The low water levels have allowed deadly parasites like C. shasta to thrive, while also making the water warmer, which creates the perfect environment for toxic algae to bloom. Today, as much as 80 percent of the area’s wetlands have disappeared.

The Chinook salmon population has been so decimated that the Tribe voluntarily stopped commercial fishing. “In Yurok Country, two years without a commercial fishing season has an impact that is similar to a plant shutting down in a one-company town,” Yurok chairman Thomas P. O’Rourke, Sr. said in a press release last year. “We are doing everything in our power to find ways to help our people to supplement their lost income. We have people who haven’t been able to catch up on bills for two years.”

“As long as we can keep hope alive that the river can be fixed, we never want to say it’s dead,” Gensaw says. But over the last decade, it has clung to life through a series of injunctions and legal arguments that both demanded more water for the fish, and the removal of dams along the Klamath once and for all. “My son doesn’t know what it’s like not to rally and protest for water,” Gensaw says. He grew up like she grew up, in the midst of hearings, logging statements, and talking to reporters about why the river and the fish matter. “There’s no alternative. What would I do—go to another river? I live 13 miles from my parents on the river, a mile from the same village where my husband’s family lived for generations,” Gensaw says. “It’s our grocery store and playground and now the place has become contaminated.” Their only choice is to stay and fight to make it better.

* * *

In 1945, Billy Frank, Jr. was 14 years old—and was trying to stay hidden. He pulled his canoe behind a fallen maple tree and began to collect the writhing Steelhead and Dog salmon from the 50-foot net he’d set in the river the night before. He was butchering the fish when the game wardens came to arrest him. As Trova Heffernan wrote in Where the Salmon Run, Frank told the wardens, “Leave me alone, goddamn it. I fish here. I live here!” But the teenager was taken into custody anyway. That arrest was the first of 50 he collected throughout his life for “illegal” fishing on his ancestral river, and it made him one of the major voices in the so-called Fish Wars to come.

When Washington was established as a territory in the 1850s, the government signed a treaty with multiple tribes. On paper it doesn’t look like it was a very good deal—2.5 million acres of tribal land traded for three paltry reservations, $32,500, and the right to fish at “all usual and accustomed grounds and stations … in common with citizens of the territory.” Without that last clause, many tribes would have refused to sign at all. Like so many who lived in the watery Pacific Northwest or along rivers further south, salmon and fishing were at the center of their culture.