woman: our connection with this land, with this river is so deeply ingrained that it's hard to explain. we feel like the salmon is related to us. we feel like the condor is related to us. every little species is related to us, and it's our place culturally and ceremonially to protect them. man: we would not be yurok without this place. this place as shaped us, and, to some extent, we've helped shape this place. different man: theiver is a teacher in itself. we have a

symbiotic relationship ecologically as well as culturally. we can learn all these great life principles, but that is nothing without reciprocating that responsibility and that relationship with the creatures of the klamath river. woman: returning condor to yurok ancestral territory is really bringing a member of our community, a member of our family home. because our entire lives are dedicated to keeping the world in balance, it means that we're praying and working towards restoration of our entire world. you really have to have that condor's view, i think, to understand the level of restoration that we're talking about. announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy. woman: our landscape is very different from what it used to be. there were a great diversity of ecosystems that supported our way of life, that supported the way of life of the species around us. the

klamath river--what used to be, what i'm told, is almost a crystal-clear river--is now muddy and green and warm and does not support our salmon and other anadromous fish populations that it used to. there used to be these vast tracks of old-growth redwood and a large prairie system which supported condors. all of these things are deeply intertwined. all the tribes' role of this area is to restore the world to as close as we can manage to what happened previous to colonizers moving into our area and creating all of this destruction. different woman: when nonnatives came here and, you know, they started to come in with the gold rush in, you know, the 1800s, you know, late 1800s, they came in, and there was a beautiful landscape, and they wanted the resources.

they started doing hydro mining, just blasted rock, which, you know, of course, caused a lot of landslides and sediment into the rivers. it really changed the dynamic of the river. when they realized that, you know, gold wasn't going to be the moneymaker that they all thought it was going to be, they kind of moved to the logging industry. logging has really been one of the most detrimental things to our landscape here. it was a drastic change for yurok people. man: we have lost some of that ability over time through history to shape this land. we had certain rules that we lived by and made sure that when we got fish here that those fish were allowed to pass up river largely unchecked until we received word that folks upriver were catcng fish.

man: some of my first memories were down here, i'm sure the first memories of charley's, as well. charley: i come from karok, hupa, and yurok people of northwest california. a cultural thread amongst those 3 people is the river and the fish. our neighbors down the river is the yurok people. it's downriver people, and they take over the responsibilities from weitchpec on down to the mouth of the klamath river. right now, we're at katimin, center of the world for karok people. the aboriginal territory stems from up towards the yreka area all the way down to weitchpec. man: katimin--upper falls. it's our fishery. yutimin--lower

falls. first spring salmon is spotted down at the mouth of the river. the medicine mannd his helper spot the first salmon. then they catch that first salmon, ritually eat it, then there's a jump dance 10 days afterwards. the second salmon ceremony is held on the new moon in july up at inam, up at clear creek, up by happy camp, and at that point, that ceremony's done, the people from inam all the way out to the ocean can fish. the shasta indians put on a salmon ceremony, as well--i'll say the third salmon ceremony-- so then everybody from that

point down can fish, so that is a very dramatic way of managing your fishery. it allows for your progeny of the run to make it to the headwaters. that means that all the fish between, before you see that first salmon, they make it all the way to the headwaters, or they can get out past you. then we can start fishing. the other traditional knowledge part of that is that you don't fish the heads of the run or the tails of the run. you fish the body of the run. a good year, we catch up to 2,000 fish. the bad year, we catch less than a hundred. we're the second largest tribe in california, with over 4,000 tribal members, so we're not even catching a fish per person. we're not even getting a half of fish per person, so

it's very demeaning to the fishermen that come down here when there's a bad fish run, when there's drought, when there's all different things. it's a matter of trying to figure out how do you subside for, you know, your people. charley: 1905 was the time of the dam construction and took our whole river out of balance. it readjusted the hydrology. it readjusted the ecosystems. the management was exchanged to the federal government and the forest service, so a lot of things were happening at once--logging, timber--that resulted in just a very unhealthy river system that couldn't--could barely support itself, nonetheless other critters that depend on it. the 2002 fish kill, that was one of e instces it w just, like, something needs to change. the low water flow allowed for a lot of different toxic blue-green algae to flourish, which contributes to low dissolved-oxygen levels.

