Overview

In the coastal mountains of the Pacific Northwest, what begins as the proposed removal of an obsolete river dam turns into a five-way culture war. Fueled by casino money and riven with politics from 150 years of exile, the Native people struggling to reclaim their ancestral river are forced to deal with everyone else who also calls the river, its canyon, and the surrounding mountains ""home."" Loggers, ranchers, river rats, and even pot farmers all square off with the Tillikum as they work to restore their homeland, foodways, language, and traditional religion. Our hosts on the reservation: Eve, a Native environmental activist hired by the tribe to manage the messy process; and Jack, her white husband, who works in the casino and volunteers with local Search & Rescue. The mysteries pile up from the first page: who tried to blow up the dam in the middle of the night? These latest newcomers? Tillikum River is rich with details about the ancient Native civilization that arose amid the mountain ranges, old-growth forests, and waterways crisscrossing present-day Oregon and northern California. With a narrative situated on the 4,000-year scale that is the history of the Tillikum, all other claimants are newcomers; and every natural feature in their world - many of them icons we know as something else - carries an original name and story. The result is a riveting drama about the present-day collision of cultures, and about collective redemption - of a river, a landscape, and a once-disposed people taking back what was always their own.

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9781971400037

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Jonah Das is an author and restoration ecologist based on the land of the Lenape / Esopus people in the Catskill Mountains of present-day New York State. He wrote Tillikum River while living and working on a native tree and plant farm on the land of the S'Klallam and Chemakum, on the Olympic Peninsula of present-day Washington state. Das is also the managing editor of Illahee Rising, a geographic information nonprofit that documents Native historic sites missing from or misrepresented on current maps. Additional historical material developed during the research and writing of Tillikum River is available, along with geo-locations, at illaheerising.org. This is his third book. He is also the author of Dudeville, an adventure novel about the spiritual dimensions of mountaineering and the transformation of the American West into an outdoor sports playground; and That Golden Shore, a road novel about the myths, landscapes, and indigenous peoples of California. Das lives and works with his wife on the land of the Lenape/Shokan in Woodstock NY.

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