Q & A: Amy Bowers Cordalis On Her Debut Memoir, “The Water Remembers”

This story originally appeared Amy Bowers Cordalis, a proud citizen of the Yurok Tribe, has many different roles within her community. She is the executive director and co-founder of Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group, a lawyer for the Yurok Tribe and was instrumental in advocating for the Klamath Dam removal, in 2023 and 2024. Bowers Cordalis, a former attorney at the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), was honored in 2024 as a UN Champion of the Earth and as Time 100 climate leader that same year. Most recently, she published her debut memoir about her family’s multigenerational fight for justice along the Klamath River. “The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life” hit the shelves on Oct. 28. The memoir tells a story of resistance, resilience and success, as she blends together hours of research and stories she heard from her family as a kid. “This is a story where the Indian wins,” Bowers Cordalis said. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Underscore Native News + ICT: Can you talk about the research that went into this book? It is such a beautiful memoir of multigenerational resistance how did it feel to weave the personal into so much research and documentation? Amy Bowers Cordalis: In many ways, now that the book is done, I realize I have been researching this book my entire life. I felt strongly about writing it in the way that I had grown up hearing it, which was through story and [the] experience of the previous generations of my family. And also, they told it in the Yurok way of talking, right? It kind of flows like a river, where it heads in a certain direction, but there are also eddies that sort of spin and circle, and then you get tossed out into this other riffle where the water is really rough, and then there’s a calm, smooth spot, and then all of a sudden, you’re at the mouth of the Klamath River and it’s wide and big, and there’s water everywhere, and ancient trees and these huge waves coming in from the ocean. Our storytelling reflects that ecosystem, and so I wanted to tell the story in that way. So the research, really it started just hearing the stories from my family. And then what was really cool was these stories were about Supreme Court cases, which I later appreciated. I dove into the briefing for Mattz v. Arnett, which was the family Supreme Court case. I read the different legal arguments the state was making. I read the different arguments that the feds were making, that the lawyers that represented the family were making. What is also cool is that that case set a very high bar for basically terminating the Indian Reservation. It was this deep dive into learning more about these stories that had fascinated me my whole life, and then taking that technical education and using those skills to really absorb all this knowledge. And then interpret it under a legal lens. It was really interesting. The moratorium said the reason for kicking us off the river and stopping our fishing was for conservation purposes. What I did was I took that and then I compared it to the state of Oregon and state of California, commercial salmon catch for offshore, non-Indian fishing folks those same two years, 78 and 79, and looked at the numbers. In Oregon and California the commercial offshore fishermen catches of Klamath salmon increased that same year. So Yurok people were the only ones that got the boot. It revealed these historical records and proof of the grave injustice that the Yurok people experienced. On top of that, there were also these transcripts of oral histories that a historian had done with my family immediately following the Fish Wars, so in the early 80s. My great grandmother was interviewed. Several family members who had sadly passed away since were interviewed, Uncle Ray, Grandma Lavina. Grandma Lavina is still with us, thank goodness. I took these interviews and was really able to put that all together in a way that told this deep, deep story. That’s how I was able to frame the chapters in the book. For example, there’s a chapter on the warrantless raids of Uncle Ray’s house and how traumatic and awful that was. I interviewed him before he passed away about that and then we had these interviews of him talking about it right after it happened. UNN + ICT: So many characters in your memoir really stuck out to me, but your great grandmother, Geneva, was really strong and clearly has impacted you and continues to be a guiding force in your life. Will you tell me a little bit more about her? What does it mean that you were able to continue her fight for the river? ABC: She was born in 1904 and passed away in 1986 and so I knew her. I don’t have a lot of memories of her, because I was very young, but I knew her. I’m so glad you asked me about her, because she was remarkable. She was raised by her grandparents, Billy and Susie Brooks, who lived in a traditional Redwood plank house, who spoke Yurok, who lived a completely subsistence way of life. And that was really remarkable, because what it meant was that she, as a young girl, until she was taken to boarding school, really lived a Yurok Aboriginal lifestyle. And when you think about the experience of Indigenous peoples in this country, it’s pretty remarkable that you could have a completely Aboriginal existence in the early 1900s. But she did, and she learned so much. I tell her story because she’s just so amazing. She was going to be trained to be a medicine woman, and then she was stolen and taken to boarding