Return to Us: Restoring Alaska’s Eklutna River

ten nine eight seven six five four three two one salmon is a language that binds us together and it has been the dream of the village to try to rehabilitate a river that has been going to shock and awe this dam was built without their permission on their river that bears their name that used to support them with the fish i think there's an awareness now that we're on denying a land that the denial of people have done a lot for us that we're just starting to appreciate when people say akuna is in anchorage i always want to say actually anchorage is in a clutner okay [Music] i don't believe that it's an accident that half the state's population lives in our traditional homeland i think when we came to this area 1500 years ago we recognized that there was something special according was kind of like a home base you know you kind of gathered there in the winter like a capital and then the summer of 1915 all these white tents start showing up and within you know a couple of years anchorage is bigger than you know the entire denial population and then you had the first private electrical enterprise about 1929 that at the lower part of the river dammed it up to build a hydro project and commoditize that water into selling electricity to a very young city but when he put that dam up it literally put a firewall up of where fish could go no one cared about fish no one cared about the river it was all about commerce at the time and we as a people were not an organized people when they needed to upgrade the hydro project they drilled a four mile hole dug right through the mountain [Music] that comes out right here [Music] when they did that they basically turned the spigot off [Music] so think of the lake as a bathtub i'm trying to put it in in terms that a lay person will understand [Laughter] we have an intake in the lake so it's like the drain in the bathtub we open the drain water flows down the drain at the end of the pipe there's a turbine that turns a generator the generator creates the electricity it gets put into the transmission lines and then goes to your house or smartphone or whatever device you're charging i think the biggest driver is it's a renewable resource clean energy if we remove the project right now we're going to have to replace that generation with natural gas and now we're talking [Music] emissions the problem of shifting baselines is always a concern for conservation if you lose it then you lose the people that remember it and if you don't remember it you don't know what you're missing they would talk about the river how it used to be and how you could walk across the backs of the fish it literally looked like the fists were the river there were so many the occluding river was a big beautiful powerful turquoise blue river with a lot of salmon in it and that's what we're aiming for so as our corporation started to build some political clout we got to a place where we could start nipping away at some of the historical issues that have hurt that river [Music] for us it was like coming full circle the ability to be the people that can actually take that damn down was not only healing for us but it was a sense of pride as we saw that the dam was actually going to be removed there was such a release from my being like the echoes of those elders subsided and became calm are you gonna miss that dan i might have to find something new to complain about i don't know so here we are the dams down now what well we got to get water back in this river 90 goes to power 10 goes to drinking water zero goes to fish i'd like to see that equation rejiggered the dam was the excuse why release water down a watershed if a 61-foot high dam doesn't let the fish go up well we've taken that excuse away [Music] getting water back into the occluden river is not that complex a plumbing problem but it's a matter of persuasion this is just the first step in fixing up the river it's been broken for 90 years yeah we're going to find out that taking this dam out was the easy part the next part is about getting water back into this river and that's why y'all brought your buckets and we're gonna put you to work we're gonna get some water to those fish that sense of involvement that sense of progress that sense of putting something back together has been particularly inspiring we had 165 people come out to form a pucker brigade totally blew me away let's go ahead and farm up this line salmon are like that common thread that bring us together the [Applause] the fish the fish it's in all our stories children grandparents and everybody all working together that unity the arrow shows where the river goes it's almost a binding agent for who we are dams have been salmon killers everywhere around the world salmon don't ask much of us they only ask that we stay out of their way and don't mess with them and if we do that they keep coming back for us [Music] it has given our people such a sense of pride it has solidified us as a people and energized us unlike anything i think i've experienced at a gluten so far [Music] when we're proud of hakuna then we're proud of ourselves when you're proud of who you are amazing things can happen you know they've stood by while history has steamrolled them the dam built on their river their kids shipped off to native schools the highways and the railroads and the quarries on their land they didn't have a lot of say about what happened to them well it's time to stop and say thank you we've got a lot of studies to do we've got a lot of stakeholders we probably have some politics involved but i think everybody will agree that the including of people have done so many things for so many people for so many agencies it's our turn you

Channel: The Conservation Fund

Views: 47,342

Rating: 4.7984252 out of 5

Keywords: Alaska, Salmon, Eklutna, Alaska Native Village, Pacific salmon, The Conservation Fund

Id: dvGtiM-r7V8

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020