Tommy Kuni Thompson

OREGON VOICES

Celilo Village Chief

This biography was written by Cain Allen and posted on the Oregon Historical Society's Oregon History Project website; it was revised by the guest editors for publication in this special issue.

CHIEF TOMMY KUNI THOMPSON (Wayam) was the chief of Celilo Village from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s. Over the course of his long lifetime, Chief Thompson witnessed a great variety of changes, both social and ecological, that came as a result of white colonization of the region. While embracing some of these changes, he resisted non-Indian attempts to minimize his people's legal rights, particularly when it came to salmon, the key element in the traditional economy of mid-Columbia River Indians.

Kuni, which means "full of knowledge" in the Sahaptin language, was born on the banks of the N'Chi-Wána (Big River) sometime between the mid-1850s and the early 1860s. His great-uncle was the renowned Chief Stocket-ly, who signed the 1855 Middle Oregon treaty for the Wyams and was later killed while scouting for the U.S. Army. Kuni followed in his great-uncle's footsteps, becoming chief at the age of twenty, the youngest man in recent memory to be so honored.

As leader of Celilo Village, Chief Thompson regulated access to the salmon fishery at Celilo Falls, one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the region. He was also a strong advocate for his people's right to harvest salmon, a resource on which they had depended for millennia. He was a vocal opponent of Bonneville Dam, for example, and organized a successful campaign against proposed state fishing regulations that would have shut down the Indian commercial fishery after the completion of the dam in 1938.

Chief Thompson also fought to enforce traditional regulations as a growing army of outsiders crowded into the Celilo fishery between the early 1920s and the mid-1950s. Most were local reservation residents either attracted by the prospect of commercial fishing or forced from their customary sites by the damming of tributary streams, but dozens of non-Indians and non-treaty Indians began fishing there as well. Many of these newcomers displaced traditional owners and ignored the salmon chief's rules, which had traditionally ordered access to the various sites and conserved the salmon runs passing over Celilo Falls. In 1936, Chief Thompson grudgingly agreed to support the Celilo Fish Committee, an intertribal organization created to settle disputes and protect Indian rights at the fishery. He always insisted that the committee should uphold his authority, however, and he resented the increasing influence of the reservation-based tribal councils.

Although Chief Thompson and the reservation tribes were united in opposition to The Dalles Dam, they parted company when the tribes reluctantly agreed to financial settlements with the Army Corps of Engineers. Chief Thompson refused to negotiate to the bitter end and only left Celilo Village when health problems forced him into a nursing home. On hearing the news that the backwaters of The Dalles Dam had drowned the falls, he lamented, "There goes my life. My people will never be the same." He died two years later. More than a thousand people, both Indians and non-Indians, came from around the region to pay their respects to the chief at his funeral.

Tommy Kuni Thompson was chief of Celilo Village at the time of Celilo Falls's inundation by backwaters behind The Dalles Dam.

OHS neg., OrHi 73724

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