Indians Wage Long Battle to Save Salmon of the Columbia River

On the bluffs overlooking the Columbia River four decades ago, a group of American Indians gathered in sorrow to watch Celilo Falls disappear.

“They stood up on the hillside for three days,” recalls Bill Yallup of the Yakama Indian Nation. “Some of them sang songs like a funeral. They were very sacred songs. Three days and nights with no sleep. It was a sad day for them.”

For thousands of years, Indians had fished for salmon at Celilo, where the wild Columbia thundered over rock cliffs on its unencumbered way to the Pacific Ocean.

“I still hear it,” says Yallup, a tribal council member and former chief judge of the Yakama Nation. “It was loud and deep.”

In 1957, completion of the Dalles Dam drowned the falls, one of many historic Indian fishing sites that disappeared as the powerful river was transformed into a series of placid reservoirs.

The fishing sites were sacrificed in the name of cheap hydroelectric power.

Foremost among creatures revered by the Indians, the salmon began a steady decline toward extinction in a river where their incredible abundance two centuries ago had left explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in awe.

Trying to rescue a fish they feel is sacred, the Indians today have become major players in the complicated, contentious fight to improve Columbia River salmon runs.

Armed with their own battalion of biologists, hydrologists and other fishery experts, and bolstered by treaty rights more than a century old, the Indians persistently have pursued their goal of trying to save the fish, often to the aggravation of the other forces fighting for control of the mighty river.

The Indians’ own detailed salmon recovery plan is more radical than proposals by the National Marine Fisheries Service. It calls for reducing the amount of water backed up by the dams to make the Columbia and Snake rivers more like free-flowing rivers again.

When a panel of leading scientists this summer released a federally funded study considered to be the most thorough report yet on how to bring the Columbia salmon back, many of its conclusions matched those already reached by the Indians’ experts.

The Indians scored a major victory this year when the Clinton administration decided the Indians must be consulted by federal agencies in determining how money should be spent to restore salmon and steelhead runs.

The depth of feeling behind the Indians’ advocacy is hard for others to understand.

“When I caught my first salmon, I had to have a ceremony, to be initiated, to be a fisherman,” says Johnson Meninick, a Yakama religious leader. “This is a ceremony to respect a sacred resource. We treat it with honor. The words I was told and always use are, ‘The resource does not belong to us. We belong to the resource.’ ”

At the root of the Indians’ faith is the understanding that the fish were provided by Earth’s creator as a renewable source of food.

“People along the Columbia have been taking these fish probably for 9,000 to 10,000 years,” says Kenneth Ames, professor of anthropology at Portland State University. “The salmon have been central to their economy in one way or another for that long. It’s like bread is our staff of life. It’s at that fundamental level.”

Before the white man arrived, the unspoiled habitat, with moss-covered stream banks, cool water and plentiful gravel spawning beds, provided a perfect home for remarkable fish that migrate hundreds of miles to the ocean.

Three or four years later, the salmon return to the exact spot where they were born to spawn and die.

“They came to provide us an example of sacrifice and because of that sacrifice we thank our creator for the divine intervention that gave the salmon the feeling of servitude,” says Ted Strong, executive director of the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and a member of the Yakama Nation.

Yallup and Meninick can’t count how many times they have been in court over salmon issues. The Yakamas’ legal fights date to the early 20th century, when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a dispute with a white man who attempted to fence off a section of the Columbia.

“The salmon cannot fight for themselves, so we must fight for them,” Meninick says.

The Indians suffered significant setbacks in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s as one dam after another was built on the Columbia and its main tributary, the Snake.

The government shrugged off Indians’ concerns in the name of the national interest.

With the construction of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia and Hell’s Canyon Dam on the Snake, the salmon disappeared from about one-third of the river system because neither dam has fish ladders.

From this low point, the Indians began to fight back on the white man’s turf--in court.

“What’s happened in that 30- to 35-year period of time have been a number of important court cases, which generally have been won by the tribes, defining, and in some ways expanding, their rights,” says Oregon state fisheries director Doug DeHart.

In the 1970s, bureaucratic battles were waged over how many salmon Indian and non-Indian fishermen should catch. Attorney Tim Weaver, who has represented the Yakama tribe for 26 years, recalls loud, angry meetings where white fishermen would carry signs saying, “Save the Salmon, Smoke an Indian.”

Each faction of fishermen wanted its share of the dwindling salmon runs.

U.S. District Judge Robert Belloni ruled in 1969--in a lawsuit known as U.S. vs. Oregon--that states could not regulate fishing by Indians in the same manner that it regulated other fishermen. And, Belloni said, the Indians had a right to a “fair share” of the fish.

In 1974, U.S. District Judge George Boldt ruled that “fair share” was 50% of the harvestable runs. Angry non-Indian fishermen hung Boldt in effigy, but Belloni adapted the allocation to his ruling.

The court decisions were based on treaties signed in 1855 by the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes. Those treaties, nearly identical and signed with an “x” by Indian leaders of the time, cede over most of the lands where the Indians lived in exchange for certain reservation land and fishing rights.

The treaties guaranteed the Indians the right to fish in their “usual and accustomed” places.

Meninick, whose great-grandfather witnessed the treaty signing, says the Indians had no choice.

“We were coerced,” Meninick says. “They said, ‘If you don’t sign, we’re going to kill your women and children, and you are going to wade knee-deep in their blood.’ ”

When the dams went up, and later as the state sent a parade of biologists to the stand in the U.S. vs. Oregon case, the Indians realized they needed their own experts who relied not on traditional Indian wisdom but on facts and figures that would hold up in court.

Thus was born the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, established in 1977 by an initial allocation of money from the Bonneville Power Administration to represent the fishing interests of the four treaty tribes.

Though often arguing against the Indians’ point of view in resource fights, the BPA remains a major source of funds for the commission, providing $1 million for law enforcement in 1995.

The biggest source of money is the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, providing $3.7 million of the commission’s $5.87-million budget last year.

But the salmon allocations mean nothing to the Indians if the fish disappear.

At one meeting of various fishing interests, a tribal leader raised the prospect of fighting over how to carve up the last salmon.

So, lately, the Indians find themselves on the side of their former adversaries--fishermen, the states and conservation groups--against their old court ally, the U.S. government.

In an attempt to explain how the salmon figures in their traditions, the tribes have developed a trilogy of videotapes titled “Empty Promises, Empty Nets,” “My Strength is From the Fish” and “Matter of Trust.” The videos have gone to Northwest libraries and, through a grant, to all education service districts in Oregon.

Along the calm reservoir where Celilo Falls lies submerged, there is a small park developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates most of the big dams.

A few hundred feet away, across Interstate 84, stand a few ramshackle Indian houses and a long house, where each spring a “First Salmon” ceremony honors the return of the fish.

The scene is far different than the one depicted in a photograph at the Yakama tribal headquarters.

Like his old friend Yallup, Joe Jay Pinkham, a Yakama elder, began fishing at Celilo in the 1930s.

As he looked at the photo, Pinkham identified a tiny dot on a rock in the river as himself, then rattled off the names of many others in the picture.

He knew exactly where they were because their fishing spots were handed down by families from generation to generation.

“A way of life is gone,” he says.

The Indians’ deepest hope is that somehow all their legal and administrative wrangling will bring about the only result that will truly satisfy them.

Someday, they believe, the waters of Celilo will roar again.

“The hardest way, but the best way, is to blow up all the dams,” Meninick says. “There is going to be a shake-up down the line. The lawmakers are building their own noose . . .

“I can’t tell you how soon, but it’s coming.”