The C'waam: The Lost River Sucker in Modoc Story and the Fight to Save It

A Fish With Its Own Name

The c'waam is a fish. Its English name is the Lost River sucker, and it lives in the shallow lakes and slow rivers of the upper Klamath Basin, in the country that spreads across the line between southern Oregon and northern California. It is large for a sucker, long-bodied and heavy, and it can live for decades. An old c'waam in Upper Klamath Lake may have been swimming there since before most of the people who now study it were born. The fish has a Modoc and Klamath name because the peoples of the basin knew it and depended on it long before it had a scientific one, and the name c'waam is the one I use here because it is the name that carries the history.

A First Food of the Basin

Every spring the c'waam left the lakes and moved up into the rivers and springs to spawn, and they came in numbers that are hard to picture now. The runs were one of the first foods of the year, arriving when the winter stores were thin and the salmon had not yet come up from the sea. For the peoples of the upper basin, the Modoc among them, the return of the c'waam was a season, a source of food that could be counted on, and an event marked with its own gathering. The Klamath Confederated Tribes still hold a Return of the C'waam ceremony each spring near the Sprague River, honoring the fish and the older relationship between the people and the water it lives in. A first food is not only food. It is a marker of the year turning, a sign that the country is still doing what it has always done.

How the Fish Fits the Origin World

I write about the twelve Modoc origin myths, the cycle I gathered in The Spirals of Kemush, and it would be easy to reach for a tidy story in which the c'waam is handed to the people by a spirit at the beginning of the world. I am not going to invent one. What I can say plainly is that first foods belong to the world the origin myths describe, the world of hunger and kinship and the forces that move through the seasons. Kemush is a witness and a mediator in that world, a culture hero who carries the memory of the cycle rather than a creator who owns it. The return of the fish each spring is its own small cycle, an ending in the fall and a beginning again in the spring flood, and that shape rhymes with the shape of the myths. When the fish come back, the pattern holds. When they stop coming back, something in the pattern has broken.

The Collapse

The pattern has been breaking for a long time. The c'waam and its smaller relative, the koptu, or shortnose sucker, were both listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1988. The adult fish are still out there, some of them very old, but for decades almost none of their young have survived to grow up. The eggs hatch and the larvae drift into the lake, and then they die, year after year, in water fouled by algae blooms and starved of oxygen through the warm months. A population made almost entirely of aging adults is a population running out of time, because the old fish cannot live forever and there is little coming up behind them. The Klamath Confederated Tribes ended their harvest of the c'waam in the 1980s, giving up a food that had fed the basin for generations, and the fish kept declining anyway. That is the hard part of the story. The people stopped taking the fish, and the water kept taking them.

The Fight to Save It

The effort to keep the c'waam from disappearing now runs on several tracks at once. The Klamath Confederated Tribes raise young suckers in a rearing program, holding them through the vulnerable early years when they would otherwise die in the lake and releasing them once they are large enough to have a chance. Federal agencies, among them the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, work on the water itself, on the flows and the lake conditions that decide whether the young fish live. The larger restoration of the Klamath Basin has moved forward too. The removal of the lower Klamath River dams, completed in 2024 and the largest dam removal in the country's history, was carried out to reopen the river and bring the salmon back to the upper basin, and it has changed the whole conversation about what this watershed can become again. The c'waam live above that stretch of river, in the lakes and springs, so their recovery turns most directly on the water they sit in rather than on the dams, but they are part of the same basin and the same argument, which is that a place that was emptied out can be helped to fill back in.

None of this is finished, and none of it is guaranteed. Raising fish in tanks and releasing them is a way of buying time while the harder work of fixing the water goes on. Whether the c'waam come back on their own, in the spring, in numbers, is a question the basin has not answered yet. What is clear is that a good many people are refusing to let the fish quietly go extinct, and that the tribes whose ceremony gave the fish its place in the year are at the center of that refusal.

What the App Carries

I made a small game called Return of the C'waam because the fish deserved something a person could hold and play, and because the phrase was already a real one, the name of a real ceremony for a real return that people are still working to make happen. The game is not a lecture. It lets you move with the fish up the river against the current, and it carries the plain facts of what the c'waam is and what has happened to it. It sits alongside The Spirals of Kemush the way the fish sits alongside the myths, as one more thread of the same basin and the same people. The origin cycle tells you how the forces of the world came to move as they do. The c'waam tells you what it looks like when one of those forces, the plain seasonal return of a first food, is interrupted, and what it costs to try to set it moving again.