school. Luckily, she survived that, and came back to the reservation and was able to stay on the reservation and really live a culturally and religiously Yurok, fishing-based way of [life]. She taught not only my family, but many other families that Yurok way of life, and she shared songs and myths and values. She really was that bridge between those Aboriginal times and now that has enabled so many Yurok people to continue to live in a Yurok way. And she was feisty! She was very petite. She had a way of just being extremely kind and efficient. And she could talk to anybody, and she could solve any problem. She was the ultimate Yurok diplomat, even when the federal marshals came to the Yurok reservation in full riot gear with machine guns and everything. She marched right down to their camp and said, “Why are you here?” There’s also a chapter in the book about her remarkable defeat of those marshals, and how she used Yurok song and medicine and her deep relationship with all of the creatures in our village to call the birds to come help protect her family and her way of life. And ultimately, that led to the end of the federal occupation and the fish wars. I mean it’s almost hard to believe that something like that happened. But I think it just speaks to the deep relationship that Indigenous peoples have with the natural environment, and that when we live in a good way, when we live according to our traditional teachings, it’s all about balance with the natural world and respect and prayer. When you live that way, different things happen and different things are possible. I think that one of the reasons I titled the book “The Water Remembers” is because not only does it remember how it used to be clean and that strong medicine that guided our lives. The ecosystems do, the planets do, but the humans do too. And even though we are now in a place where we’re a little more disconnected from all that, when we return to that deep relationship, when we heal the earth so that we can feel that relationship and exercise our duties as stewards, then we can uplift that good, powerful medicine, and it’s a way of healing us. It’s a way of healing the earth. I wanted to tell that story in the book so that people could reconnect with that. UNN + ICT: Can you talk about the connection and overlap between activism and law in your life? I think of examples of both family members of yours and you organizing protests in law school that you describe in your memoir. ABC: One thing I learned from the Klamath Dam removal movement, is that grassroots activism, law and political leadership are key in creating movements and creating change. If you single out any one of those three things, you may not be as effective. But the special recipe for Klamath Dam removal was that combo of grassroots, legal work and then leadership. And really, the grassroots organizers, the Indigenous peoples on the Klamath after the Fish Kills, they really launched the Undam the Klamath movement. They were fierce, and they were strategic. They traveled the world protesting at shareholder meetings of whoever owned the dam. At one point it was Scotland, and they went over there, and then the next thing you know, Warren Buffett’s company, the richest men in the world, acquired the dams. And that didn’t faze them. They went and protested all over, you know, even up in Portland. They put huge signs over I-5 that said “Warren Buffett kills salmon.” They were so powerful and fierce they raised public awareness about the issues and got people’s attention about how harmful the dams were to our way of life. That was key, because then by the time we had a regulatory door open, there was already public awareness about the harmful impacts of the Klamath dams, so we were able to take that knowledge and that awareness in the public, and then continue to advocate for dam removal using every tool we had under the law. UNN + ICT: In your memoir, you describe getting to ignite a detonator on Copco No 1. on your birthday one of the largest explosions on the project. What was going on in your mind at that moment? ABC: I grew up fishing on the Klamath River my whole life. Around the 2000s, we knew that the river was starting to get sicker and sicker, and that salmon runs were declining, and we knew dams were a major culprit. And so there were so many times that me and other people fishing would sit around and talk about blowing up the dams. I have these fun memories of sitting on the river bar next to a fire with the net out. And we’re talking with a bunch of people kind of daydreaming about blowing up those dams. And then there it was, 20 years later, and it’s my birthday, and they said, “Hey, do you want to blow up the dam?” And it was like, “Are you kidding me?! There’s nothing more I want than to blow up this dam.” It was a surreal moment. There was a red circle detonator on the ground, and you had to stomp on it. And they said, “You have to stomp on it with force, it’s got to be hardcore.” So I stomped on that thing with the force of six generations of injustice just coming down on that detonator. And then the next thing you know, there’s this massive explosion, a huge sound. There’s concrete and dust everywhere. It felt like I was releasing an internal dam of generations of inherited anger that had just come from all the injustice that happened on the river for the last 150 years. It was remarkable. One thing I feel really strongly about with this book and the timing of this book, is that I hope when people read it, they feel like they’re in the story with me. I hope they feel like they are with me exploding