Charles Wilkinson

Celilo Falls

At the Center of Western History

IN THE LATE 1980s, I began writing a book on the lands and waters of the American West. It was basically a history, a recounting of the actions and ideas that have driven the relationships between the United States government and the landscape of the West and the people who were already there. One thing is sure. From Lewis and Clark through roughly the 1960s, a single core conviction trumped all else: American technology could rework the natural and cultural world in any conceivable way — and fast — to achieve the demands of settlement and development.

To tell that story, I wanted to identify the events that best represented America's epic advance on the lands, waters, and people of the West. I settled on several. The all-out rush on the gold and silver fields. The damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Sierra Nevada, sacred to the Miwok, glorious to John Muir. The clearcutting of the Northwest's forests. The ranch cattle industry's takeover of the public range lands. The inundation of Glen Canyon on the Colorado River and its ancient villages and petroglyphs in the Southwest. The destruction of Celilo Falls.

Celilo had a particular hold on me. I was teaching law at the University of Oregon at the time and, although the Falls was not part of my youth, people from Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Warm Springs mentioned it often. I was taken, too, by the sadness and anger of non-Indians who had witnessed, and been inspired by, those age-old fisheries at work. Ken Kesey had some of his facts wrong, but he acknowledged in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the iconic place of Celilo Falls in the history of the Pacific Northwest. In my mind, Celilo came to stand as an emblem of how westerners have always wanted progress — that is, quick money — regardless of the worth of what was already there and would be lost.

Indian fishermen work at Celilo Falls shortly before the inundation. Salmon did not literally jump these high falls. Rather, they would leap part-way up the falls and swim frantically up the current until they reached the slower river-water above.

OHS neg., OrHi 59376

I tried to think through the best way to explain Celilo. As I did, I kept reflecting on how Indian people talked about, and felt, their tribal histories. The detail. The precision. The care. The respect. The determination to get it right.

One day I was over at Warm Springs, having a talk with Delbert Frank, who turned the discussion to fishing in the Columbia River Gorge. His family had always fished there, and he'd long been a leader on the tribe's fish committee. After awhile, I found myself saying that I was starting a book and that I wanted Celilo to be a central part of it.

"Would you be willing to sit down and take me through what it was like on the Columbia before white people?" I asked.

Delbert thought about it.

"Yes. That sounds good."

"Could we spend a whole day on it?"

"Sure." Then Delbert added: "How about if we talk down by the water?"

I said that would definitely be fine.

A few weeks later, I picked him up early, and we headed out. Delbert said he'd been thinking maybe the best place to talk would be Sherars Bridge on the Deschutes. That way, he explained, while we wouldn't be down on the Columbia, we would have a flowing river. And the tribal fishery was active, so we'd be able to see dipnet fishermen working their scaffolds right across the river from us.

I'll never forget that bright, early summer, high desert day, June 30, 1988. Delbert was so patient, so vivid. He took me back to the time before Lewis and Clark. And I realize now that day was the beginning of the enterprise that gives me the purest joy of anything in my professional life: listening to, and putting down in writing, the stories of Indian people.

Delbert's family fished mostly at Big Eddy, in Long Narrows about six miles below Celilo Falls. His grandfather, Yahtin, was born in 1840 and his great-grandfather, Wunn-o-ah-chi, in about 1805. So Delbert received information from a person who was alive at treaty time and information, just once removed, back to Lewis and Clark. Of course, many of the stories Delbert heard from Yahtin and other elders stretched much further back, deep into the 550 or more generations when the salmon people had built their lives on the Columbia's bounty.

Delbert told the details, and tone and timbre and pace, of a long-ago fishing day at Big Eddy. The men and their sons, up early, crossed to the north side of the river in their cedar canoes to reach the fishing stations, while the women, who would clean the big fish and drape them on the drying racks, set up shop for their labors along the south bank. The fishermen plied their trade from the log and driftwood platforms, pulling the salmon up and out of the foam using long-handled hoop nets with frames made of red fir and nets of hemp that had been assiduously dried, spun, and woven into a strong and flexible twine. They kept fish in the twenty to thirty pound range but none larger. Chinook running up to one hundred pounds or more would make slices that were too heavy and would drop off the drying racks.

