File: Lone Pine, a fishing site near The Dalles Dam along the Columbia River, as seen in 2021. The fishing access site was reserved for tribes by the U.S. government.
Courtesy of Katie Campbell/ProPublica
The Biden administration released a report this week acknowledging “the historic, ongoing, and cumulative damage and injustices that the federal dams on the Columbia River have caused and continue to cause to Tribal Nations.”
Across 73 pages, the report from the U.S. Department of Interior concludes “the government afforded little, if any, consideration to the devastation the dams would bring to Tribal communities, including to their cultures, sacred sites, economies, and homes.”
But here’s what’s not in the new document: The injuries to Native people were not just an unforeseen byproduct of federal dam building. They were, in fact, taken into account at the time. And federal leaders considered that damage a good thing.
In government documents from the 1940s and 1950s, obtained by OPB and ProPublica, officials openly discussed what they called “the Indian problem” on the Columbia River. At times, they characterized the destruction of the last major tribal fishery as a benefit of dam construction.
The archival government records were released to Columbia River treaty tribes several years ago under the Freedom of Information Act, and first made public by OPB and ProPublica in March and April episodes of the podcast “Salmon Wars.”
The documents reveal that the government’s 1950s era of dam-building on the Columbia was marked not by a failure to consider tribal impacts, but rather by a well-informed and intentional disregard for Native people.
“These documents shine a spotlight on a historic wrong” U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement. “The government’s actions wiped out tribal communities, houses, villages, and traditional hunting and fishing sites with thousands of years of history.”
In response to emails detailing the documents, Merkley said he would push the federal government to develop new tribal villages to replace what was flooded.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, also an Oregon Democrat, said he looked forward to working with tribes and the federal government to “to repair that shameful past.”
“This report writes yet one more painful chapter in the awful and deceitful history of federal decisions that willfully ignored Tribal communities’ rights and humanity,” Wyden said in an emailed statement.
What’s left out
The Interior report does not mention any of the discussion from government officials previously reported by OPB and ProPublica.
A spokesman for the Department of the Interior declined to comment when emailed the documents and asked whether the department was aware of them.
“We have nothing further to add beyond what’s in the extensive report,” press secretary Giovanni Rocco said in an email.
The report is a component of a recent 10-year agreement between the White House and tribes to restore endangered Columbia River Basin salmon populations, which once were plentiful enough to sustain a way of life for tribes along the main Columbia and its many tributaries across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Canada.
Northwest tribes lauded the report as a long-overdue accounting of harms and a demonstration of the current administration’s commitment to listen to tribes and do right by them.
“The analysis highlights the many different ways the dams have impacted our cultures, lifestyles, diets, and economies and it got this information directly from the tribal people who have been affected,” Corinne Sams, chair of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, said in an emailed statement. “By listening to and including these testimonies, interviews, and statements, the federal government has taken tribes into consideration on this topic from a relationship of respect and willingness to learn.”
Salmon are estimated to have once totaled more than 10 million in the Columbia River, and they were central to the way of life for many tribes across the river basin. Now, the salmon populations hover around 1 million. The decline is attributed largely to dams and other habitat loss stemming from development, along with overfishing.
Before any dams were built in the Northwest, people along the Columbia River had fished for salmon and other species for thousands of years; salmon were a fixture of their diet, religion and commercial trade.
Documents show government officials came to view the Native presence on the river as a detriment to their own development plans and to the fish themselves.
In one memo from 1951, Sam Hutchinson, the acting regional director for the Bureau of Fisheries, summarized a conversation about the anticipated effects of The Dalles dam, which ultimately drowned tribes’ last major fishery, at Celilo Falls, when it was completed in 1957.
“... as to the effects of the Dalles Dam,” Hutchinson wrote, “I stated that the beneficial effects would compensate for the detrimental conditions that exist there at present.”
The sentiment was also documented in meeting minutes from a 1947 committee of state, federal and local governments about future dam plans.
“We get up above and we run into the Indian problem at Celilo and other places. They are allowed to fish at will,” said Milo Moore, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, according to the minutes. He said the tribe’s fishing makes it difficult to maintain a constant supply of fish for the department’s own purposes.
The head of the Port of Vancouver at the time, Frank Pender, also told federal officials of “the Indian problem” and said of tribal fishing, “certainly we don’t want it to stand in the way of the development of our own way of life.”
The minutes also document a public relations officer for the federal Department of Fisheries and the Indians, Wilfred Steve, acknowledging, “these dams are going along and they are going to destroy their very life, the essence of life of these various tribes.”
Later in his remarks, the public relations officer praised the potential of education programs to assimilate Native people, and stated “we hope that there will be no Indians.” He recommended paying the tribes in exchange for flooding their lands and destroying their fisheries.
Paltry restitution
Randy Settler, a Yakama Nation fisherman whose family history of salmon fishing was previously documented by OPB and ProPublica, said the money his family received in exchange for the dam flooding Celilo and other tribal lands amounted to roughly $3,200 per individual.
After dam construction, Congress and agency officials created programs to boost fishing opportunities that involved stocking the river with massive amounts of fish. The archival government documents detail how these programs were used at the time to justify a lack of effective passage routes for fish through dams, despite the fact that they were almost entirely focused on the fishing grounds below the dams used predominantly by white fishermen. Roughly 99% of the fish were stocked in areas where they’d never reach the tribes above the dams.
“It was kind of like what happened to the buffalo,” Settler told OPB and ProPublica during the initial reporting for “Salmon Wars.” “If they could rid the natural food of those tribes that they were dependent upon, they could weaken the tribes and get them to stop going across their ancestral territories. They would be more confined to their reservation lands where they could be controlled.”
The Biden administration has promised tribes it will restore wild salmon populations. As part of a 10-year agreement with tribes, which includes a pause on any lawsuits over the dam system, the White House announced a plan to invest heavily in tribally-led salmon restoration and energy projects that could potentially replace the power from some hydroelectric dams. President Biden also signed a memorandum calling for federal agencies to prioritize salmon recovery and to review the work to make sure they’re doing enough.
On the same day the Interior released its report on historic harms, the White House Council on Environmental Quality announced the formation of a new federal task force that will coordinate Columbia River salmon efforts across federal agencies.
