 days.
Attorney: …I don’t think there’s any language left to discuss unless others feel that there is.
DON BADER: Jeff, would you like to take a quick caucus?
Chief Caleen and I are told we have to leave while district officials and attorneys meet. We’re escorted into a small room down the hallway where we look over papers handed out during the meeting.
CHIEF SISK: It’s too much. How can you follow all of this? And how can you stand up for the salmon if you don’t understand the whole process of what they’re doing?
The contracts being finalized today will set up water deliveries to irrigation districts in the Sacramento Valley.
CHIEF SISK: It’s hard to even...they don’t really care about Shasta Dam. They just care about the canal, coming from the Sacramento River.
CHIEF SISK: You know, there’s no fish in the canal. She laughs. So they don’t really worry about the fish, the flows for the fish, as long as they have flows in their canals.
About 20 minutes pass and a guy from the irrigation district knocks to tell us the meeting will resume. As we walk back, we cross paths with Don Bader, area manager of the Northern California region of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
“Could I talk with you after the meeting?” I ask him.
I want to ask about the Bureau’s response when the Winnemem Wintu protested at the Shasta Dam Visitor Center several months ago.
“No comment,” he says, and keeps walking.
Back in the meeting, the lawyers wrap up.
Don Bader says now is the time if any members of the public want to speak. From the side wall where we sit, Chief Sisk stands up.
CHIEF SISK: Yeah, I’m Caleen Sisk. I’m the chief of the Winnemem Wintu tribe of McCloud River, which is where this water comes from. And we are very concerned about the restoration of salmon coming up to our river again, and also the salmon in the Sacramento River.
CHIEF SISK: I just wanted to be here and let you all know that the salmon are still important, not just because they’re a food or a fish, but they’re important to water.
As a keystone species, salmon has an outsized impact on the ecology where it lives.
CHIEF SISK: And so, I’m just here to say, I hope that maybe some of you, maybe not this year, but maybe coming up, that things can change, that we can move toward protecting the water a little better.
CHIEF SISK: So thank you guys. Thank you. Ho.
The meeting ends. No one comments on what she’s said.
BADER: That concludes our session here with PC contractors. You are free to leave.
After the meeting, it occurs to me that the bureaucracy we’ve just observed is a legacy of policies started in the mid-1800s. American settlers to California established governments and laws that supported genocide, slavery, indenture, claimed title to their land and otherwise treated Native people as inferior. They had little to no rights to protect cultural resources.
For tribes like the Winnemem Wintu, this erasure continues. The government continues on, holding meetings and issuing contracts, as if their concerns do not exist.
***
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.
Sacramento River Delta, CA — Along the banks of the Delta, a sign warns of gas pipelines that run beneath the Sacramento river. May 13, 2021. Tom Levy/The Spiritual Edge
