Last year, four dams on the Klamath River were removed. For Indigenous nations in Oregon and California, it was a victory decades in the making. It was the largest dam removal in US history and tribes are already seeing river health and salmon populations improving.
Our Living Lands producer Daniel Spaulding spoke to Grist reporter Anita Hofschneider about her reporting on how the dams came down. Hofschneider, along with Jake Bittle at Grist, wrote a history of the decades of activism and legal battles that went into the dam removals.
“The dam removal that took place last fall is one of the biggest victories for Indigenous environmental justice in North American history,” Hofschneider said. “And it was brought about because of the persistence of tribes and their allies across decades.”
