 What I said is that good afternoon my friends and family that we're here to talk about the Puyum Puyuk Mim which is the mountain waters that are sacred that come down throughout the valley to the ocean and what does that have to do with the climate change and the understanding that people need to catch up with what Mother Nature already built already designed already made it perfect for us to live here on this land and we have done a number of things as people creating this society as it is now where money have been coming more important even than water even though most of us know from our own experience in our history that no life can continue without pure good water including ours and why we choose to jeopardize that basic knowledge still is a wonder why people would think that money is a better way to go than protecting the rights of the water and you know I'm from a mountain where we drink water directly from the source it's not you know filtered or anything happens to it no chlorine no fluoride and I think that most people haven't a clue what real water tastes like and I'm sad to say that your water here really tastes different it's a taste that I don't really like and it looks like water it feels like water but for us it probably isn't water it's something else it's a wet liquid you know it's some sort of odd tea seems like to me so that's part of the issues that we're facing is that not enough people have a memory that goes back to a time when you could drink from the spring or stream or river and right now the common knowledge is that you can't that if you go hiking even to the pristine waters in the mountains that you should carry your water in or you should have a filtering system or you should boil it or something you need to do to the water and all of this still doesn't bring about like it like people to be upset with it and instead we're so complacent that we accept it it's just the way it is instead of being appalled that it's turned this way and that we should be doing something about it and instead we say we can't do anything about it because we can't change we can't change it the way that it's been the way that things have happened to water yet we know nothing exists without water and it's a very very short time that you can exist without water you know you might live what 14 days 15 days if you're really strong without water and so it's a it's a kind of a odd thing to me that so many millions of people have become complacent about the water issues in california you know we're in drought we've been in drought for a very long time yet we're still fracking we're still building new fracking industry and we know that fracked water cannot be used again do we have enough water to have one more fracking mine before it tilts and we're fighting for drinking water which i think that we're fighting for drinking water now yet we're not strong enough to make those changes and maybe not quick enough because you know we're fighting against crystal geyser on mount shasta from taking more water from a volcanic aquifer no science knows what happens to an aquifer that is surrounding a volcano or the temperature changes when you draft off unlimited amounts of cold water pool from a volcano you know and maybe there'll be some people who live beyond that who can go and study it and come up with the result of what happened when they draft it off too much water from a volcano but do we want to go there do we really want that you know i think not i think that creator put that together in a way that is supposed to warn us you know when when the volcanoes explode for us that's in our story telling is is that that is a sign that we need to make some changes in what we're doing not just a coincidence not just a seismic activity of the earth but it is the voice of the earth telling us giving us a chance you know to make some changes and same with the earthquakes the earthquakes are telling us about fracking that we should stop that because here it comes you know here comes these earthquakes they're telling us and we're looking at it and the scientists are already relating fracking activity to a number of increased earthquakes including in humble county i mean how many of you know how many fracking mines are in california yeah there's thousands yeah they're in places you don't even know that they are and they're considered clean energy yet just like nuclear power is considered clean energy and so is coal considered clean energy yet the water that is used in these processes um they have no idea and no way to fix it they can't it's not even like a a sewer system a sewer system you can change and you can filter it out and you can make that water drinkable again by all because that's what mother nature does it has a process of filtering out and changing and and giving back to these underground aquifers clean water to be stored for every living thing but fracking water um is not going to do that you can't reuse it you can't do anything with it and so i think you know as we go along people have to get more knowledge about the processes that are happening and about the effects because while we rely on science a great deal to protect us to some degree on these new projects or new things that are being built or exercised that we have to start asking the questions how much water in california are we polluting every day i mean taking clean drinkable water and we convert it to contaminated water what's the amount every day every hour do we know that we don't know that they don't talk about it right but in their eir's they have to say how many gallons of water will be used and how many gallons of water will be a waste waste water they call it they don't call it contaminated poison toxic water which they should call it because it's more than wastewater but we don't know we don't keep track of all these projects that are happening throughout our state uh and we we become complacent about water just like with crystal geyser nestlies and all of those who are tapping into our systems of water bottling it up leaving the other half contaminated water for us to deal with and shipping the water to other countries from a state that is in drought why do we allow that you know because we don't know or because it's just you know