The Columbia — by far the largest river in the West, carrying fifteen times as much water as the Colorado — was fast and dangerous in front of Big Eddy but much more so at Celilo Falls, where Delbert's family sometimes fished. Celilo, half a day's horse ride upriver, drew the area's largest congregation of fishers, who used rocks and platforms at the many rapids and side channels. Everyone told of the noise there, where the basalt bluffs on both shores narrowed the Columbia and the great river gathered force and blasted relentlessly through. Dan Landeen and Allen Pinkham quoted Ron Halfmoon (Umatilla, Nez Perce, and Cayuse): "The roar of the river was everywhere: the roar and the mist, the roar of the falls. I don't know how many hundreds of yards of falls there were, but they raised a big mist everywhere."¹ "I can still hear the roar of those falls today," Leroy Seth of the Nez Perce Tribe remembered. "That water was unbelievable. The falls were like a volcano in power. Mount St. Helens blew up once, but Celilo was there every day."²

An Indian fisherman on scaffolding at the left of the photograph prepares to place his net in the swirling back eddy below. The size of his set net is much larger than a moveable dipnet would be.

OHS neg., OrHi 65985

In the Pacific Northwest, sovereignty — the making and enforcing of laws — was mostly carried out at the village level. In the mid-Columbia, this grew complicated because Indians from so many tribes came there. Still, the tradition of local governance held and at Celilo the Wyam governed. Families inherited the right to fish at particular rocks but had an obligation to allow others to use the area when the family had taken as many fish as it could process in a day. A chief made these allocation decisions and also had the responsibility of shutting down fishing if needed to sustain a run. A person who violated the rules, as carried out by the chief, would be banished from the area. Tommy Thompson (Wyam) born in the treaty year of 1855 and elected as chief in 1875, served for more than three-quarters of a century until the flooding took the falls and his heart.

Wumsucks Indian camp is in the foreground, with Wasco Island in the background of this photograph, taken around 1870–1890.

OHS neg., OrHi 44159

It took a strong, reliable, and broadly respected sovereignty to govern the thousands of people who depended on the multitudes of salmon that coursed up the river. With so much at stake, many other societies would have gravitated toward disorder, driven by acquisitiveness. On the Columbia, the sovereignty was buttressed by a uniformly held ethic. The salmon came back voluntarily to support the people, and the returning fish were honored members of the community. "One of our relatives has returned," wrote poet Elizabeth Woody, "and we consider the lives we take to care for our communities."³

With the salmon bringing such riches — of sustenance and spirit — it is no wonder that the mid-Columbia became the trade and social convening place for a whole region, out to the basin and range country, to the Rockies, and to the plains beyond. The nutritious salmon traveled well when properly dried, for it was light and durable. Archaeologists, confirming what Indian people already knew, documented contact with faraway places by excavating Vancouver Island dentalium, Pueblo country turquoise, and Minnesota pipestone from the mid-Columbia soils. Celilo brought together salmon, canoe, and totem peoples as well as buffalo, tipi, and bear dance societies. And mark it down that it was fun. As Chuck Williams, a Cascade Indian, has put it, "Trails radiated out from the Narrows and from Celilo Falls, and thousands of Indians from the surrounding countryside gathered every year to fish, visit, meet friends and lovers, trade, sing, compete in games, gamble, and party. This entire stretch of river became an annual summer-long county fair...."⁴

SO MUCH CHANGED when the new people came. European diseases — deadly, long-distance travelers — took out more than 90 percent of the Native population. Robert Boyd's gruesome but important book, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, chronicles the march of this horror, tribe by tribe, decade after decade, across the Northwest. Then the treaties took most of the land, forcing dozens of mid–Columbia River tribes and bands onto four reservations. Some tribes retained no land at all.

As for the salmon, the Americans proved incapable of regulating narrow self-interest and assuring sustainable salmon runs, as Native salmon management practices had done. In aboriginal times, the salmon people harvested prodigious amounts of fish — an estimated 42 million pounds a year from the Columbia — but the runs remained healthy and plentiful until the whites arrived.⁵ As early as 1892, Dr. Livington Stone, among others, could see the wreckage of non-Indian activities in the Columbia Basin: "The helpless salmon's life is gripped between these two forces — the murderous greed of the fishermen and the white man's advancing civilization — and what hope is there for the salmon in the end?"⁶ By the mid-twentieth century, the free-for-all of fish wheels, gillnets, dynamite, canneries, poor logging and grazing practices, and dams had driven down the harvest to just a fraction of the aboriginal Indian take.

It was about to get even worse.

THE END OF WORLD WAR II ignited a transforming population rush to the West. To keep up with that influx, and better yet to accelerate it, boosters generated a burst of industrial development that eclipsed virtually every other industrial effort on earth.⁷ To the white world, the logic was indisputable. The key ingredient was water. Farmers needed it for irrigation. The cities and the corporations needed it for electricity. What better source, many thought, than the Columbia?

