Aztec dancers from the Bay Area perform at the annual Coonrod ceremony, meant to maintain the Winnemem tribe's connection to salmon in the McCloud River.The construction of Shasta Dam ended the McCloud salmon run, but now descendants of the chinook – thriving in New Zealand – will be coming home.
 

For nearly 70 years, the McCloud River in Northern California has been deprived of the chinook salmon spawning runs for which it was once known.
But for a few hours this summer, the Winnemem Wintu tribe revived the river's memory of the lost, sacred fish.
"We Winnemem are a salmon people, but because of the Shasta Dam, the salmon can't swim this river anymore," tribal member Rick Wilson told about 100 Winnemem and supporters at the river's falls. "So we have to do it for them."
Following the path the fish once took up the McCloud's glacial waters, the members of the Winnemem and their supporters plunged from the rounded cliffs of the river's Lower Falls, swam under the feathery cascade of the 50-foot Middle Falls, then at the Upper Falls dove into a chilly former spawning pool and fetched a stone from the bottom, just as salmon upturn the gravel to lay their roe.
The spiritual rite, part of the annual Coonrod ceremony, is meant to maintain the Winnemem's connection to their lost salmon. But the traditional, federally unrecognized tribe of 123 plans to one day swim the falls with its salmon by importing them back to the McCloud from an unlikely way station – New Zealand.
"When our people first came into the world, it was salmon who gave us their voice, and we promised to always speak for them in return," said spiritual leader and traditional chief Caleen Sisk-Franco. "But now, we might have to learn to speak with a Kiwi accent."
During World War II, the 602-foot-high Shasta Dam flooded the lower 26 miles of the McCloud and blocked the chinook salmon from migrating to their birth waters, leaving them to either assimilate with the Sacramento River salmon or die bashing their heads against the dam.
But the Winnemem's salmon, by a twist of fate, have been thriving across the hemisphere since the early 20th century when a federal hatchery on the McCloud sent eggs to New Zealand, according to Fish and Game New Zealand officials.
While somewhat smaller than their McCloud ancestors, the salmon in the Rakaia River have remained genetically pristine and disease-free, said Dirk Barr, manager of Fish and Game New Zealand's salmon hatchery on the river.
"These are the fish that would have grown up to be McCloud River salmon," Sisk-Franco said.
When the hatchery was built during the 1870s, the Winnemem eventually came to an uneasy truce with the fish culturists while also making a spiritual covenant with their salmon: The hatchery might take their roe and milt, but the salmon always would be able to come home to the McCloud.
The dam, of course, broke this covenant, and atonement was the tribe's mission last spring when nearly 30 members maxed out credit cards and raised enough funds to travel to New Zealand to hold their first salmon ceremony in nearly a century.
In the Canterbury province, the Winnemem were hosted by Maori tribes, visited a hatchery, and danced and sang for four days on the banks of the Rakaia, asking the salmon for forgiveness.
"During the ceremony, we saw the salmon jumping out of the water for us. I knew they were happy to see us, and they were ready to come home," Sisk-Franco said.
With the spiritual connection restored, the tribe is working with federal agencies to implement its innovative plan to return the salmon.
Already having secured the approval of Fish and Game New Zealand and Maori tribes, the Winnemem would import salmon eggs from the Rakaia and rear them in their own hatchery on the upper McCloud, where the fish could acclimate to the river.
Federal fish biologists say young salmon traveling downstream probably will need help to navigate the reservoir. But spawning salmon, if they've been imprinted as fry with McCloud water, should find their way once they get a whiff of their birth waters, Sisk-Franco said.
Biologists already have targeted the cold, clean McCloud River as a place salmon must be reintroduced if they're to survive. The Winnemem's plan could be a cost-effective alternative to trapping salmon below and above the dam and hauling them around on trucks or barges.
For the Winnemem, preserving the Central Valley salmon, of which only three of 18 historical wild spring runs remain, means nothing less than preserving their culture.
"Maybe we should be put on an endangered species list, too, because we're still recovering from what the dam did to us," Sisk-Franco said. "In order for us to recover, we need to have salmon in the McCloud. We need that relationship back again."
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