This February, after long-anticipated rains deluged California, causing creek beds to overflow and turning fields into marshland, the spawning runs of a sacred, highly endangered fish—the Clear Lake Hitch—reappeared in their historic waterways.
We rejoiced, we wept, and we sang to them. Then we rolled up our sleeves and pantlegs and rescued over 5,000 hitch from puddles in vineyards and isolated pools in the creeks as the water levels dropped lower and lower. Tribal members participating in the rescues held hitch gently in their hands, marveling over their size and vigor. Some of the beefier guys gave them quick, surreptitious kisses before releasing back into safer waters.
“We see a direct connection between the loss of ancestral lands and waters, native fish and traditional lifeways, and the despair and poor health outcomes affecting Tribal people.”
Hitch are deeply embedded in our Tribal culture. Known as chi (pronounced “chai”) in Bahtssal (Eastern Pomo), healthy hitch populations sustained Pomo, Lake Miwok, Wappo, and Pit River Tribal families for thousands of years. Communal fishing parties—where children and young adults caught hitch with their shirts or in buckets, and mothers and aunties gutted, scaled, and set the fish on lines to dry for year-round eating—supplemented diets at times when Tribal members faced limited job opportunities. Catching, processing, and eating hitch reinforced social relationships across families, Tribes, and generations. Yet today’s Gen Zers have never tasted hitch, and millennials have only fleeting memories.
The Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, where Ron is a Tribal elder and the Tribal historic preservation officer, is one of seven local Tribes. Since the pandemic began, the Tribe has lost 5 percent of its population. (The 2021 death rate in California was 0.76 percent.) Half of the Tribe’s elders, and over two dozen adults in their 20s to 50s, have died of unnatural causes: COVID, cancer, heatstroke, drug addiction, murder, suicide.
Lack of access to ancestral foods has implications for Tribal spiritual, mental, and physical health. We see a direct connection between the loss of ancestral lands and waters, native fish and traditional lifeways, and the despair and poor health outcomes affecting Tribal people.
We’re fighting to bring back the hitch to our waters in hopes of reversing these lethal trends. For far too long, discriminatory policies against Tribal lifeways and beliefs, and the ancestral homelands and native wildlife whom we consider extended family members, have resulted in destructive legacies that harm all of us. If the hitch don’t have what they need to survive, neither do we.
Culturally Significant Fish
California’s most endangered fish: the Delta smelt, the Clear Lake hitch, and all four species of salmon have all played vital, irreplaceable roles in the cultures of hundreds of California Tribes and Tribal communities. Coastal Tribes—known as Salmon Nations—have an extensive history of salmon rituals, ceremonies, and complex intertribal understandings that ensured sustainable harvests for millennia. Tolowa Dee-ni elders recall catching salmon so hefty it took two men to haul them up the river banks. Historical accounts repeatedly say that wherever fish like hitch and salmon spawned, they filled waterways to the point that “you could cross the riverbeds walking on their backs.”
As of today, Delta smelt have been absent from scientists’ counts for seven years. Despite the abundance of adult hitch this winter, no juvenile hitch has been found in biological surveys for six years—a death knell for a species whose adult lifecycle ends after seven years. And the California salmon fishing season has been shut down, again. Tribes see policies that promote dams over free-flowing rivers, and commercial agriculture over fish, as environmental racism.
Tribes consider their existence intertwined with species that are culturally significant: What impacts those species, impacts the Tribes. Pomo creation stories tell how Clear Lake originated from a hole poked into Coyote’s side following a devastating drought, and the wild creatures he ate before filling his belly with water “turned themselves into fish.” Fishnets woven from milkweed and traditional willow fish traps similar to the ones from the 1800s collected at the Smithsonian Museum are still crafted and used today.
The hitch migrate from Clear Lake, the largest lake in California, into its tributaries to spawn before retuning. The fish were so numerous pre-contact that photos from the 19th century show them in extravagant piles, flooding the creeks, and spilling over the banks. Cole Creek, one of the hitch-bearing tributaries passing through the territories of the Xabenapo people (Ron’s ancestors), was known as che-be-domeh (hitch creek).
1873 photo of “squaw” fish (hitch) overflowing the banks of Kelsey Creek.
Two centuries later, 2019 surveys in Cole Creek counted no fish. Toxic and increasingly warm water, frequent harmful algal blooms, and predation by dozens of invasive species (bass, carp, and catfish) introduced by California Fish and Game—the very agency now fighting alongside the Tribes for the hitch’s survival—has made the hitch so rare that it is now more commonly found as plastic replica, the “All-American Trash Fish” in Lake County bait-and-tackle shops than in the water.
The Fight
Seven Lake County Pomo Tribes have been fighting for the hitch’s survival for over a generation, but their efforts gained urgency in the last decade. Since 2011, Lake County Pomo have boarded Tribal vans and driven hundreds of miles to testify at state agency meetings on behalf of the fish. Tribal testimony, alongside lawsuits from the Center for Biological Diversity, resulted in breakthroughs in 2014, when the the State of California listed the hitch as threatened and again in 2022, when the California Fish and Game Commission convened a multi-agency emergency summit.
Yet the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the agency responsible for enacting the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the policy ensuring the furthest-reaching protections for the hitch, refused to grant the hitch federal listing status, saying there was “insufficient data.”
An endangered listing would provide a legal basis for protecting critical hitch habitat—Clear Lake and its tributaries—and make it illegal to harm the hitch by diverting or withdrawing excess water from those tributaries. For example, an ESA listing would prevent creekside vineyards from indiscriminately using water for frost protection during hitch runs—a current practice that the agricultural community is fiercely defending.
Grape growers in the region have said they have no other way to save their crops, and adamantly deny that their water use has any significant bearing on the dried-up creek beds, desiccated egg masses, or stranded and dead fish documented during hitch migrations.