that dam and that that helps whatever metaphorical dam they have internally. I hope that we can all see these things happening as we’re reading. I think seeing is the first step in doing. I hope that’s what everybody feels when they read the book, is like, “Okay, I can see how this could happen on my home waters. I could see how we could organize things this way on my home turf.” I hope it deeply resonates in that way of inspiring action. UNN + ICT: If a reader walks away with one overall message from “The Water Remembers,” what do you hope that is? ABC: One of my closing points is after seeing this historical effort by so many people, there were so many champions of Klamath dam removal who did big and small things. All of it meant the world and made it all happen. I think all of us have this ancestral knowledge in our bones, in our blood, about what it was like to be on a healthy planet and have that good relationship with the earth and with nature. And even if you live in a city, even if you are disconnected from your tribe, whatever it might be, it’s still in your bones, and it’s something that we can all tap into internally through intention. I think it starts with observation. And it could be the observation of nature. It could be observing the beauty of nature, whatever is surrounding you, but just tapping into that, it pulls up that knowledge. And I think that knowledge is really empowering, because it helps us remember who we are and remember that we’re all good. Even though things are kind of bad right now, we all have this good part in us that when we lean into it, it can be uplifted, and then we can go out into the world and do good things. UNN + ICT: Of course, this fight for dam removal is huge, and though the Klamath dams have come down, that doesn’t mean that the fight is over. We have seen that the river’s health has begun to bounce back, which is huge. But there’s so much work that still has to be done still. I’m curious what your reflections are on the current state of the Klamath River? ABC: Well, the first thing I’ll say is the Klamath is fiercer than I have ever seen it in my lifetime. It is strong, the water is clearer, it is cleaner, it smells better. It’s colder. The first time I went swimming in it after all the sediment had gone out and it was warm enough to be swimming, I jumped in, and it was almost like the water told me, “Hey, I’m different. I’m cleaner, I’m stronger, I have more vitality.” And you just feel that when you’re immersed in the Klamath River. So it’s remarkable how quickly that transformation has happened, The second thing is that Klamath dam removal was just the beginning of the river’s healing. We just sort of opened the veins, if you will. We opened the flood gates, and now the river is running free, and right now we’re engaged in some of the largest restoration projects. Ridges to Riffles, my nonprofit, is working with a group of people restoring over 20, 000 acres within the former reservoir footprint, and our role specifically, is to help facilitate an inter tribal advisory panel that is overseeing all the restoration. That is not impacted by federal funding at all. Also within that area, the Yurok tribe has planted over 19 billion native seeds. It’s acorns and willows and first foods. As they grow, they’re rebuilding, being an Indigenous grocery store, and that will help facilitate our traditional way of life. If you plant the acorns, if you plant the native grasses, then all the other native first foods come back. We do have work to do on water. Rivers need water, so we need to work on in-stream flows. We need to help our neighbors in the upper part of the Klamath Basin be in a position to welcome the salmon home. The salmon, remarkably, went back up into Oregon before anybody really expected them to. I mean, we knew they were coming, we knew they were going to but it’s remarkable how quickly they have gone back into their historical habitat. And so there’s work that we need to do in preparing the communities there. But what I’ll say is, we’re on a roll. UNN + ICT: What do you hope the world learns from the dam removal and the ongoing restoration projects that we’re seeing? ABC: We don’t have to move to Mars. We can stay on Earth and heal ecosystems through nature based solutions. The idea of Klamath dam removal was essentially to remove the dams to basically restore the river’s traditional ecological functions and let it be a river again. Through doing that, it would then rebuild the salmon runs. It would help the water be cooler and cleaner. It will help rebuild the ecosystem resiliency, and then it can better help the humans. And also, it was profitable. We put $15 million into the economy, and one of the world’s largest construction corporations did the actual removal of the dams. What that proves is that these kinds of nature based, ecological function, resiliency, restoration projects work and they’re profitable. So you can take that model and scale it to other places and replicate it. I wanted people to know that the bones of that type of regenerative economy, it’s there in the Klamath. Also, I want people to know that when humans work together to restore ecosystems, we can do remarkable things. We can literally do what we think is impossible. We just need to lean into each other, lean into our commonalities and work to rebuild nature. But also, we have to make adjustments to our lifestyles and make sure that we’re living sustainably. UNN + ICT: It comes across so clearly in your words and how you write about the Klamath river, that it is intrinsically a part of who you