Indian Tribe Bonds With Utility to Survive

Fifty years ago, a tiny band of Indians called the Wanapum were living much as they had for centuries among the basalt cliffs that frame the banks of the river they named Chiawana.

They caught salmon, hunted deer and elk, gathered roots and built homes out of mats made from tule reeds. They worshiped in the old way, held fast to their traditions and spoke little English.

But the band, squeezed over the years by government land grabs, has forged an unusual relationship with the Grant County Public Utility District that may have been the key to the Wanapums’ survival.

The Wanapums’ 80-mile range from Vantage to Pasco and their access to the camel-colored hills and surrounding sage and grasslands had been diminished by vast acquisitions for the Hanford nuclear reservation, irrigation projects and, later, the Army’s Yakima Training Center.

In the 1950s, the Grant County utility district put the wheels in motion to build two hydroelectric dams, 10 miles apart, in the middle of the Wanapum wintering grounds.

At the time, no one seemed to realize the Wanapum were there, said Kathy Kiefer, a district employee who worked as a liaison between the band and the utility from 1990-96.

A Yakima newspaper reporter who befriended the Wanapum wrote to the district, telling officials that the projects would be catastrophic for the band, which under tribal leader Johnny Buck was basically squatting and had no legal right to the land.

“The bottom line is the PUD needed to keep on the fast track and the grandfather [Johnny Buck] had been squeezed into the one last place he could hang on to,” Kiefer said.

Johnny Buck would not live to see the agreement signed in 1957. But today one of his grandsons, Rex Buck Jr., 45, is essentially a tribal elder for the 10 Wanapum families that remain here. He awakens every morning to the hum of the red-and-green Priest Rapids power plant, on what is still one of the most isolated stretches of the Columbia River outside the Hanford nuclear reservation.

“Once the projects came in, there was nowhere for the Wanapum to go. They couldn’t do anything,” Rex Buck said.

“In order for them to survive, they had to make a change.”

So the Wanapum rolled with the punches. The children would have a chance to go to school, and jobs meant an end to the lean months that came from living off the land.

Thirty-two of the band’s about 60 members are employed full- or part-time by the Public Utility District now.

The district, in its literature, calls the relationship between the utility and the Wanapum remarkable and unprecedented. Kiefer calls it collaborative.

“It’s a partner relationship that’s based on trust and respect from both sides,” said Rex Buck, who used to be an electrician for the district but now spends most of his days at a desk.

The Wanapum Village on the west bank of the river is made up of 10 modest houses, a horse corral, a shiny new playground and a tidy long house for ceremonial and community gatherings. Accessible only by driving across the top of Priest Rapids Dam, the village is opened periodically to friends of the Wanapum for special activities.

Rex Buck can remember the days before satellite television, telecommunications and easy trips to Costco in Yakima, an hour away.

“It was a very simple life,” he says. “It had discipline.”

“We had very little, but we didn’t need anything a lot. We just had what we needed--our food and our beliefs and each other.”

He and his brother, Richard, 40, of Lapwai, Idaho, are two of the four adults remaining from their generation, which numbered about a dozen when they were boys in the village. Today, they must compete with outside influences such as the Internet and MTV to impart the value of the old ways--the skills, the stories, the beliefs--to the next generation.

“When we were young, we didn’t have TV,” Richard Buck said. “Our father used to sit down . . . he would tell us the legends. It was a form of entertainment about creation, birds, the river flow, what they were at one time. That’s how we learned it.”

And, like countless generations before them, the two reluctant elders sometimes wonder if the message is getting through.

“I feel just like a really old person,” Richard Buck said. “Nobody really wants to listen.”

The Wanapum numbered about 2,500 when Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery followed the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. The Wanapum didn’t fight in the Indian wars of the West. They obtained no treaty rights or title to their lands. They refused to move to the nearby Yakima Nation reservation and are not federally recognized.

White men’s diseases, substance abuse, relocation and changing times have limbed the Wanapum family tree, with roots that reach back at least 9,000 years, according to the archeological record.

The Wanapum Dam Heritage Center, upriver from Priest Rapids, is filled with displays showing the Wanapum history, from their early tools and building materials to beadwork and intricately woven baskets to the circumstances that made the utility district and the band an unusual team.

Richard Buck, who works part-time on relicensing preparation for the district, remembers when the baskets were workaday tools for hauling and storage.

“We’d go to town and leave them in the back of the truck,” never realizing that one day they would be worth thousands of dollars to collectors and considered priceless to those who have lost the traditional skills.

He looks at a photograph taken 20 years ago. He and his brother, Rex, are the two young men in the picture and the only ones still alive.

“I get angry at these men. I shouldn’t be one of the elders,” Richard Buck said.

The Wanapum have salvaged what they could as the world changed around them, Rex Buck said.

An education has helped band members survive among the white culture and better communicate the Wanapum values to those who don’t always care to understand.

“You can do a couple of things. Victimize yourself and say, ‘I’m like this and fall victim,’ and just don’t do anything. Or you can say, ‘Our people . . . have always welcomed people who have come to our land and provided them with a place, a welcomeness, because that’s how we are, that’s the nature of who we are.”

Grant County PUD: https://www.gcpud.org