“For us, taking care of each other, taking care of the village, making sure that people have what they need is important. But to sit on millions of dollars, it would be silly. I couldn’t even imagine me living at the village sitting on a million dollars and not doing anything, but just more destruction.” […]
CHIEF SISK: It covers up our homeland. It misplaced us. It gave us nowhere to live. And it took our salmon away and gave the salmon nowhere to live. Some people see it just as a recreational area. They don’t even know where this water goes or care where it goes. CHIEF SISK: Yeah, they […]
“There’s nowhere else in the world that we can go to learn how to be Winnemems. Only there. We can’t go to Navajo. We can’t go to Alaska. We can’t go to Cherokee to learn how to be Winnemems.” — Caleen Sisk, Hereditary and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu people Listen and subscribe to […]
CHIEF SISK: Will she want to still go there and sing to that spring? Will we still be around enough to teach that? CHIEF SISK: That’s the struggle that we have right. Will we survive this? Will the Shasta Dam raise mean the extinction of the Winnemem Wintu? CHIEF SISK: It’s like maybe one day […]
Chief Caleen Sisk is talking about what will happen if the government has its way and the Shasta Dam Enlargement Project goes through. After decades of planning, the project is moving towards final approval. CHIEF SISK: And then see, up there, it will still impact like Sucker Pool. It will impact Wiwaket Village. It will […]
In a peaceful protest, the Winnemem Wintu call out the U.S. government for its refusal to acknowledge the destruction caused by Shasta Dam. The protest at the Shasta Dam Visitor Center reveals the Winnemem Wintu’s ongoing reality. They are ignored and later a security guard threatens to forcibly remove them. Read More We accompany the […]
BURNS: The swift water kept their body built. And so they thrived on the strength of the river and the water. That’s the way I would look at it… spiritually and that was one of the things that I was taught as a young kid to respect, and that seems to have been one of […]
“This is something that can actually happen. And those salmon already know it. I feel like they’re helping to explain this to the fish experts who think, well, they haven’t been there for 30 years, they’re not coming back. if we put those songs and prayers on the water. If we take that all the […]
“Yeah, I felt so deeply for the people. I thought to myself, if there’s one thing I do on this earth, I’d love to be able to be in a position that would help to see, in shape or form, that that happens. That they get their fish back.” – Dirk Barr, fish culturist, New […]
He’s a fish culturist, someone who breeds fish. HOPKINS: And we are going through them right now and tagging them. And taking a genetic punch out of them. The tagging and punching is to help one species of Chinook salmon, the winter-run, an endangered species. In the 1990s, alarmed by the low numbers of returning […]
CHIEF CALEEN SISK: Everybody used to be inside this mountain as spirit beings. And then when the Creator created all of this out here, he wanted every spiritual form to take a physical form. And as they took their physical form, they came out of this doorway that goes into this mountain that has a […]
I suspect most Californians don’t think too hard about the state’s history and it’s takeover by Euro American settlers. But for indigenous people it’s hard to forget. To help us understand, here’s Lyla June Johnston, an indigenous scholar who is trying to find ways to reconcile past and present. LYLA JUNE: I think a lot […]
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 […]
Chapter 5. A Prayer for Salmon
“It feels like I’m doing my purpose in life. This is my job as a dancer and as a Winnemem Wintu man and human being to speak up for salmon and water and land and indigenous ways, indigenous lifeways and the spirituality of it all— speak on behalf of all of that, the best we […]