Field Notes

A discussion with Dennis Martinez

By Craig Jacobson

The Lower Klamath River is a place of a beauty within Salmon Nation. Ancestral home to the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, Wiyot, and other tribes, it is an immense landscape of green, steep forested ravines carved by dynamic and resilient rivers and streams. Paved roads follow the water, infrequently venturing off through the forest hillsides given the stark topography. Driving along the winding roads of the Lower Klamath is not simple. The map has no straight lines on it from here to there.

There is a place, near where the Klamath and Salmon Rivers meet, that the Karuk people call the Center of the Universe. In the summer of 2002, the Center of the Universe and the surrounding lands and waters of the Lower Klamath, witnessed one of the most significant fish kills of our time. Over 34,000 carcasses of migrating salmon littered the riverbanks here, the result of water incapable of supporting life. Upstream dams and diversions take water that would otherwise flow through the winding miles of the Lower Klamath and move it elsewhere — dams, power stations, culverts, pumps, fields.

There are, as a result, no straight lines on the road map for recovery of the Lower Klamath ecosystem. Like traveling through this landscape, ecological restoration efforts here will require persistence, time, and a willingness to accept a slow and deliberate form of change. And optimism.

On the morning of July 8th, 2005, Dennis Martinez sat in a restaurant in Orleans, California, three stones throws from the Klamath River. Over coffee and an uncharacteristically hearty breakfast, he greeted the day with these words: “The birds are singing because the sun rose again.”

On most days he waits until lunchtime for his first meal, and if one were betting on the setting of where he eats most all of his meals, betting “in a forest somewhere” is as close to a sure thing as an oddsmaker could create. Dennis spends his life in the forests, literally, working as one of the leading forest restoration ecologists in Salmon Nation and living in the forest outside Hayfork, California. His knowledge of forests can be seen in his use of tools such as mcclouds and pulaski’s, just as it can be experienced in whatever scholarly journal article is next on the horizon. He has forgotten more about how forests work than you or I will ever know.

He is, in his words, “Part Swedish, part Chicano, part Tohono O’odham Indian.” If you meet him, you will never confuse him with someone else you have met.

He is in Orleans to lead a three day workshop, kicked off later on the night of July 8th with a traditional Karuk salmon bake, entitled “Fire, Water and Medicine: Restoring Klamath Forests Cultures and Ecosystems.” Residents of the Lower Klamath, as well as people from surrounding watersheds, have traveled to learn from Dennis and others about forest ecosystem restoration and practices. He had these words for the citizens of Salmon Nation about what he is doing to restore our forest ecosystems

Craig Jacobson: Dennis, what memories stay with you from your time growing up in the San Joaquin Valley?

Dennis Martinez: I can remember when the San Joaquin River was a beautiful, flowing, lively river. Actually I can remember the birds that used to block the sun, sometimes all day. I used to fish — until we stopped due to high salinity — but we used to go frog digging when I was a kid. The river changed with the onset of irrigation, cotton fields, diversions…

We knew a lot about salmon. You don’t ordinarily think of people from the San Joaquin as salmon people, but we are. At one time, like the Sacramento River now, there were incredible spring and fall Chinook runs on the San Joaquin. In the 1940s, when it was still legal, we used to catch four foot Chinooks.

This was a time when we had road runners and horned toads. It was so sad, I even had relatives that worked on the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin in the 1940s when it was put up. And like what happened with the Coyote Valley Reservation when they created Lake Mendocino and dammed the Russian River, in those two cases (the San Joaquin and Russian), the fish got to the point where they could go no further and they ended up in the ditches and in the fields, flopping around and wondering what had become of them. Huge fish with no place to go. So that’s my experience with salmon.

One of earliest memories I have was of smoked salmon. I savor that smell, even to this day. And I miss it so much.

Your work restores forested ecosystems to health. What does “restoration” mean to you?

Native American management envisions human beings as an essential element in any ecosystem — human activity as a critical part of whole picture — with responsibilities to take care of this place, this home, the plants and animals as they take care of us. I have heard the elders say that if we don’t take care of the plants and animals, they are going to go away, and will not take care of us any longer.

There is a cultural difference between the dominant culture and Indian culture in that the dominant culture focuses on the big, charismatic species in environmental work. I like to say that in restoration we deal less with charismatic fauna, and more with enigmatic flora. That is what we focus on. Burning, openings, grasses, ecological and landscape mosaics.

There is a legend from this area that involves the dragonfly and the creation of prominent rocks east of Medford, Oregon — Table Rock included. As we know, the dragonfly comes out of seemingly dead logs or debris along ponds and lakes and is born sometimes out of the dead, and symbolizes the great cycle — life, death, rebirth — river and ocean. Water, oceans, clouds and rain, over and over again. That great cycle that we ourselves participate in, how can we renew the earth and renew ourselves in the same process.

Is there, in your work, a place or time where restoration and change have had the greatest impact on the landscape and/or yourself personally?

Well, in 1994 I got together with Agnes Pilgrim who is a Takelma Indian, Siletz tribal member, and was living in southwestern Oregon at the time with her husband who has now passed on. On Forest Service land, Rogue River National Forest, we got some fish and had a gathering. This was after a year or so of negotiations, government-to-government negotiations between the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the federal government. We had our first Salmon Ceremony in over 150 years. Due to the treaty in 1855 and the relocation of Indians to the Coast Reservation, very few Rogue River Indians remained.

