The item was a small one. Eight column
inches buried in a back section of the
Oregonian. The headline read: "U.S., NW
Tribes sign fishing pact."
Once again the
state's newspaper o f record lives down to its
name.
What happened, a landmark event the
headline makes no effort to announce, is
this: after half a century, the United States
Government is making good on its promise to
the Columbia R iver Tribes to replace fishing
sites drowned by the waters of Bonneville
Dam. The dam was built in 1938. Good work
takes time. So, evidently, does no work at all.
But that was then and this is now. The
Department of the Interior and the U.S.
Army Corps o f Engineers have budgeted $57
m illion over the next five years to build 29
fishing sites. There are, o f course, no
salmon to catch, but the River People w ill
still celebrate. We should celebrate too. The
beginning of the end o f h a lf a century of
stinking injustice is worth singing and
dancing about.
To put matters into perspective demands
some imagination.
Before they closed the
floodgates at Bonneville in 1938, the
Columbia was a w ild river, the Columbia
Gorge its wildest stretch. Bonneville Dam
was more than just a monumental feat of
engineering, a 20-story concrete testament
to what humans can accomplish if they put
their minds and muscle to it. Bonneville Dam
was the bootstrap the Northwest used to haul
itse lf out o f the Great Depression. Bonneville
Dam was about power and, without it,
Portland would be a small town in western
Appalachia. The Columbia was a source of
free energy.
It was the River People who
paid the price.
We need to bear in mind that, when Lewis
& Clark discovered the River o f the West in
1804, the River People had been flourishing
for 10,000 years. What their federal
surveying party surveyed was settled land,
the banks o f the Columbia lined with villages
and ancient fishing sites o f a civilization
that stretched from the Rocky Mountains to
the sea. To their credit, Lewis & Clark
recognized the River People as the most
advanced native culture on the continent.
W ithin ten years, 90% o f it was gone, quietly
massacred by emmigrant borne disease.
What followed was a century of relentless
theft and genocide. The people who fed
Lewis & Clark were in the way and, when
they w ouldn't move, our government
made
war on them.
Their resistance was such that
the p re -C ivil War army was nearly entirely
devoted to beating them into submission.
By
1885, it was all over. In that year, the U.S.
Government signed treaties with the five
recognized river tribes.
The treaties
guaranteed their rights to fish on the river
for "as long as the grass grows and the river
runs."
There was no escape clause covering
h y d ro e le c tric
projects.
Even after the treaties, the duplicity and
murder went on.
The tracks of the Northern
Pacific Railroad are built, literally, on the
bones o f the River People. To gain right o f
way, the railroad signed contracts deeding
land to individual Indian families w ith the
proviso that, should the families cease to
exist, the land would revert to the
stockholders.
Systematic slaughter is the
only term to describe the next part o f the
business plan.
As a young and angry
Yakama put it to me once; "You've got
pictures o f the Holocaust.
We've got pictures
of buckboards filled with dead Indians.
Men,
women and children."
Even compared to this, Bonneville Dam was
a hammer blow. The waters behind its steel
and concrete wall drowned scores o f villages
and fishing sites.
These, our government
vowed to replace. But the Great White Father
was a busy man and W orld War II
intervened. The men o f the River Tribes
went to fight for the country that once was
theirs. Many o f them didn't come back.
When the war ended, more promises were
made. The River People waited.
In 1954, their patience was rewarded with
The Dalles Dam. A government unable to
replace fishing sites somehow managed to
construct a second hydroelectric dam which
submerged the great falls at Celilo, a
thundering cataract a m ile long that was the
spiritual center o f the River People.
For
generations, the people gathered here in the
spring to feast on the first salmon, renew old
friendships, and give thanks to the Maker of
the World. A t a feast four years ago, Maggi
Jim, whose husband Howard Jim is chief of
the C elilo, cleaned bitter roots and described
scenes from her youth.
"The drumming and
the singing was so loud, you couldn't hear
the falls.
There were so many people then."
Now. there is nothing. The Dalles Dam
effectively removed the River Culture.
S till
waiting for the return o f their land above
Bonneville, the tribes accepted a lump sum
payment and moved to reservations o ff the
river.
A ll that physically remains o f the
River People is Celilo Village: a barren 34
acre plot cut o ff from the Columbia by the
Amtrack railbed and six lanes of interstate
highway.
Aside from that, only seasonal
fishing sites.
But we mustn't let this mar our
celebration.
A fter half a century, the Great
White Father is settling the first o f his debts
to the River People.
Twenty-nine fishing
sites to replace the 37 sacrificed for electric
toothbrushes and cheap aluminum.
No, the
River People can't live there.
And no, there
are no longer fish to catch. Nobody said it's a
perfect world. But at least, by God, it's
something. When you stand in the way of
civilization and profit, you take what you
can get.
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