“When there are no more salmon, there will be no more Winnemem people.” - ancient Winnemem prophecy. Winnemem Yetcha Pon (Middle Water Dream Run) To make a tax-deductible donation or help our salmon project, visit www.winnememwintu.us. Checks can be made out to Indian Cultural Organization, the tribe’s non- profit, and sent to 14840 Bear Mountain Road, Redding, CA 96003. Map of the Sacramento River, Shasta Lake, Upper Sacramento, McCloud and Pit Rivers, located north of Redding, Calif.

Bring Home the McCloud River Salmon A Winnemem Wintu project of cultural, ecological and spiritual restoration. Join our fight for threatened California salmon, justice and the preservation of life. Visit www.winnememwintu.us to donate and help return our salmon home from New Zealand.

About the Winnemem Wintu The Plan to Return the Salmon We are a traditional tribe who inhabits In the spring of 2010, we traveled to our ancestral territory from Mt. Shasta New Zealand where, with the help of down the McCloud River watershed. Maori tribes, we held a four-day cere- When the Shasta Dam was constructed mony, Nur Chonas Winyupus, on the during World War II, it flooded our Rakaia and atoned for our failure to stop homes and blocked all the McCloud the dam. The salmon are now ready to salmon runs. return to their home, and the Maori and Fish and Game New Zealand have The Chinook salmon are an integral part Sunrise prayers at Coonrod ceremony agreed to export their salmon eggs from Middle Falls of the McCloud River of our lifeway and of a healthy McCloud the Rakaia hatchery directly to the tribe River watershed. We believe that when the last salmon is gone, humans will and the tribe alone. Once the eggs arrive, we plan to rear them in a hatchery be gone too. Our fight to return the salmon to the McCloud River is no less on the upper McCloud, where the fish could acclimate to the river’s waters. than a fight to save the Winnemem Wintu Tribe.

As salmon people and Middle Water people, we advocate for all aspects of In August and September, we held three meetings with biologists from the clean water and the restoration of salmon to their natural spawning grounds. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency in charge of restoring wild salmon to the Central Valley. Only three of Our Salmon Story: Sacred Fish Lost and Found 18 historic Central Valley Chinook Salmon runs still survive. NOAA has man- dated the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) to return salmon above Shasta Dam According to our creation story, it was salmon who gave us to mountain rivers like the McCloud, which have colder waters that are more their voice. In return, we promised to always speak for resistant to climate change. NOAA has expressed a great interest in collabo- them. For thousands of years, we lived on the banks of the rating with the Winnemem. McCloud, harvesting the prolific salmon runs and honor- ing our sacred relationship. We are researching and developing a proposal for a passageway around Shasta Dam for the returning spawning salmon and the outgoing ocean bound In the 1870s, the U.S. established the Baird Hatchery on salmon fingerlings. This passageway the McCloud. From that hatchery, McCloud would ideally be designed so that it would River salmon eggs were exported around the world, includ- be used by migrating Chinook salmon with ing a shipment to New Zealand where a stable fishery was little or no human intervention. In recent Filleting a Trinity River salmon established on the Rakaia River. Initially unhappy with the years, there have been many developments hatchery’s presence, the Winnemem made a promise to with fish passages, and we will be working our salmon: the hatchery could capture the salmon, but our sacred fish would with BOR and NOAA to develop a state- always be able to return home. of-the-art project. Rakaia River salmon hatchery This covenant with the salmon was broken when the Shasta Dam was We currently are working on our proposal constructed during World War II and blocked our salmon’s spawning run. and need funds to conduct research trips to existing hatcheries, surveys on the The McCloud salmon either interbred with Sacramento River salmon or died creeks and other fieldwork.. We plan to submit our proposal to NOAA in the out here in California, but they continued to thrive disease-free in the pristine Spring of 2012. waters of New Zealand. We learned that Rakaia River salmon were descended from our salmon when a New Zealand professor contacted us after reading To make a tax deductible donation or to register your support for this project, about our 2004 War Dance at Shasta Dam. visit www.winnememwintu.us.