For all the assaults on Indian culture and natural resources, the fishery at Celilo Falls lived on after the war. Everyone could see how magical it was — the nimble hoop netters on the scaffolds, the flashing silver fish, the thunder and spray of the Falls. It was evident, too, how the Falls and other mid-Columbia treaty fishing sites supported, materially and spiritually, the worthy, ancient tribes of salmon people who lived on the river and out on the reservations. Up to two thousand people fished at Celilo during the runs. These were men and women hard at work. The salmon they caught and processed was the main food of the tribal peoples. The commerce, minimal though it was, made up most of their families' income. Celilo Falls had been there forever, forever at the center.

In their comprehensive examination of Celilo Falls, The Si'lailo Way, Joseph Dupris, Kathleen Hill, and Williams Rodgers chronicled the valiant efforts of Native people to prevent the inundation of the historic fishing grounds. The tribes, almost alone, saw what was coming when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began hatching plans for The Dalles Dam in 1945. They saw the runs decline after Bonneville closed its gates downstream in 1938. Then, in 1941, Grand Coulee Dam, which had no fish ladders, shut down immense amounts of habitat in Washington and Canada, depriving the Columbia Basin of prime runs, strong fish genetically attuned to migrating to the farthest reaches of the Columbia River.

Tribal people did everything they could. They pleaded their case in the halls of Congress and in field hearings. They sent letters and attended every meeting in Washington, D.C., and in Oregon and Washington states. Francis Seufert, of the family whose cannery lay on the bluff across the river from Big Eddy, attended a meeting in 1945 between the tribes and the Army Corps of Engineers and recounted "the elegance and dignity of the Indian chiefs in stating their case, their choice of words, the beautifully put phrases, excellent prose, their poetic way of using picturesque and yet descriptive speech."⁸

No matter. No one in charge seemed to hear or care. None of the modern environmental laws had yet been enacted. For some dam supporters and anti-Indian forces, racism, cynicism, and commitment to progress — that is, to large-scale economic development — blended to create the most craven argument of all: that The Dalles Dam would actually improve the runs by eliminating Indian fishing at Celilo Falls. This was said of peoples who had cared for, honored, and sustained the runs for thousands of years; who by every account provided to arriving Americans a magnificently productive river; and who, by the 1950s, because of over-harvesting and over-development by non-Indians, and illegal crackdowns on treaty fishing, were able to take less than 8 percent of the returning salmon.

In October 1956, the final major blast at The Dalles Dam used more than twenty tons of powder and removed 60,000 cubic yards of basalt.

OHS neg., CN 015320

Still, though some evil was undeniably at work, the larger sadness is the passivity of a good society that abdicated responsibility and left it to the experts. Technology had all the answers. The idea of developing the Columbia was so sensible. Portland and Seattle were good and valuable cities, and they needed energy to grow. Hydroelectric power was clean, sustainable, and cheap. The tribes were on their way out and would be better off by joining mainstream America. Ecology was not yet a word in common discourse. No one yet understood that we could supply a great deal of water and electricity — meet a big part of the demand — by conservation and truly renewable sources. No one beyond the reservations realized that the tribes had a revival in them if they could just throw off the Bureau of Indian Affairs and free up their own sovereignty and culture. Even if those ideas could have been put forth effectively, there was no time to think them through and implement them. America was in a hurry and needed results now.

My people came on so hard and so fast. Fifty years ago, on March 10, 1957, an army general shouted out the "down gates" command, and the larger society's technology flew into action. The gates slammed shut, and the River of the West stopped dead and backed up. Big Eddy was gone in less than an hour, Celilo Falls in six.

It seems that only Indian people asked questions that day and for years beyond. But now, looking back with the facts and lessons of a full half-century, the people of the Pacific Northwest do ask those questions, and those questions now drift in the winds of the Columbia Gorge above The Dalles Dam, Long Narrows, and Celilo Falls. Was it right to inflict such wounds on the waves of silver that for eons charged up through the currents and falls in such numbers with such vigor? Was it right to obliterate ten thousand years of human history? How did we get the right to do such things — from planning to construction to "down gates" — in the space of one decade, such a thin sliver of time?

The destruction of Celilo Falls epitomizes and symbolizes the excesses of the big-dam and large-reservoir projects that have left just fifty miles of open water in the six hundred miles of river between Bonneville and the Canadian border. The flat, quiet waters that submerge Celilo Falls also serve as a principal monument to the shortsighted, single-minded obsession with intensive, extractive development that played out all across the American West to the exclusion of environmental and human concerns.

