A floating blockade stretches across the Klamath River waiting to stop boats carrying Yurok and Karuk tribal officials and Berkshire Hathaway executives upriver on Aug. 28, 2020.
It was a Friday in late August when four jet boats made their way up the Klamath River under a cloudless blue sky. The boats carried three tribal chairs. From the Karuk Tribe, there was Russell "Buster" Attebery, who'd found pride as a boy catching salmon from the river and bringing them home to his family, and later come to believe some tribal youth's troubles — from suicides to substance use — could be traced back to their never having had that opportunity, growing up alongside a river now choked with algae and diminishing fish populations. There was Joseph James from the Yurok Tribe, who'd come to see the river's declining health as a "slow strangulation" of his people — "river people" — who have lived along its banks and relied on its salmon as the bedrock of their diet since time immemorial. And there was Don Gentry, recently elected to a third term as the upriver Klamath Tribes' chair, whose people hadn't seen salmon and steelhead swimming in their ancestral territory in a generation.