you have thousands of fish packed like sardines into one refugia, disease just spreads like it's a wildfire, so when you have that magnified throughout the entire water system, like, it's no wonder that there's 40,000 to 60,000 adults chinook salmon dead on thbeach. ron: yeah. usually when the sun gets halfway up that mountain, you better be doing your last round, right, chuck? charley: yep. ron: you'll be meeting virusur on the way out, meeting bear, virusur. charley: our people and fish have a symbiotic relationship, meaning that if they're unhealthy, we're unhealthy because we very much depend on each other to thrive. now we're finally getting back to revitalizing who we are as people, our responsibilities, and i think that's where i see a lot of hope.

man: all right. here we go. uh, going in. it's all kind of a cluster until you're in the boat. oh, it's beautiful out. so the klamath river watershed is very big. the trinity river is the largest tributary to the klamath river, and from a fisheries perspective, the trinity is super valuable, and so we're at the head of this big valley--it's like 10 or 12 miles long--and our project is just down here. man: the yurok tribe along with the hupa valley tribe co-managing with federal

agencies is part of the trinity river restoration program, and it's a 40-mile reach of river, restoring various aspects of the trinity from the degradation of anthropogenic influence over time, everything from mining era in the 1800s to water diversion to the central valley. weissmann: we're approximately a hundred miles from t reservation here, but the tribe, they see the value in restoring this habitat to benefit the river overall, and they definitely take a holistic approach. it's not just salmon. it's all the river's animals. boulby: this isn't our ancestral land, but this is wherour fishome from. the mini back in the 1800s destroyed the spawning grounds, completely devastated this land. the river can no longer meander. it's just, now it's just like a ditch. weissmann: when the dam was put in, it kind of choked down the high flows. it sees episodic events that really changed the

river around, spread things out, make the channel jump out of where it was and go to a new spot, and so that's what we've tried to recreate as a dynamic system. we just want all kinds of areas. we're not ever shooting for one kind of area, but we really are trying to unlock the potential of the river to maintain its own habitat. [beeping] this is all rock that we process from the mining tailings. the tailings are an artifact of the bucket-dredge mining. essentially, all the gravel and sediment that got processed on the conveyor belt to remove the gold, no amount of river power can scour them or remove them. they need to be

manually removed. that's probably our most experienced operator right there, roger boulby, and he's working on one of the most difficult parts of the project we've run into so far, which is trying to excavate a bend in the river, and this won't be the river anymore. this'll be a gravel bar, and that will be the river over there. it's a feat of engineering. man: for us to bring this river back to support salmon runs anywhere near the historic scale, you got to go big. you can't do it small. putting a few logs in the river isn't going to bring back, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of salmon a year in this river. it took decades and incredible amounts of manpower to put us where we are

right now, and it's people who have to put it back. brandowski: we implement these projects in a way that we're providing that foundation for the river to actually really do it itself. if we build it and it actually stays static, then we've really failed, and we really want the river to take it to the next step, and we want dynamic processes. we want natural processes to happen. one of the ways that we do that is by looking at how the rivers have functioned over time, and the tribes have at perspective, as they've been here since time immemorial. weissmann: we're at the interface between the new project we're working on right now and the project that we did two years ago. these are two logjs that we built, so narrowing and widening the river is one way to get where you want to go. you can also just put in material that's so big, the river can't move it, and the river has to go one way or the other. boulby: this isn't the way it was. this should be grassy

meadows with fingers boiling with fish up here. with us stepping in and fixing things, the population should be strong, in theory. we'll see. weismann: the chinook salmon love these valley sections, and it's because the velocity never really gets too high, and the salmon redds, their little beds that they put the eggs in, the chance of those getting blown out because of high-velocity water is decreased. that's kind of what they like--just cold, clean rers with gvel and the ability to move around on their own. they don't like to be told what to do. this spot over here just downstream in the shade, there were salmon all over there spawning. right when we got done building, they were in there. they like it. salmon, yoknow, they're vulnerable when they're out there in super shallow water. they're a big, big, giant protein packet. everything wants to eat them, and it's good for them to have somewhere

