Soul of the Mattole

Nestled deep in the valleys of the King Range runs the Mattole River. The Indigenous Mattole people lived along the Mattole River, anchored to their main food source, salmon. The river ran thick with fish, supporting family groups peppered throughout the watershed. The Mattole held a reverence for water. Water was alive, it watched you, had thoughts and feelings, and became rough if you spoke in its presence. Only when water knows you may you look upon it and speak in its company. Their reverence carried through to their name, the word Mattole meaning ‘clear water’, you need only to visit the river to know why.

White settlers arrived brazenly in 1857, spreading into the valley and imposing their presence upon the Mattole. The Mattole resisted the invasion and were met with violence. By 1864 the settlers had viciously diminished the tribe’s number to almost zero, and took the Mattole homeland for themselves. However, this land is not theirs. It never will be.

Today the Mattole tribe lives on as part of the Bear River Band. The band was formed in the early 1900s to bring together the descendants of Mattole, Wailaki and Wiyot people. The Mattole have found a home here and a space to conserve their sacred cultural identity and practices.

As days shorten and leaves alight with color, salmon gather at the coasts, waiting to swim upriver to their natal spawning grounds. The Bear River Band gather at the mouth of the Mattole River, and for the first time in 100 years, these Mattole bound salmon will hear a welcoming call from the shore. Pieced together from memory and myth, the Bear River Band will perform their Salmon Dance Ceremony.

Bear tracks pattern the sinuous strip of sand that holds as the last barrier between ocean dwelling salmon and their riverine spawning grounds. The sand eagerly awaits a generous storm that will allow the Mattole estuary to bleed through into the Pacific Ocean, pulling the pelagic salmon into its brackish embrace.

Tribal members dance as one to welcome the salmon home, in a ceremony that would traditionally mark the beginning of bounty.

The next day the rains come, and waves finally eat their way through the sand, mixing salt and fresh water and letting the hope of a bountiful salmon run swell into the Mattole estuary once more.

What a true honor to witness the salmon dance.

Over time, the same greed that saw the Mattole people pushed out of their ancestral homeland took its toll on the river. Intensive timber harvesting between the 1940s and 1970s coupled with other land-use changes redefined the geomorphology of the river. Deep pools that had provided refuge for adult salmon were filled with sediment, and the river spread, losing its complexity. The salmon runs were reduced to a shadow of their former bounty.

Despite this voracity, the Mattole Valley still maintained remnants of a community that was bound together by salmon. Born out of the desire to see the native Mattole salmon run restored, community members banded together to form some of the first citizen-led watershed restoration groups in the West. The Mattole Salmon Group was formed in 1980, quickly followed by the Mattole Restoration Council in 1983. These groups envision a time when the Mattole has healthy, self-sustaining forests, meadows, and creeks. A time when salmon have no longer need human help. A time when the soul of the Mattole runs strong again.

Rains come, flows rise, and the mouth of the Mattole River opens. Now, fish biologists with the Mattole Salmon Group hike, canoe, and snorkel the watershed in search of signs of salmon, dead or alive. Most commonly, the only sign biologists will see are salmon nests, called redds. An indentation in the gravel, each one holding up to 2500 eggs.

Spawning migration is the last great journey a salmon will make. The miles, the pounding water, the predators, the redd building all take their toll on the fish who will eventually give up their life to spawn. In a healthy system, you can smell when the salmon have arrived. Carcasses line the stream banks, breaking down and feeding the ecosystem.

You can't smell the salmon in the Mattole, but the hopes are that someday you will.

Monitoring spawning activity helps inform where and how humans can restore the river. In the headwaters of the Mattole lies Ancestor Creek, ajoined by Grandmother and Grandfather Creek. These tributaries wind their way through once old growth Redwood stands, and have been found to provide spawning grounds for imperiled coho salmon. Coho fight their way to the very tip top of watersheds to spawn, so it's vital that the creek remains a welcoming home for these returning salmon.

Ancestor Creek suffers from bank incision and fast flowing water, meaning that by summer the waters have all but run dry. These critically low flows strand and suffocate juvenile salmon. To fix this, scientists are looking to beavers for a solution. They are building beaver dams.

Beavers are habitat engineers, they have the power alter the course of a river and to turn meadows into wetlands. By harnessing beaver power, scientists from the Mattole Salmon Group and Bureau of Land Management are trying to reconnect floodplains to Ancestor Creek by using beaver dams to slow the flow of water.