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Book Review
| Empty Nets: Indians, Dams and the Columbia River. By Roberta Ulrich. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999. vii + 248 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Paper $19.95.
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| Historians of the American West know well the saga of the conversion of the Columbia River beginning with construction of the Bonneville Dam, completed in 1938. A project of the New Deal's Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission, Bonneville would be the first of a series of high dams in the Columbia basin that would include eventually Grand Coulee and four others in Oregon and Washington, three on the upper Columbia in Canada, and three on the Snake River, creating what Richard White called aptly the "Organic Machine." Completion of the Dalles Dam in the Columbia River Gorge in 1957 flooded the rapids complex known as Celilo Falls, drowning the most famous Indian fishing site on the river. Today the Columbia is an environmentally degraded, fiercely contested, artificially maintained water supply nurturing a diverse and complex economic engine. |
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Scholars are less familiar with the promise the federal government made to Columbia River Indians to provide them with replacement fishing sites on the river in lieu of the sites drowned by Bonneville Dam. The government made additional promises in regard to the Dalles Dam, where two thousand Indians still fished in 1957. The Indians based their claim to fish sites on the 1855 treaties executed by Indian Superintendents Isaac Stevens and Joel Palmer that allocated half the fish in the river to the Indians for whom they were the principal food staple and the center of cultural identity. In 1939, the government promised that four hundred acres would be set aside and a variety of sites reserved for Indian fishermen. Ultimately, the four hundred acres would be divided into thirty-one sites, far fewer than the scores of sites Indians had used traditionally, but some compensation for the Indians since they would have exclusive use, and the government would maintain the sites and protect the Indians. |
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In Empty Nets Roberta Ulrich, former UPI and Portland Oregonian reporter, reconstructs the Indians' struggle with the federal bureaucracy, with state and federal courts, and with public opinion over more than sixty years to try to force the government to honor its promise. From meticulous and thorough research in federal, state, and tribal archives, and based on many interviews, Ulrich tells a story of government disregard, delay, obfuscation, and chicanery. As other historians of the region have documented, political leaders repeatedly and routinely have placed urban demand for power, industrial development, agriculture, shipping, and the non-Indian commercial fishery ahead of Indian rights and welfare in sorting out the uses of the river. That the government provided any sites at all is traceable to the Indians' unbreakable determination, and to the 1974 Boldt decision upholding the Indians' 1855 treaty rights, a story told fully elsewhere. |
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The importance of Empty Nets lies in the detailed account of the Indians' perseverance and its cost to them, and in the documentation of the bureaucracy's persistence in resisting compliance with its own commitments. Critics have argued that reserving half of the fish for the Indians constitutes a historical aberration resulting in an unbalanced allocation of a vital resource on which millions of non-Indians must rely. Ulrich demonstrates that thirty-one sites on four hundred acres obtained at the cost of Indian lives, dignity, and well-being hardly represents an imbalance. |
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Reviewed by Stephen Haycox, University of Alaska, Anchorage. |
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