to escape. man: it's actually amazing in a lot of ways that we even have any salmon left. they get kind of a raw deal, right, because they live both in freshwater and saltwater. neither environment is very inviting for them right now. we got low flows, high water temperature, low dissolved oxygen. you know, the list goes on, so one of the targets is natural escapement. escapement are all of the fish tht avoid getting caught in nets, avoid getting eaten by marine mammals, avoid getting disease, avoid getting caught by rod-and-reel fishermen, and actually make it to the spawning grounds. that's really important to understand. more is not always better because what happens is, there's not enough habitat, so they're actually spawning on top of each other, which is not good, so, in other words, the recolonization of salmon, that escapement number will likely change. it will likely go higher because we've

increased the habitat. most indigenous people of this basin feel that, you know, the klamath river really is like the lifeblood of our culture, and since time immemorial, we've lived off this river, and this river has provided for us and not just in the formf fish, but in the form of a lot of different things, and many of our religious ceremonies revolve around species that the river supports. there's, like, 46 other species, i believe, something like that, that depend on salmon. so there's the pod. you can see them. there's mostly harbor seals there, and there's also some california sea lions next to them in another group there, but normally, they're up here further. this week, they've been up closer, but right now, it looks like they're just napping after having a big feast, probably.

[gulls squawking] it's a pretty amazing process, the way it works. you know, these salmon bring back all these marine-derived nutrients, right, and all of those nutrients, you know, that are contained in those fish from the ocean, well, those carcasses are drug out into the forest by many different species that eat on them, right, and those carcasses decay, and they're absorbed into the ecosystem, and so we wouldn't have redwood trees, we wouldn't have conifer forest if it wasn't for a returning fish like salmon. how else can you get marine-derived nutrients in that kind of mass hundreds of miles upriver? man: the yurok tribe see things from a cyclical perspective and more of a holistic ecosystem approach where everything's

part of the system, everything's used, nothing's really waste. condors can be part of that, bringing those nutrients to those more terrestrial upland ecosystems. williams: because our entire lives are supposed to be dedicated to keeping the world in balance, it means that we're praying and workingowards a restoration of our entire world. all of the tribes in this area find condor to be deeply spiritually significant, so from both the spiritual and the ecological standpoint, we've had a very large hole in our world since condor has disappeared. west: at the time of euro-american arrival here, there were a lot of big, bad predators, and people were trying to start up, you know, bringing in livestock. they wanted to get rid of the grizzly bears. they wanted to get rid of the wolves. there were a lot of carcasses put out that were intentionally laced with strychnine and other toxins, so condors, turkey vultures, eagles all took major hits at that time.

williams: another one of the big impacts on condor was the introduction of the use of lead ammunition, and, of course, lead is well-established as being a toxic material. we got it out of our lead paints, out of our leaded gasoline, gotten rid of all those things, but it's still the most commonly used ammunition type for most hunters. some statistics indicate the use of lead ammunition is actually the number-one reason that condors ardying in the wil even today. condor reintroduction ties very deeply to our world renewal ceremonies, to our reason for being. all of the tribes in this area find condor to be deeply spiritually significant. we do continue with our dances, but we no longer have condor providing us our feathers, which we use that feather in our regalia, and in yurok belief, that feather carries the condndor spirit with it. we don't have condor here to gift us those feathers. condor traditionally would carry our prayers to the heavens, which he's no longer in our skies to carry our prayers to heavens, and, of course, his ecological role has

been nonfunctioning, as well. he serves as the ultimate in the cleanup crew, the ultimate in the world renewal as he goes across the landscape breaking into these particularly large carcasses--like whales, seals, sea lions, bears--that other smaller scavengers can't break into. he actually breaks into them, opens them up for more bioavailability and provides more food to the ecosystem that normally wouldn't have been there. woman: we're going to have one person who's going to go all the way to the back and poke the birds. then we'll have another person with a net kind of in that general area and then the other person, again, kind of up by that other snag blocking the birds from that easy landing on that snag and kind of corralling them back. west: we're at the bitter creek wildlife refuge, which is a u.s. fish and wildlife service refuge in southern california in the santa barbara back count. we came down here to worwith the u.s. fish and wildlife service crew to trap up condors, so this is their