we have to share our water with everybody in the world and uh we're getting some sort of a benefit from it you know i don't see that i see nestlies getting rich and richer and doing things that was switzerland would not let them do there but they come to these countries they come to these communities that are maybe less educated about water laws and they exercise a power to extract water for the sales everywhere so they just get richer and richer you know crystal geyser advertises on their website for mount shasta that they're going to be selling flavored waters yeah flavored waters are going to come out of mount shasta it's like really and i did talk with the president of the bottle watering industry out of washington dc and i said to him we drink straight from the springs on mount shasta it doesn't go through any processes even the town has no real filtration system for their homes they drink straight from the source and i said what do you do to the bottle water when you extract it well the first thing they do is they put the uh disinfectant in the water it's like what would you be disinfecting when all of the people here just drink it straight from the source so you're taking pristine water you're contaminating it with disinfectant and then you're adding something to it and then you're selling it as spring water it's like and we buy it right we have no idea that uh you know you can buy nestle's product here in california that's made from mount shasta or somewhere else and you can buy the same thing in poland and those two waters will taste the same because the customers expect it to taste the same whether or not you get it in guatemala or ecuador or anywhere it's going to taste the same every bottle of water tastes the same so if it's going to taste the same why are we destroying all these springs and mountain systems to extract this water for bottling to to sell you know it's a problem that we need to wake up to there are many situations that we need to wake up to or our college systems need to start talking about it our students need to be starting to have rationality about the water issues you know 30 years ago my grand said that water will be so scarce that so many diseases will come from it because the water will be so low and contaminated that the people won't know what to do about it they'll they'll be respiratory systems that are affected by these water problems and we're going into it um like frogs in a pot you know uh i don't know if you know that frogs in a pot that term means that if there's a frog in the water and the water begins to warm the frog doesn't notice until he's dead but you put a frog in hot water and they're going to jump right otherwise it's just gradually happening and we don't recognize it that's what's happening to the people all of this gradual stuff uh that's happening with our water our air and we're convinced that we can't live without it when in fact uh we have before you know all of the communities have lived and at some point in time without all of the commodities and without all of the modernization of comfort and there's something to be said about uh societies that are built for their environments uh survive meaning like in the arctic people in the arctic have knowledge and technology and systems in place that they can continue to exist there but if we went up there in the arctic chances are we we probably will not know and our bodies are not conditioned to be any colder than you know what is it 70 degrees 68 degrees because that's where you turn down your air conditioners to 68 or 65 degrees you know and um and then we turn it up it's like okay 70 degrees or 75 degrees and we have this very short range of living condition that we can tolerate and we've we've given this to generations of us right so if it really gets too cold we lose a lot of people to uh storms and weather weather changes um icing of towns that shut down their systems most people don't know how to get along you know if you shut down all the supermarkets most people won't know of a food source you know but we don't know how vulnerable that we are and we don't want to think that that would ever ever end that'll never stop but our water systems you know uh we have these exotic things like water bottling but then we also have food processing like uh growing all of these products for the domesticated animals you know they take more water than not for pigs and and cows and alfalfa and corn to to feed them while we're convinced that we have to do these water projects in california because people don't have drinking water it's like we have a whole array of things that need to be fixed and changed and we have the technology that could change it to a better way but we don't use it because i'm thinking the people who get the money from the sources is a handful of people who have convinced everybody else that they have to have it this way and we're not willing to take a risk that they might be lying right but at one point in time like i said earlier many many families and houses and farms were off grid and they survived and they had healthier food when they canned their own peaches they canned their own tomatoes they had real food and nowadays you know you're buying food that's full of preservatives full of sugar full of corn syrup you know which isn't as healthy for us but we're convinced that we can live longer right if we eat like that um but for um for the environment itself we have to establish a relationship i think everybody needs to have a relationship with your environment when you're in a what what grams would call a stagnant environment is one that has exotic flowers and lawns that they don't know anything and and those people who only go to groomed parks as their outdoor recreation um idea that there are no stickers there there's no you know everything is so groomed that children playing in these places certainly probably are safe but are they learning anything about their environment i mean most kids don't know what the smell of dry grass smells like they have no clue they have no clue what the native plants are here or what's edible what's not edible what's a weed what what came in you know we don't we don't have that knowledge per se but maybe we should you know start thinking