Hoopa, Klamath, Karuk, Shasta and Yurok youths make a boisterous
circle of kayaks in the calm crescent of the river’s oxbow, then fall
silent as a tribal elder’s hawk-feather fan blesses each young voyager
with the sacred smoke from a smoldering bundle of wild celery root.

Then, with a whoop, they all begin the 300-mile paddle from the headwaters
near Spencer Creek to the mouth on California’s northern coast. This, after weeks
of together learning the language of the rollicking, rejoicing waters of the rewilded
Klamath River, a language their elders refused to forget.

            ambo               goge               nepuy              tlamatl

It’s said if any living thing or place goes unspoken for too long it becomes
faceless, unknown, prone to reckless use…or forgotten forever. The words
that are the nouns of, the actions of, the descriptions of all things have to be
uttered for the thing itself to live on in heart, in mind, in fact, in real time.

hishqi”i           kittfin             is’iish             a’ama

Believe with me…the five river tribes’ orisons about river, rapids and salmon, their fierce
loyalty to prayer, pledge and story, is what eroded the sullen concrete resolve of Copco One
and Two, of Iron Gate and Boyle. Eleven days after the last of those dams fell and for the first time in more than one hundred years, salmon returned to spawn in their natal waters.

On that eleventh day a woman walked out into Spencer Creek. A Chinook salmon
swam up right next to her feet. So overcome, they say she cried for a week.

Aiy-ye-kwee! Aiy-ye-kwee!  I’ve been lonesome for you.