release facilitwhere they release birds, but they also trap birds a couple times a year here. williams: they've graciously invited us here to do some hands-on training in preparation for our releases up in northern california. woman: these birds hate having their tails messed with, and so nicole's trying to go for a slap that they really don't like because that gets them to move off the perch. oh, is it--yeah. go, go, go, go, go, go, go. man: oh! woman: you got it. you got it. you got it. all right, guys. different woman: nicely done. thanks, guys. west: you're welcome. woman: cool. it's down this way, so-- different woman: and then make sure you get that beak under control. man: yeah. woman: that's kind of your next step. man: keep your--yeah. woman: great. if you want to just stand up, i'm going to help you with the net, nice, and somebody can do that. man: beauty. good.

west: so the condor population right now is at over 400 individuals. we were down to only 22 individuals left in the world at one time. i believe there's over 200 individuals just in california, so our flock up in northern california, we'll be doing kind of your standard release setup, which is about 6 condors annually. what, exactly, our recovered condor population looks like is not really known, but i think in the back of everyone's mind is self-sustaining. the population has to be self-sustaining and not declining without human ntervention. woman: so we're going to flip the bird in your lap, if you're comfortable with that. so can you grab the beak there? there we go. so i'm going to take a blood sample from this bird, and we take that blood sample, and we send it in to get tested for blood

lead levels, and from that, we can tell people how much blood lead levels are in this bird and also where that lead came from. williams: it is very nice t get into the field. this is my third opportunity to actually get hands on a condor. forhe last couple of years, we've been really involved in the more bureaucratic process, the permitting process to get birds in the air. that's a lot of desk work. it is wonderful to be out here in the sun and just watching them so casually fly over and check us out. they're very curious birds. west: the california condor recovery program is a group of people that is mosy led by the u.s. fish and wildlife service, since they have the charge for protecting and restoring endangered species in the united states. with the idea that there was a need for rangewide recovery, the tribe nted to get involved. from that point, it snowballed pretty quickly. we've been working on this for a decade just to get to this point where we're ready to release birds.

woman: we should grab this container. different woman: right, right. does anyone want to get beak for this bird? williams: returning condor to yurok ancestral territory is really bringing a member of our community, a member of our family home. there's nobody living who's actually lived in the same world as condors in yurok ancestral territory. i mean, you're almost talking about a creature of myth at that point. one of the really great things about condors is that, as the sort of apex species, if you're going to have a healthy condor population, that means you're going to have a healthy environment not only for condors, but for all the species, so that might tie into

the dam removal that's going on on the klamath river. we want these old-growth redwoodthat they use for nesting. we want these wide open prairie systems that they use for foraging. it's all-encompassing way of thinking about things where humans are not isolated within our own little world, but we're actually a part of this integrated community. the traditional way is all-encompassing. it's circular. it's a web more than a line, and so if you recognize those interconnected lines, you realize that everything you do has a much bigger impact than you had initially thought. west: i think that the condors are going to do really, really well up here. there is ample oceanic resources along the coast. there's dense deer and elk and bear communities inland. hopefully, we're going to have restoration of our salmon runs, and with that, there's just going to be even

more resources available to the birds. we don't want to just put condors on the landscape. we want to put cdors on the landscape so that they can thrive. williams: it's literally going to be like just fitting that final piece of the puzzle back into the skies, being able to see them fill that space that's been empty for so long. it's going to be amazing. announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy. íñíñ

>> this year for “bioneers" we did what we could to bring those visionaries, artists and activists who had the greatest influence on us, whom we look up to the most and whose work has continued to grow and evolve over time. there is no one who inspires me, challenges me, and whose example strengthens my courage more than the incredible playwright, author and women's rights activists, eve ensler. [applause]