Amy Bower Cordalis’ “The Water Remembers” does not flow in a straight line.
Her book “is written in the format of Yurok [the largest Native tribe in California] storytelling,” she writes, meandering here and there, much like the Klamath River that supported her people for millennia.
No spoiler alerts necessary here. The title tells all. Cordalis and a group of leaders from several Native nations took on powerful interests to rescue a dying river.
But this is more than a feel-good environmental story. At its heart, “The Water Remembers” is an Indigenous “Fiddler on the Roof”: about tradition, about prejudice and — like “Fiddler,” a macro story told in clear and understandable microfashion — about family.
Cordalis’ Yurok people live in Northern California, around the Klamath River, which flows from the Cascades of southern Oregon to the Pacific. It was once home to the third-largest salmon run in the U.S.
The Yurok have been there since “the Creator told my ancestors ... that all of this was made for them. They would never want for anything if they lived in balance with this world.”
Sadly, the contemporary Yurok story is less about balance than land stolen, treaties abrogated, children — including Cordalis’ great-grandmother — forcibly taken to a boarding school as part of a 20th-century campaign to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
Between 1911 and 1964, four dams were built along the river, cutting off several species from their spawning ground. About 240,000 acres of pristine farmland were auctioned off to white farmers who received contractual water rights to irrigate their crops.
