|
|
|
OREGON VOICES
Chuck Williams
Chuck Williams (Cascade) was instrumental in pushing legislation that led to the passage of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Act in 1986. Williams is a photographer and the author of Bridge of the Gods, Mountains of Fire: A Return to the Columbia Gorge (New York: Friends of the Earth; and Elephant Mountain Arts, 1980). Tumalth, Williams's grandfather, was a chief at a village near the present location of Bonneville Dam, which he references in this short selection.
Clark Hansen interviewed Chuck Williams on January 22, 1999, as part of a project, "The Columbia River Dissenters," which collected the oral histories of people who objected to the management of the Columbia River. The "dissenters series" was a joint project of the Oregon Historical Society and the Center for Columbia River History and was funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The complete transcript is available at the Oregon Historical Society and www.ccrh.org.
|
|
|
| SO FOR INDIANS, [salmon is] the whole center of the religion and such. You don't eat salmon in the spring until there's the ceremony at Celilo, which is probably the most important religious ceremony for a Northwest Indian. Celilo's kind of Mecca for Northwest Indians. It's integrated into our whole culture. Even though I'm not a traditionalist that way, it's something I definitely honor. But to me, it's subsistence or spiritual. It's nothing to do with sport fishing or flyfishing. I have no particular interest in that. |
1
|
|
It's just a sad thing to have them disappear. A lot of the problem being — Bonneville Dam's built on top of my village. [What's] really ironic is the second powerhouse at Bonneville Dam is the newest dam on the Columbia River, and it's the biggest fish killer. So, somehow, technology has not advanced. I'm not ready to get into it, but a lot of the problem with Bonneville Dam was that, in the Mitchell Act in 1938, the company, Bonneville Dam, was to set up hatchery programs to restore salmon that are being destroyed by the dams. Obviously, the salmon runs being destroyed by the dams are upriver from Bonneville, because it's a lower — eighteen out of the twenty-one hatcheries put in under the Mitchell Act are below Bonneville Dam, purposely set up so the Indians would never get the fish. They're set up as terminal hatchery fish producers for commercial, not Indian, fishermen. |
2
|
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|