Three years in the sea are quite enough
before it’s time come back to the stream
where they were born and grizzlies used to dream.
while Pomos, Miwoks, Yuroks lined the bluff
with nets to dip into the salmon run,
the fish like steppingstones from shore to shore.
But settlers took the land and fish and more,
building dams and killing with their guns.
No grizzlies fish today along this coast
where redwoods reach into the foggy sky
and salmon used to come to mate and die
by millions. I can see the salmon ghosts
in pools and riffles while the Yuroks drum.
Take out the dams now! Let the salmon come!
Lang Day says about her poem: “For more than 400 years Europeans conducted a war of colonization against the Indigenous peoples of North and South America. . . . In California this war was especially brutal. . . . At the same time California tribes were decimated, so too were ecosystems. . . . The tribes mentioned in the poem, however, still exist today. In 2024, following a long legal battle, four dams were removed from the Klamath river, allowing salmon to return to some of their historical spawning grounds.”
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