Molli Myers was pregnant with her firstborn when the salmon began to die. It was 2002, during the depths of a yearslong drought, and farmers far upstream of her community on the Yurok reservation in Northern California had pressured the George W. Bush administration to divert water from the Klamath River in Oregon to irrigate their fields. Water temperatures rose as the river slowed through the summer, and in September, Chinook salmon returning to spawn began to die, littering the banks with as many as 70,000 carcasses.

　　Two years later, with her young son in her lap, Myers testified in Orleans, California, before a panel of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials charged with renewing the operating licenses of four hydroelectric dams that had contributed to the fish kill. None of the panelists looked her in the eye as she described the structures as an existential threat to the river and the salmon that have sustained her Karuk people since time immemorial.

　　When the meeting ended, Myers joined a handful of Native people and friends around a bonfire by the river in Orleans to lick their wounds and vent their anger. “That was when we made the decision to dedicate ourselves to dam removal,” Myers recalls. “And that has been our lives.”

　　The Klamath River flows 263 miles from southern Oregon to far Northern California, through ancestral lands of the Klamath, Karuk, Hupa, Shasta, and Yurok, whose traditions and way of life grew around the river and the abundance it provided. The Klamath once teemed with salmon, but the dams, built between 1918 and 1964 without consulting the tribes, blocked the fish from critical spawning habitat on the upper river and its tributaries. The dams provided no drinking water and almost no flood control. Toxic algae bloomed in their reservoirs, and they accounted for less than 2 percent of the electricity generated by their owner, PacifiCorp. Still, taking them down would involve the largest dam-removal project in American history. The tribes would accept nothing less.

　　They organized protests at PacifiCorp’s Oregon headquarters, then traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to lobby the utility’s parent company, Scottish Power, which proceeded to sell PacifiCorp in 2006. The new owner was Berkshire Hathaway Energy, controlled by Warren Buffett, then the planet’s wealthiest man.

　　The coalition shifted their protests to Omaha, Nebraska, where Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting packs a 19,000-seat arena. In 2008, 23-year-old Karuk tribal member Chook-Chook Hillman waited in line all night, then sprinted for a microphone and the chance to question Buffett directly. As Hillman introduced himself in the Karuk language, a stunned hush fell over the crowd. Switching to English, he demanded Buffett sign an agreement to remove the dams as Georgiana Myers and Annelia Hillman of the Yurok tribe unfurled a banner proclaiming: BUFFETT’S KLAMATH DAMS = CULTURAL GENOCIDE.

　　“The world’s richest man doesn’t faze me at all, because in our culture I’m just as equal as any other being on the planet,” Chook-Chook Hillman recalls. “I got my moment and I took full advantage of it.” After two other Klamath River defenders spoke up, Buffett announced that he wouldn’t take any more questions about the dams, and security hustled the remaining activists out of the queue.

　　The protesters had made their point and could now engage Buffett’s people in a language they understood: the cost of adding fish ladders and bringing the dams up to spec for relicensing was more than it would cost to tear them down—and more than they’d ever earn back. The smart play for PacifiCorp was to walk away. Over the next 16 years, without easing the threat of direct action, the tribes worked with environmentalists, irrigators, commercial fishers, state and federal governments, and PacifiCorp itself to help the utility company do just that.

　　In 2010, nearly 50 parties signed a dam-removal settlement and an environmental-restoration agreement, only to watch them both die in Congress five years later. The tribes then took the lead in new talks, negotiating an amended agreement that didn’t require congressional approval. The accord formed the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corporation to manage the project, with the state of California contributing $250 million in dam-removal and remediation costs and PacifiCorp rate-payers covering the remaining $200 million.

　　The last major hurdle was approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency Molli Myers had testified to decades ago. In November 2022, as officials met in Washington, D.C., Myers joined friends by the river in Orleans, gathering around a Starlink connection to share the historic moment with their children, now grown, who’d witnessed the dam-removal fight their entire lives, and elders who thought they would never live to see it succeed. “We built a bonfire,” she says. “We pulled out all of our old banners from over the years, and we celebrated.”

　　Dam removal began the following spring and continued in earnest this year. The largest of the four structures, Iron Gate, stood 173 feet tall and 740 feet long. In May, excavators began reducing the earthen formation scoop by scoop, loading the soil into oversize trucks that would return it to the pit it was taken from decades ago. The same day, crews of young people walked the steep embankments, spreading native seeds as part of a habitat-restoration effort that will go on for years. By August, all four dams were gone, freeing the river to carry on the work of healing itself, and providing migrating salmon a clear route upstream for the first time in more than a century.