|
|
|
Reviews
CELILO FALLS AND THE REMAKING OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER
|
written, edited, and produced by Joseph Cone
|
| Sea Grant Communications, Corvallis, Ore., 2005. 31 minutes, color. $19.95 DVD. |
| March 10, 2007, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the flooding of Celilo Falls by The Dalles Dam. Columbia River Indians remember it as a date that will live in infamy — the day ten thousand years of human history disappeared beneath a reservoir and solemn treaty promises were once again broken in the name of national progress. For many residents of the Pacific Northwest, however, Celilo's demise is either unknown or unimportant compared to other historical events, such as the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. They regard the dams on the Columbia as somehow natural features of the river or as necessary evils in an age of electricity and high-tech industry. Speeding past The Dalles Dam and Celilo Village on I-84, few pause to reflect on the absence of the falls whose roar still echoes in the memories of some tribal elders and local residents. Joseph Cone's new film is intended to fill this void in popular consciousness and to encourage serious discussion of what the Columbia has become. |
1
|
|
Cone is hardly the first to find a compelling story in the drowning of Celilo Falls and the transformation of the river into what Richard White has called an "organic machine." Over the past decade, numerous scholars and journalists have covered the subject with varying degrees of complexity and insight. Two books published this year — Katrine Barber's Death of Celilo Falls and The Si'lailo Way, by Joseph Dupris, Kathleen Hill, and William Rodgers Jr. — have made detailed studies of the fishery, the community, and the impact of the dam. The fate of Celilo has also inspired the work of indigenous artists and authors such as Lillian Pitt, Ed Edmo, and Elizabeth Woody, an accomplished Warm Springs poet who appears in the film. With so much material at hand, one could hope for a documentary of great intellectual depth and emotional power, a movie to match the vanished grandeur of the place it commemorates. Cone instead settles for a utilitarian educational video that conveys the basic facts yet fails to stir the blood or touch the heart. |
2
|
|
Using historic photographs and rare movie footage, the film gives a straightforward summary of the cultural, legal, and political factors that made Celilo Falls significant to mid-Columbia Indians but expendable to the dominant society. For at least ten millennia, Indians from around the Northwest gathered at this "unique and powerful place of transition on the river" to fish and trade for salmon. The traditional dipnet fishery formed the hub of the annual subsistence cycle for many Indians, not only supplying a crucial dietary staple but also powering a vast economic network and infusing indigenous spirituality with a profound reverence for salmon. Northwest Indians valued their fishing rights so highly that they expressly reserved them in treaties signed with the federal government during the mid 1850s. By the late nineteenth century, however, Euro-American industrialization of the fisheries had begun to deplete the runs and push Indians off the river. |
3
|
|
The dam-building boom of the twentieth century further threatened the survival of salmon and tribal treaty rights. During the Great Depression, regional boosters and federal officials promoted hydroelectric projects as a way of "freeing the Columbia" for navigation and "harnessing the river as an engine of prosperity." This enthusiasm for "improving" nature spilled into the postwar period, fueled by industrial development and Cold War demands for "energy security." In 1957, despite Indian protests, The Dalles Dam inundated Celilo Falls and displaced Celilo Village. Although the treaty tribes received monetary settlements from the government, bitterness and sadness still pervade Indian thoughts of that time and place. |
4
|
|
Cone frames the death of Celilo Falls as "a fundamental story of modern times, something finally not just about Celilo Indians or the Columbia River, or even just about America. Finally, it seems about an undercurrent that ebbs and flows against the power of the modern world." There is truth to this observation, yet much is also omitted from Cone's simple, declensionist narrative of modernity overwhelming the ancient, harmonious world of Indians and nature. The significance of the treaties is not adequately explained, and there is little mention of the inter- and intratribal disputes over who could fish at Celilo, which was a "usual and accustomed place" — as fishing sites were identified in the treaties — for only some of the people who ultimately claimed rights there. The treaty fishery and the community both survived the dam, although in diminished form, and their persistence deserves more attention than it receives here. To be fair, Cone's documentary is more a work of advocacy than of history. It asks viewers to reconsider the Columbia's future as well as its past, offering a useful introduction for secondary school and college teachers looking to raise the issue of river development. One merely wishes that Cone had told the story in a more compelling way. |
5
|
| ANDREW FISHER
|
The College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|