about our own levels of the future you know like my grandma said when she um was much older she said you know i do these things for my seven generations my time here is up whatever happens now you know isn't going to affect me i'm going to be gone it's all of you kids and your kids is kids that's going to be here and have to have to figure out what what they could do but i think that you know if we don't look around and start getting some practical knowledge like i was saying about the little white butterfly and the pine tree you know people go to the go to the recreational areas to enjoy the woods the forest go camping up on lake shasta you know but a lot of those campers they come in with these big RVs and their motorboat and their motorcycle and their tv antenna and their rig and that's recreating right they have their bicycle and they're recreating in the forest but really they're not they're not understanding that this pine tree that's leaking all this pitch that that pitch is a medicine and that you know nothing like that is is really a part of their experience other than seeing a tree you know and it's seeing a tree in a different way like seeing a picture of a tree whereas if you're there in the mountains you would know that the snow melts first around the bottom of the tree and you would know that trees will look half white and half green in in the winter time and so when you draw pictures of trees you don't see anybody drawing picture of a half white tree because on the shaded side of the tree it's still frozen it still has the white dust of the snow and on the sun side it's all melted and screen but who notices that kind of detail when you're out in the woods when you're when you're experiencing the mother nature's way of working to provide all of us with what we need you know with the air that we need with the waters that we need you know they're just now starting to study the root system of the trees and I did hear that they were going to go and cut a lot of trees down because they thought the trees were using too much water it was like oh my gosh we have a long way to go but whatever you see on the top of the ground is in the ground under that tree and the root systems are entwined with each other to hold themselves up in the communities of the trees and yet we don't we don't realize that you know we're we're into renewable resources and we can just plant those things and and we still have them yet we don't recognize that what we're doing is planting an orchard in the forest we have an orchard of trees that are going to be the same size grow the same height be knocked down the same time and they're not really a forest you know it's not where the birds and everything chooses to live when you have a forest you also have all of those things that are choosing to live there because everything there is what they need but our replanted forests don't provide that they don't provide that and we still don't have a policy of areas that we say we're going to let them grow for a hundred years before we cut them a hundred years it's like 40 years and they're coming back to cut them but we don't recognize that we came from a state that had these huge trees you know even in our area under the lake when the lake recedes we see these stumps because they cut all the trees when the dam came in but we have this one stump that's under it's an oak tree that was like 12 and a half feet in diameter who sees that anymore a 12 and a half foot oak at the base of the trunk it's almost like a story right it's like a make believe story it's like the hundred pound salmon it's like who sees those anymore you're making that up you know but on battle creek they did find a salmon in the carcass of a salmon that was 85 pounds but through our hatchery system we have created a salmon that's basically the same size just like we're making these trees the same size you know in the early days of the hatchery process and and even probably now it's they don't have that diversity but it was people who milk the male salmon onto the eggs well nobody wanted to lift the 85 pound squirmy flopping salmon right so they lifted the smaller ones and so they created these generations of smaller salmon by not using the diversity of the large salmon and now you know we have these studies that kind of pin us in that 100 pound 85 pound salmon are pretty rare but studies don't go back as far as we did you know because when they started like my dad's generation started seeing the 40 pound salmon as the normal salmon coming up they were saying how small those salmon are right those salmon are pretty small these days while everybody else is saying gee look how big this fish is you know how they had to fight it to get it in all of that right but they don't really recognize what was already here or the processes that were already here and that some way we have to find our way back if we want to if we want to change climate and we can't really change it we can only put back what was here that sustained climate like our our large trees we need the large trees like the wolves you know wolves in california are very detrimental to the to the water issues and maybe you say why would the wolf be a part of the water system well one the wolf is a fisherman but aside from that he maintains a high mountain meadows and the way that he does it is that you know our meadows nowadays are all being encroached by vegetation because the wolf is not there when the wolf is present you don't have the other animals who eat grass and stuff encroaching on the meadow changing the hydrology of the ground as well as eating all of the plants off and not eating from the edge of the meadow that keeps it wide when the wolves are there he's a predator of those animals like deer and rabbits and every everyone else that goes in to do that and so they eat on the edges of the meadow because they don't want to be prime dinner right and and they're not impacting the heart of the meadow it's remained soft and spongy by the voles and they eat on the edge of the meadow keeping vegetation from growing into the meadow that's why he's a waterkeeper you know but all of these things that I don't think science has caught up with the effects of everybody's jobs everybody's here for a reason