Sammy Gensaw III grew up as a fisherman on Northern California's Klamath River, learning from a young age that a healthy river means a healthy people. Now, as Director of the Ancestral Guard — a nonprofit that teaches traditional fishing and farming to Indigenous youth — he has helped pull off something many thought impossible: tearing down four massive dams and giving an entire river back to nature and to the Yurok people who have depended on it for thousands of years.
To understand why this matters, you have to understand the Klamath. It's a strange and special river. It starts in wetlands, turns around, heads back north, and finally runs out to the ocean near the Yurok homeland. That shape created a paradise at the river's mouth — a place where families have caught salmon and steelhead and gathered fresh greens for generations. But starting in the early 1900s, during a huge American infrastructure boom, dams were built on the river in the name of electricity. They were sold as good for communities. They were not.
Those dams slowed or completely stopped the natural flow of the water. The Klamath should almost "breathe," Sammy explains — rising and falling, picking up algae and tossing it onto the banks. Instead, the dams choked that rhythm and devastated the salmon runs. People had fought back as early as the 1930s, which means the problems were obvious almost from the day the dams were built. Locals at Blue Creek, also called Ah-Pah, and the Yurok tribe stood at the river bar to stop even more dams from going in. They saved some places, but four other projects moved forward anyway.
The victory came with the removal of those four dams, with demolition wrapping up by fall 2024. It's more than an ecological win. For the Yurok, the river is tied to their rights, their food, their health, and their way of life. "If the river is not healthy, then our people aren't going to be healthy," Sammy said. Access had been denied for decades — a community living on a river without its salmon. Now those ancestral waters are flowing free again, and the fish and the lifeways that depend on them are coming back.
Sammy will speak about the Klamath and the power of grassroots organizing at Bioneers' The Big Fix event on September 30, 2026. His message is simple but profound: whole families have depended on these watersheds for thousands of years, and they will continue to do so until the end of time. The dam removal shows what determined people can accomplish when they organize — not just for themselves, but for the rivers that carry life for everyone downstream.