WE'RE BEGINNING TO HEAR some proposals to restore Celilo Falls. I suppose there are two ways for this to happen. One is this story:

"Grandmother," said the young Indian girl, "what are those big things in the river?" The grandmother raised her eyes towards the broken blocks of massive concrete through which the river poured. "Daughter," the old woman said, "those are the dams the white people left."⁹

My own view about this is similar to my growing appreciation of the value of Indian oral history, which began with my memorable day with Delbert Frank. At first it didn't resonate with me when Indian people talked about outlasting white society and having the land back to themselves. Over the years, that scenario has become stuck in my mind as a possibility. While I would just as soon it didn't go into effect for at least a few more years, the story about grandmother is at least a good metaphor for the unsustainable world my people have created; and perhaps the idea will turn out to be more than metaphor.

A second possibility is that the tribes, in a way they could not do in the 1950s before they learned how to influence public policy, will build a movement to decommission The Dalles Dam. This will of course be hard to do; although The Dalles Dam is one of the worst fish killers on the Columbia, it generates 1,780 megawatts of electricity, much less than Grand Coulee but still fourth largest among the Columbia and Snake River dams.

Still, the idea cannot be written off. We're seeing a sea of change in dam and reservoir policy. Now we realize we've overbuilt. We're reluctant to put in any new dams. Further, after generations of rapid dam construction, dam removal has become an important part of water policy. A few small impoundments have already been taken out. Soon we will begin tearing down the two dams on the Olympic Peninsula's Elwha River in order to bring the legendary salmon runs back to the Elwha's pristine upper watershed in the Olympic Range and also to bring justice to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. PacifiCorp, under pressure from the Yakama Nation and environmental groups, has agreed to remove the Condit Dam, beginning in 2008, in order to open up habitat in Washington's White Salmon River watershed. Pressure continues to build on the four Lower Snake River dams and, inevitably, they will be breached; in fact, with a shift of a few votes in the 2000 presidential election, we would already be decommissioning them. On the Klamath River, tribes in Oregon and California are close to achieving removal of salmon-deadly impoundments. As for Hetch Hetchy Dam — like The Dalles, one of the West's most notorious mistakes — serious proposals for its elimination are on the table. Other western dams are also candidates for removal.

Bringing back Celilo Falls will take time — decades, not years — but Indian people understand time and know how to put together campaigns and bring them to successful conclusions. They will find many allies. The public now understands that a wrong was committed. This country abides all manner of injustice, but it never sits comfortably. Given time and broad societal understanding and sympathy, most injustices are eventually addressed.

The memory of Celilo Falls creates discomfort. It rasps. It sits heavily on the minds of many citizens in the Pacific Northwest and across the country.

The mist is now clamped down, the roar is stilled, the salmon have no current to fight, no falls to surmount, both of which they need, and the old fishing rocks lie in still, deep water. We must keep telling people about it. We must not relent. The moment really can come when time is treated with respect, when the people reflect on loss and insist on redress, and when our government acts and justice is served. If such a day does come, then we should all go to the Gorge and watch and celebrate the day when the level comes down, when the falls and rocks and rapids reappear, when the noise again sounds, when Celilo Falls once again becomes a place of majesty and poetry, and when the reverence for nature and community held so dearly by Delbert Frank and Tommy Thompson and all the chiefs and people before them is honored and, at long last, redeemed.

This essay was presented as the opening address at the "Celilo Stories" conference in The Dalles, Oregon, in March 2007.

Notes

The author sends his gratitude to Cynthia Carter, Elizabeth Woody, Eliza Canty-Jones, and Philip Wilkinson for their inspiration and support.

^1. Dan Landeen and Allen Pinkham, Salmon and His People: Fish and Fishing in Nez Perce Culture, (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1999), 66.

^2. Landeen and Pinkham, Salmon and His People, 65.

^3. Elizabeth Woody, "Recalling Celilo," in Salmon Nation: People and Fish at the Edge, (Portland, Ore.: Ecotrust, 1999), 13, emphasis in original.

^4. Chuck Williams, Bridge of the Gods, Mountains of Fire: A Return to the Columbia Gorge, (New York: Friends of the Earth; White Salmon, Wash.: Elephant Mountain Arts, 1980), 73.

^5. Northwest Power Planning Council, "Compilation of Information on Salmon and Steelhead Losses in the Columbia River Basin," (March 1986), 66–76, available at http://www.nwcouncil.org/library/1986/Compilation.htm (accessed October 5, 2007).

^6. Anthony Netboy, Salmon: The World's Most Harassed Fish (London: André Deutsch, 1980), 213.

^7. For comparisons of the buildups in the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest with other such efforts, see Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau, 185, and supporting note, 380.

^8. Landeen and Pinkham, Salmon and His People, 73.

^9. Jean Johnson, "Water in the West: Klamath Tribes Know its Worth," Indian Country Today (August 11, 2004), A1.

Bibliography

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Barber, Katrine. Death of Celilo Falls. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

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———. "Still Waters, Stolen Lives." Oregonian, March 4, 2007.

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———. Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999.

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