that kind of filters into our own life you know like we were telling Peter Moyle yesterday is that the Indians on the river and the salmon have stories together we relied on each other there's a dependency together and one of those ways of looking at things is that there's always been high water years wet water years dry drought years all of that but in the drought years it was the people who had dip netting skills that dip netted the salmon to help them get above the jumps that they couldn't make during a low water year so that they could go to their spawning ground so there was a basic understanding that you didn't look at the pool and say hey I look at all those fish for me you know you looked at all the fish and saying oh those poor fish they can't get to where they're supposed to be I have to help them I can't just take them all and eat them all I have to help them and doing that you know and and that's a different way of thinking about things you know even in the hunting seasons it's like uh there wasn't this uh trophy hunter kind of uh you know uh need for the hunters in fact it was frowned upon if you brought back the biggest rack of a deer it was frowned upon because you have interrupted the generational um processes of this giant deer to affect all populations behind him and so uh large deer like that the big antlers they were allowed to walk away you wouldn't take that one because he's going to produce more large deer if you take him maybe there won't be that big a deer anymore and so there was there was a process of a selection of which which animals was more likely to be not as affected in the chain of life as others but nowadays you know it is the the giant horns it is it is that you know it's um a crazy thing that uh trophy hunting has done to people because we're not reliant on that as a food source hunting and fishing have now dropped into the categories of recreation instead of sustenance you know where the tribes are still in the mindset of sustenance uh and the and the reliability of um the process of salmon from ocean to the high mountain streams and seeing the indications of whether or not it's a good year or a bad year you know now it seems like the uh Indian people who have fisheries are indicating that uh we have big problems with water we have salmon coming back upstream that are uh deformed we have them coming back upstream that have bugs in them and um different growths that are on them these are all indicators that our water system is collapsing not that the fish are having a bad year the overall we have to pay attention to you have a question yeah you know about the water project in california uh we believe that it's all one project you know you have the delta tunnels that they say is a separate project that's going to be built big enough to divert the entire river of the sacramento they say they won't and i asked them why they said we don't have the permit but they're going to spend the money to build them big enough that they can why would they do that if they're not going to it's a waste of money to build them oversized then you have sites reservoir which is right out here um in williams that they're going to build it's on the uh governor's list of wet water projects for prop one funds there's no way to fill sites there's no running river uh streams year-round streams that would go into sites reservoir to fill it they will have to pump from water from the sacramento river to fill sites reservoir in order to do that because they are pumping as much water out of the sacramento now that they couldn't possibly pump more to fill sites so that brings us to the chassadam rays and they have to build chassadam higher so that they can catch more of the runoff water which will then be shipped to sites to fill sites uh during winter year winter months and start building up the water storage at sites by the overflow uh from shasta in orville but uh it doesn't make sense you know uh shasta dam is over 85 feet uh 85 excuse me a second she's coming if you want to stop and take a drink of water then i could circulate the rest of the evaluations oh oh sure sure clipboard no no no i don't know how you guys recommend it which is a sad thing for things a piece of water you know we uh we went to san diego one year and they were hosting a spiritual wellness conference at the san diego hotel right there at the town and country by the san diego river right and so i had some of my young people with me and they asked us to do a women's blessing down by the river and so we said oh yeah you know we could do that we'd love to do that we went outside and it's like where is the river and then we walked around the hotel and we couldn't find the river and then they came out and we said well you know we'd love to do that blessing but we can't find the river to set our stuff up so we walk around the other side and they said this is the river and it's this chocolate brown stream running by the hotel that was the san diego river and if you've seen um mccloud river it's pretty pristine i mean you can see to the bottom of it it's nice and cold and bubbly and a lot aerated it it smells good it tastes good as compared to that and so our young people looked around and thought oh the little mouths dropped open it's like wow that's the you can't you got to be kidding us right you're kidding us that looks like a sewer ditch and then we saw up river there was somebody fishing and they said oh they're not going to eat anything out of there but it was a shock you know and then i showed them the the la river it's like what what happened to this you know and and the the things that people become accustomed to doing and seeing impacts our ability to change anything you know and for them it was like oh they need to free that river you know get that concrete out of there but uh when when you have populations that grow a custom to it it's it's harder it's like the frogs in the pot you know they don't they don't see a difference generation after generation it's just the way it is but as far as the Shasta dam rays they want to build it 18 and a half feet higher which will essentially be like 22 feet higher they'll have to do a clear cut around the lake cutting all the trees up to 25 or 30 feet from the new