Happy Indigenous Heritage Month! UO student Marisol Peters (Karuk) and I have been hosting conversations with Indigenous leaders and artists from the Klamath River watershed post dam-removal, exploring what dam removal means for their communities, cultures, and more-than-human relatives. We will be releasing one interview per week for Indigenous Heritage month. We hope you will tune in!
Our first conversation is with Paul Robert Wolf Wilson, a photographer working within his ancestral homelands of Southern Oregon and Northern California, and a member of the Klamath and Modoc Tribes. His practice centers on visual sovereignty and land-based storytelling—examining the deep relationships between people and place. Marisol and I spoke with Paul in February 2025, shortly after the inauguration of the Trump administration. We discuss memory, place, story, and what dam removal has meant to Paul and the people of the Klamath River.
Background
In November 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the final order to remove the four dams impeding the flow of the Klamath River—marking the largest dam removal project in history. This milestone concluded a decades-long effort led by Tribal Nations of Oregon and California, alongside environmental advocates, to restore the river’s vitality following the catastrophic 2002 salmon die-off. That event, triggered by a federal decision to divert water to agriculture during a severe drought, galvanized a movement for ecological and cultural renewal. By 2024, all four dams had been dismantled, and life within and along the river is regenerating with remarkable speed. C’iyals (fall-run Chinook salmon), long absent from the upper Klamath since the dams were built, have now returned to their spawning grounds from over a century ago.
One of the first C’iyals[Fall-Run Chinook Salmon] to return above the reaches of the dams on the Klamath River. This particular salmon has made its way into Spencer Creek, taking its part in spawning activities.© Paul Wilson
-Danielle Mericle, Curator of Visual Materials
