Klamath River Tribes Host Salmon Bake Tonight to Kick Off SalmonAid Festival

Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley Tribes Host Salmon Bake at Ocean Beach

by Dan Bacher

Members of three Klamath River Indian Tribes - the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley - are hosting a traditional salmon bake tonight at Ocean Beach in San Francisco to show support for the two day Salmon Aid Festival slated for this weekend at Jack London Square in Oakland.

The event seeks to draw attention to the ongoing salmon fisheries disaster on the Klamath, Sacramento, Columbia and other West Coast rivers. This year, due to record low numbers of salmon expected to return to the Central Valley rivers, all commercial and recreational ocean fishing is banned off the California and Oregon coasts.

“Tonight’s salmon bake may be the only opportunity that many San Franciscans get to taste wild Pacific salmon this year,” said Ron Reed, Karuk cultural biologist and traditional dip net fisherman.

Tribes, fisherman, and conservationists from all along the West Coast are slowly building unique and unprecedented coalitions to drive home solutions to the current salmon crisis. “The time has come for real solutions like curtailing pumping freshwater from the Bay-Delta and the removal of Warren Buffett’s lower four Klamath River dams,” said Reed, drawing the close connection between fishery failures on the Klamath and Sacramento.

Commercial fishermen along the California and southern Oregon coast in 2006 were subject to severe fishing restrictions because of low numbers of Klamath River that returned to spawn this year. This year, both ocean recreational and commercial fishing is closed off California and Oregon, while recreational fishing in Central Valley rivers will be shut down except for a brief two month window of opportunity for late fall run chinook salmon on the Sacramento.

“The public is invited to come taste the fresh fire roasted salmon and enjoy music provide by singers and drummers from the Tribes,” stated Craig Tucker, Karuk Tribe spokesman.

The salmon bake will take on Ocean Beach in San Francisco; look for the fire pit one block south of the intersection of Fulton Street and the Great Highway. The fire starts at 4:30 p.m.; fish will be ready to serve around 6:30 p.m.

Salmon Aid will be held at Jack London Square in Oakland, Ca May 31 – June 1 from noon-7pm. Bay Area alternative rock royalty and Primus front-man Les Claypool, whose thumping bass lines and unique worldview have become the calling cards for a number of wildly successful and influential albums in the last two decades, will lead a diverse roster of twenty bands on two live outdoor stages at Oakland’s 2008 SalmonAid Festival.

Claypool, The Zydeco Flames, Stacy Kray, Sizemo, Saul Kaye, Captain Zohar, Tia Carroll, Manaleo, Captain Mike & The Sea Kings, Asheba, John Craigie, The Bobby Young Project, Eliyahu & Qadim, and other performing artists promise to provide loads of fun when they join West Coast fishermen, tribes, restaurateurs and conservationists on May 31 and June 1 in Oakland’s Jack London Square to celebrate wild Pacific salmon.

The purpose of the free and family-friendly, two-day event is to highlight the urgent need to protect the river habitats of these iconic fish. SalmonAid will feature top music acts, educational forums, children’s activities, speakers and a chance for the public to enjoy wild caught salmon served by some of the West Coast’s finest restaurants.

“Pacific salmon is an icon and inspiration for a lot of us the West Coast, and it’s one of my favorite foods,” said Claypool, who regularly sport fishes for salmon off the northern California coast. “But today we’re in danger of losing this incredible fish. The bands at SalmonAid are playing to help ensure that wild Pacific salmon will always be around, and to help protect the rivers where salmon live.”

West Coast restaurants, including Fish. in Sausalito, CA, The Basin in Saratoga, CA, Flea Street Café in Menlo Park, CA, and Local Ocean Seafoods in Newport, OR, are also banding together for the festival. Due to the total closure of the 2008 ocean salmon season from the Mexican border to the Oregon-Washington line, Alaskan commercial fishermen will be donating the wild salmon served at the festival.

In recent years, salmon fishing has be closed or significantly limited along most of the West Coast because fish populations from three of the most productive salmon watersheds in the world – the Sacramento, the Columbia-Snake, and the Klamath river basins – are collapsing. The problem is not overfishing. Out-dated dams, runaway water diversions, and government inaction are taking a lethal toll on wild salmon. The grim result are some of the most sweeping fishing closures in West Coast history, costing the region’s economy hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of family-wage jobs.

Federal judges have been forced to become involved in managing all three rivers because the federal government, which operates dams and water diversion projects on all three rivers, repeatedly produces inadequate salmon protection plans (biological opinions) and refuses to follow the science that says wild salmon need cold, free-flowing rivers and streams to thrive. When salmon habitat disappears, so do the wild salmon.

Despite the bad news of recent years, the festival’s goal is to highlight the economic, cultural, and culinary value of salmon.
For more information about Friday’s event, contact Craig Tucker, Spokesperson Karuk Tribe, cell (916) 207-8294, or Mike Hudson, Organizer of Salmon Aid, (510) 407-2000.

See: http://www.salmonaid.org/ for more information about the festival.

For more information on the struggle to remove Klamath Dams see:
http://www.karuk.us/press/press.php