water's edge and they say that that would be the keystone to the california waterfix but in reality you know we we have sacred places still along the river we've lost 26 miles of the river the first time they put the dam in they've never really justified that there's an act of congress that says they'll give us life land to live on move our cemeteries and give us an infrastructure to continue our way of life well none of that has happened they did move 183 gravesites to a central place in old Shasta I mean not old Shasta but Shasta Lake cities where it was supposed to continue to be our cemetery so now they have transferred that land into the BLM land banks and if you know anything about BLM they don't allow burials on their lands yet it's a practicing burial place so we have a problem there right but in addition to that there's been no land given to us so we have no land on the McLeod river and they'd had no in fact there's a letter that says the best thing you can do for those Indians is to move them out of there why give them an infrastructure to live in a place that's unlivable so that that's the commissioner of Indian affairs to the president and so none of the other guarantees of the act happened for the 26 miles of river in a way of life and you have to realize that the minimum never came down to join in the new developments of modernization they always remained on the river and always wanted to remain on the river well at that building of the dam whatever happened to the salmon happened to us the salmon were no longer allowed to come back to their homelands and neither were the winimum and so that in itself is an issue that's over here and everybody goes well they don't even name that act of Congress that allowed them to fill the lake on top of our lands but you know there's problems with legal legal remedies and all that kind of thing but the other part of it is is that we asked them if you did raise it even if you raise it 200 feet higher because that's what they were initially intending for the dam to be 200 feet higher it's supposed to be an 800 foot dam they stopped at 602 feet because the war was pretty much over the money was running pretty thin and they ended it right but if even if they did the water that would be captured in Lake Shasta would not make an iota a difference in the percent needed by the people in the south it'd be a drop in the bucket of the need to address the issues of how we're using water right but the other issue that people don't think about too is is that in 1850 you know the people came to the state why gold they came for gold and they came in the hundreds of thousands into the state and that's what happened to the Indian people is that there was an actual policy by the first governor of california to exterminate all the Indians so you could make your money killing Indians men women children babies whatever or finding gold and so that was the that happened so there was a lot of mining that was exercised on a lot of the rivers including the Sacramento river the mccloud river we were still what they say wild enough to keep the miners out so the miners never got to dredge up the mccloud river they never got to find out whether or not there were pots of gold on the mccloud river because of the fierce nature of the tribe that was there and because it was far enough away in a canyon that they couldn't you know they didn't just encroach and live like like on dunes mirror that was the way of the railroad and so the the tribes along the mccloud i mean the Sacramento river going that way had less of a chance because there were so many people coming and they kept coming and they kept coming on the mccloud you would know they would be coming up on the buckboard right you could hear them and so they could be stopped more easily by the the tribe and and they did but on the Sacramento river there was a lot of mining and for nickel for copper for iron and they did a lot of hydro mining at that time as well and and you know that there's a hydro mine up there called iron canyon that continually bleeds the poisons that eventually in the winter time in a wet year it'll dump over and it goes down the Sacramento river nobody wants to talk about that and they don't want to talk about that it continually bleeds and they don't know how to stop it they've tried a number of methods and they can't stop it from bleeding it's left over from the mining time well on the Sacramento and under the Shasta Lake there are also hydro mining activity that took place and all of that metal and is exposed to the lake and as long as three rivers run down to fill Lake Shasta there's a movement of sediment that has moved to the bottom of the dam and so nobody's talking about the 60 foot of toxic sludge at the base of the dam or what to do about it but us right we're saying if you dredged out that 60 foot of toxic sludge that's on the bottom of this lake you would have more room for volume of water you wouldn't even have to build it higher if you took that out because you're gonna you're gonna build it 20 feet higher and you got 60 feet if you just dredged it out new and clean and they said well we don't know it'd be pretty expensive and we don't know what we would do with that toxic waste and so you're just gonna build it higher you're gonna leave it there and it's still gonna continue to accumulate and you're gonna put water on top of it that's the answer and so you know we were we were complaining to them that the fish have mercury poison well did you test them it's like no we didn't test them but we see it we see it you don't have to be a scientist to know when a fish has mercury poison you know even in the taste of them you know and so finally just this last year I don't know if you saw the report from I think it was Sacramento B or LA Times reporter had talked about the the Shasta Lake and the mercury poisoning of the fish because we have been asking the Forest Service when are you gonna put up signs to warn the people that these fish have mercury poisoning and that was like eight years ago right and we still haven't seen any signs because we were asking well how many languages will you put that up in because this is a world renowned lake that people come out from all over to come here not one