The Pulikla: Downriver Yurok of the Klamath

You are near the lower Klamath River, one of the most storied salmon rivers in California, and the country here belongs to the Yurok people. The name Pulikla, meaning downriver people in the Yurok language, refers to the specific band whose territory centers on the final miles of the Klamath before it meets the Pacific. The Yurok are among the largest Indigenous nations in California, and crucially, they are one of the very few tribes who were never removed from their ancestral lands.

The Yurok world was oriented entirely around the river. The Klamath delivered chinook salmon in such numbers that it supported a dense, relatively settled population. Villages were built on terraces above the water, and the rhythms of life followed the salmon runs: spring chinook, summer steelhead, fall coho, fall chinook. Acorns from tan oaks provided the staple carbohydrate, stored in elevated granaries between harvests. Yurok canoes, carved from redwood, were engineering masterpieces capable of riding ocean swells to harvest offshore rockfish and hunt sea lions.

The Klamath River Reservation was established in eighteen fifty-five. The federal government later created a formal Yurok Indian Reservation in the eighteen ninety-one Indian Appropriations Act, covering a forty-four-mile stretch of the lower river. Within that larger territory, a smaller parcel was set aside specifically for the Pulikla band. In nineteen thirty-eight, the government purchased land from a private owner to formalize this holding, and in nineteen seventy-five the Pulikla established their tribal government.

For decades the Yurok and Pulikla fought to restore salmon runs devastated by upstream dams, irrigation diversions, and logging. Between twenty twenty-three and twenty twenty-four, four dams on the Klamath were removed in the largest dam removal project in American history, reopening over four hundred miles of spawning habitat. The salmon are beginning to return. It is a story still being written, here at the river's mouth where the Pulikla have always lived.