Agnes Pilgrim remains the oldest living Takelma Indian from that area. On May 14, 1994 on Forest Service land we had the first Salmon Ceremony in a very long time. And it was an incredible time, for people who have never been to their ancestral homelands, the place where their ancestors’ bones are buried, coming back it was described sometimes as deja vu. We now have it every year, the second Saturday of June, we keep an open invitation for everyone to come.

It is amazing to see people come together after all this time, to relate to the earth as caregivers. A year after the first Salmon Ceremony, the coho runs on the Applegate River increased dramatically, which makes it all very gratifying.

Along with the Ceremony, there is active restoration work happening in that same area, we understand.

We have been working for years with the Forest Service to acquire the right to have a demonstration area in the Applegate watershed to carry out ecological restoration. After years and years of work, we think we will see this demonstration area created, to show the difference between Native American management and federal agency management.

In what ways do these land management systems differ in forested ecosystems?

You can still see the last vestiges of native management in the black and white oak stands in the west, management with fire. Today, we have lost almost all of the oak savannah habitat and native praire. Manzanita moves into these places that were historically managed by fire, and soon they are wiped out. The more time you spend in the woods, the more you understand about ecology, the more you see how these systems work.

Some forest stands that we see today are biological deserts. Forest stands that are so overcrowded with tree stems that you cannot even walk through them. The federal managers seek to maintain parking lot environmental conditions on forestlands in the west.

It is a mosaic we are trying to emulate that balances thick stands that offer protection for species that need it, to the open places like the meadows that produce the quality habitat for elk and deer. We manage today for a mix of age classes, species and genetic diversity in our native forest stands. By creating openings in the forest, we create opportunities for multiple-generations of species, regeneration and restoration.

We have always had pests, but in a balanced system with the use of fire, we do not see the pandemic outbreaks of beetles, diseases, and other problems like we are seeing now with our forests.

Practitioners such as Susan “Tweet” Burdick and the California Indian Basketweavers Association are out with propane torches treating areas with fire. For the beargrass, it needs to be burned the year before it is used by the weavers.

In the Yosemite Valley you see and the overcrowding of conifers into the oak stands in that area. What you see in oak stands and savannahs from British Columbia to Baja California is stagnation, where they are not regenerating. We may only have thirty years left before we see that they are gone. Overcrowding and competition from conifers, deer predation, cattle grazing, and development.

This weekend in the Lower Klamath, we will focus on the connection between the uplands, the forest, and the aquatic system. With climate change, it is becoming painfully obvious that we are going to have to deal with upland and forested areas in order to protect aquatic system. Restoration forestry has a direct link to what we are doing in fisheries.

You are working this weekend in the Lower Klamath. How does that fit within the work you do regionally and internationally?

I co-direct the Indigenous Peoples Restoration Network (IPRN) and work closely with the Society for Ecological Restoration International. Agnes Pilgrim, who I mentioned earlier, is also the Chairperson of the Group of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, and she herself just came back from Amazonia in Brazil. We are going together in September to a conference that is being put on by the IPRN and the Society for Ecological Restoration International in Spain. The conference focuses on global climate change and indigenous peoples, what these people are going through and facing as they live near oceans, in the arctic, in Amazonia, here in the western United States.

Even if we stop everything right now, in terms of fossil fuel use, the effects would still be felt hundreds of years into the future.

When we talk about a strategy for how to restore forest ecosystems, we mean finding a balance. We do not want to be locked into the idea of total carbon sequestration, planting trees everywhere. We are trying to find the balance between biodiversity and sequestering carbon, we want to preserve old-growth ecosystems, discourage wildfires that release carbon to the atmosphere, and restoring soil and organic matter that store a lot of carbon. The idea is to find a balance in those approaches.

Human beings have a tendency to get on one track or the other track, and above all now we need to balance all these factors. How to achieve that balance in a temperate forest ecosystem is critical.

We know a lot of work is being done looking at the role of biomass in energy production. From your perspective, what are the challenges ahead?

Biomass is a difficult economic issue. If you have a truckload of biomass that travels more than 25 miles one way, with the fuel costs to haul it, energy is not economical to produce. We need a lot of smaller, mobile efforts, or well-situated biomass projects that maximize location.

Other than biomass, there is good work happening with small diameter logging and thinning. We did a project up in Glendale, Oregon with a portable mill, salvage logging from 10 inches down to about 3 inches. It was very labor-intensive work, but you can end up, with this type of a mill, with a variety of quickly produced dimensional lumber and other forest products.

As you look out at the road ahead, what hope is inherent in the restoration work you are doing in Salmon Nation?

It introduces the idea of the balancing act of how we relate to our forests. Traditionally, the forest was the pantry, medicine cabinet, and lumberyard for indigenous people. Things may get a lot worse before they get better for our children and grandchildren, and it is incredibly critical that, with our restoration work, we have a few reference systems to model our efforts on. We must show how forest restoration works — so that future generations can continue the rebuilding process. Our success will provide a reference point, and the more restoration success we can produce, the more hope we all have.

Dennis Martinez is a 2001 Ecotrust Award for Indigenous Leadership honoree. Learn more…

A discussion with Dennis Martinez

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