sign has gone up not one meeting about the what to do about the mercury-infested fish still even after the the article that came out pointing to that and so we have problems with the Shasta Dam on a technical scientific basis you know not just us being in the way of another raise of the water over our sacred sites which affects who we are how do we remain to be Winamom when that's the only place that we can go to learn how to be Winamom we can't go to Hoopa and still learn how to be Winamom we can't go to Cherokee or Arizona and learn how to be Winamoms we have to be in the Winamom territory to be Winamom to raise our children Winamom to know all that we know about our own traditional territory so we're affected big time by this raise but everybody else you know maybe they don't care about cultures or maybe they don't care about tribes and maybe they look at us as a small handful of people standing in a way of millions of people who need water but the bottom line is is that we're standing in this handful of people in objection to raising this dam against a handful of people who want to make money off of this Westlands Water District Metropolitan Water District all of the GMO farmers Resnick's farms all of these people stand to get richer than they are I mean they're powerful enough right now and everybody you know doesn't realize that the Shassadam fix is not for the people it is not to give more water to independent farmers they're still going to buy that water from the brokers at horrible prices already they're selling water that they get for 20 dollars an acre foot subsidized they're selling for anywhere from 400 to 2500 an acre foot depending on who's bidding at the time and who needs the water at the time so this handful of people is what we're dealing with but they want to make it out that we're standing in the way of all the people getting water and it's like if all the people knew that you know LA is not going to get any more water than they can buy and the prices are going to be very very high that the small towns like Seville and Alpaw and all the ones in on the corridor of Fresno Stockton foothills are not rich enough to buy that water even the place in Tuolumne their water allotment ran out and the Tuolumne tribe utilized their water right to bring water for that town otherwise they wouldn't have water they didn't have no more money they ran out of their allocation you know that's how evil this water war is going to get and we don't realize it right now because we think the government is making plans to help everybody but the government is not putting themselves in charge of the distribution or of that water they're putting water districts in it right and you know that they have the money to do it like everybody said Diane Feinstein's bill for the water fix was this scattergun approach you know to desal drought groundwater reservoirs raising you know it's just this massive water fix well February 10th came out her her next version of it Shasta dam is on it as authorized to raise as part of the water fix as is governor brown pushing the delta tunnels and the same thing is true with the delta no one has seen a delta die if you take all of the fresh water out of a delta it's no longer a delta it's no longer an estuary it's an inlet and when you change that you're changing this whole flyway system you're changing all of the fish that are in that that system that need fresh water you're changing all the plants that are growing within that structured area and you're changing all of the salmon runs for the major rivers in california and they say they're not going to right they're just going to dig out these two giant holes in the delta and place their tunnels down so nobody sees that they're probably as big as his room their four lane highway size tunnels now they're trying to call them pipes because in people's minds pipes are smaller than tunnels and so it's a word word play on people too but they're building them so big that they will be able to divert the entire sacramental river and right now the motto of the state is is every drop of water to the ocean is a wasted drop right that's the big tagline and and farmers feed america people are fish it's like what do you think the fish are gathering up their arms against you it's like now the fish are marching on us here comes the salmon it's like this is dreamlike enemy the fish are our enemy and we couldn't possibly allow them to live you know and right now the delta smelt are nearly gone and uc davis here has been charged with rearing them in their tanks on campus to try to save the delta smelt rather than allow them to live in their natural habitat by moving the pumps and diverting the water at different times of year and instead the thought is well those little fish are just in the way of us growing food for the world right we're going food for the world but this little finger-sized fish they say is our enemy you know they're on the last leg per se like there was they've been here for over 6,000 years native fish to the delta and necessary fish for the acclimation of the salmon and other species that utilize that delta smelt and 99.5 percent of them have given up their lives for the delta pumping system and now we just have to go after that last one percent because they're still in our way and we don't recognize the effect of losing the delta smelt on the salmon runs on anything it's like we're so removed from that that the delta smelt is like nobody catches that nobody eats that nobody does you know it doesn't benefit us right up front it's not a moneymaker and so we don't give them importance but as tribal people know that the delta smelt is very important to the overall ecology of the entire delta and that once you take start taking out these pieces it's like the little white butterfly if they poison the little white butterfly eventually there'll be no trees because they won't reproduce the same is true of the delta smelt that's why it's such a disaster tragedy for them to you know not consider them a part of our environment a part of our system and then after they do this after if they get the build the tunnels they're going to pull out all this toxic dirt from the bottom of the delta right because the ships have gone in and