are, who your family is, what it means to be Yurok, what it means to be Indigenous living along the river. You describe the river as this living, breathing being that has taught you so much. What are some of those most important lessons that you have learned from the river itself? ABC: The river has informed almost every single thing I have done in my life, and I felt really lucky to have been raised with and by the river. I’ve always just really loved the river, and a part of it is because it just brings me this peace. In times when I’ve had hard things in my life, I go back to the river and try to just listen to it because it tells you all kinds of remarkable things. This is something I talked about in the book too, is when I went to law school, I got to work at NARF, which I’m so grateful for. When I came home [during] some of my hardest moments of legal advocacy, I would go to the river, and it would give me a little sign about how to strategically move through a problem. And so I’ve just found that when you open your heart and yourself up to the river, and if you listen to it, it responds, and it really gives you guidance, and it gives you strength. It’s just this place I always go back to, and it always calls me home, and it always fills me with inspiration and hope. It’s taught me how to be a human and how to find joy in the midst of fish guts and moss. UNN + ICT: Thinking back on your younger self, the one you talk a lot about in your book, if you could give her one piece of advice, or someone like her, another young Indigenous person that has a dream to fight for change in their community in the world, what would that be? ABC: Believe in yourselfand take care of yourself. I think one of the greatest lessons is learning to trust yourself and learning about what fills your cup and having daily practices that allow you to take care of yourself. I think having that core belief that whatever your path is, if you pray deeply, if you believe in yourself, the Creator will reveal it to you. Also, I believe in all of you, I believe in all of them. I remember my younger self was kind of in awe of all lawyers. And I thought maybe they’re smarter than me, or they have more money, or they have white privilege, for example, and that’s why they can do all this stuff. And, yeah, that may be true, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it too. You may just have to be a little more rugged or rezzy. UNN + ICT: Your book officially published on October 28. What’s next for you? ABC: Well, we still got to get water in the river, so I’m going to work on that. I’m really excited about the work that Ridges to Riffles is doing. We are helping to facilitate the reconnection of the Indigenous peoples on the Klamath Basin. Now that the dams are out, we’re able to start seeing the healing of our river and sort of moving [away] from this colonialized culture of scarcity and trying to go back to our Indigenous culture of abundance and gratitude and sharing. So we’re trying to help facilitate that. I salmon fish every year as much as I possibly can. So a big part of what I hope to do in the future is just keep salmon fishing. This summer, the fall Chinook run came into my home village in August, and those fish were bigger and brighter than I had seen in years. They were awesome. And we harvested some, we filled the smoke house, and we gave salmon to people from the Hoopa tribe, from Karuk, from the Klamath tribes. Those salmon literally went all through the Klamath Basin. They went into Southern Oregon. They went into Northern California. Those fish went everywhere and fed people. In that way, the salmon reunite us. It just reminds me of how much of a life force they are. They’re like this uniting life force. I hope we keep healing the river more and more, so that those salmon runs just keep repopulating, and everything including us, gets more healthy, and we can continue to share that abundance. You know that that’s what we did as aboriginal people in the basin, and so I hope that’s what we can do again. UNN + ICT: You’re no stranger to interviews and public speaking. Is there a question that doesn’t often get asked that you wish did? ABC: I hope that this book opens the door for more people from the Klamath to tell their story, because there are so many remarkable stories from this movement that are really important. I also hope that this book inspires other Indigenous writers to write. I hope it inspires other publishers to publish Indigenous writers. One thing that I feel strongly about is this is a story where the Indians win. There is heartbreak, there is injustice, but in the end, we win. And we won by leveraging and uplifting tribal rights. I hope that people read it so we can start changing the narrative around how people view and see Indigenous peoples and also Indigenous rights. So often people look at Indigenous rights as something to be squashed and something that’s taking away from other people. That’s not the case at all. They are powerful, powerful rights that can really lead to immense change. In our case, the world’s largest river restoration project. We should all be leaning into those and uplifting those, because they could save the future. ‍Underscore Native News is a nonprofit newsroom committed to Indigenous-centered reporting in the Pacific Northwest. We are supported by foundations and donor contributions. TikTok, YouTube and Bluesky.
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/uncategorized/q-a-amy-bowers-cordalis-on-her-debut-memoir-the-water-remembers/

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