wherever the ships go in there's a lot of toxic waste that's circulating on the bottom so they're going to build this and you know what they're going to do with that dirt they're going to build a wetland so not only are we taking this toxic dirt out that we shouldn't but now we're going to give them to the flyway bird system so all the birds flying up and down our our sink is going to be sitting in that toxic dirt that they're going to pump water into and they say they're going to create 100 100 more acres of wetlands for the birds out of that okay all right well there's so many things to to think about and talk about but right now you know we've we passed out a little flyer we're trying to find a champion in the system that would actually speak up or help talk about these things help the tribe um and the salmon our main focus is bringing the salmon back because we believe that once those salmon get back into that river many things will change there's a magic that happens when they come back that isn't there now and so we're crippled in that way but when they come back maybe more eyes will be opened maybe more hearts will feel the difference maybe more people will understand our connectedness with our mother earth and and that um we are not smarter than they are that's what you know we have to recognize all of the science and all the studies on the salmon are incomplete and are only on the terms of what human people want to think but salmon have more information about our systems than we do and we should follow them and so we're following the salmon and we're trying to open up that waterway so they can come back on their own and utilize that entire system and have major effects on climate when they swim up and turn the rocks over and they deposit their um nutrients the whole mountain the whole system is better the meadows retain more water the trees retain more water there's condensation that happens in the water system that people don't count that our major water performance throughout the year you know people are trained to only look at a reservoir and say whether or not we have water or not but did you notice that our reservoirs especially fulsome was like dirt dirt down there 11 full a mud hole while reservoirs in the southern part of the state were completely full what kind of drought is that that leaves us with no water and fills the lakes down there like they got rain and we didn't yeah it's a selective frame makes you think that we're in dire drought state but we're not we're in dire um choices people are making choices about our water and how to use that water and what they can do but we really have to rethink a lot of things and and a lot of it i don't understand because they say you know california feeds the entire world with almonds or china gets major almonds from the state so it's important to grow almonds in the desert you know i don't know but if you drive up by the i5 corridor you see all these brand new little trees coming up in the desert you know something is wrong with our thinking and so there needs to be a paradigm shift of what we're capable of doing what we need to do and we have to wake up you know we have to start participating with these water district meetings because i can guarantee you that um just like the site's project for the governor they have a chief of staff for that that chief of staff is an employee of the westlands water district and so these things they say there is no conflict of interest but even on the governor staff they have another water district westlands water district person uh designing the plan for the governor you know and so we have to wake up and start realizing that we shouldn't have that means like the frankenfish i don't know if you heard of frankenfish they're developing this well they have the guy from aqua bounty who is the lab that's developed frankenfish on the food and drug administration uh leading the approval of the frankenfish it's like you know we'd be better with a homeless person in there who has a sense of like his environment he has a sense of you know getting by and knowing uh how to how to survive you know uh there are decisions being made by people who will never have to live it you know just like a mount shasta you know we're fighting crystal geyser and people utilize mount shasta you know around the world but they get the fly in they get to do whatever they're gonna do and then they fly home and we're left with whatever runs off of mount shasta because we're all downhill from there so we have we have a lot of work to do but i think um the more people start talking about things and start caring about things um and start with their own homes stop using fertilize stop using roundup stop using antiseptic dish soap you know start uh buying more organic and get away from gmo's because the money issue pushes these guys to continue what they're doing you know i think there was enough issue in the organic processes that these major gmo companies started buying up the gmo companies i mean the the organic companies so that their supermarkets can now you know but they're still getting all the profit from that and they're still regulating how much organic food can go on the market at what price because we used to all all be organic and it was pretty cheap but now organic anything that's good for you cost a lot of money right and so uh i just want to thank you guys for coming out and being here and inviting me there's a lot of things that churches across the the nation around the world really need to start sitting down with indigenous peoples who are struggling to protect their homelands but it's not only their homelands but it's a signature for the world's existence yeah the the other the other issue that uh you need to be aware of that whenever you join in uh defending mother earth or it seemed to be this is that you'll have a number of enemies and you'll be targeted and we go through that uh uh we've survived a couple of uh crippling blows to the tribe uh and they remain you know they continue to keep us poor so that we can't really make an impact and so social media and talking out like this is our basic weapon to defend and try to educate and help all of us understand you know what your circle can do so thank you very much