Losing Wykanushpum — Oregon’s Use of Dams as a Tool for Displacement
A lowly trailer park sits along the Columbia River in Eastern Oregon. Lone Pine is a municipality so overlooked, it has no official address within the state. However, this campground and five other sites occupying approximately 40 acres serve also as desperate homes to Native Americans displaced by the dammed river.
Descendants of generations of Native people, spiritually and economically dependent on the ancient rhythms of the river, its ecology, and its salmon, are clawing to the remnants of a way of life, and more tangibly, the basics of survival — food and shelter. Bernadette Grace, a resident of Lone Pine, fully embracing her heritage, would long fish the waters of the Columbia, enjoying the abundance of wildlife that had been blessed to the Wykanushpum. Wykanushpum, a deep-rooted name bestowed to the tribes indigenous to the Columbia River Gorge Basin, translates directly to salmon (Wykanush) people (Pum).
Grace is one of the many Native Americans living at sites, like Lone Pine, where the squalid living conditions are akin to those of economically developing nations. The cultural significance of salmon and its relationship to a way of life traces to the environmentally deterministic qualities of the Pacific Northwest. However, the damming of rivers causes great environmental and societal harm. The once-beloved salmon are becoming extinct and Native American communities are being displaced by dam construction, while the already privileged continue to profit from the productivity of the dams.
This poverty is not an isolated example in the miscarriage of environmental justice and perpetuation of environmental racism against Native American communities along the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Native homes are a patchwork of decrepit trailers, plywood, and tarps. Electricity is jury-rigged from nearby day camp restrooms. Tangled extension cords, some running through standing water, interconnect dilapidated trailers and dismal shelters. As with electricity, these sites have no other infrastructure; water is shared by site members by way of a single spigot and there are no sewers.
Johnny Jackson, an 86 year-old Chief of a tribe of the Yakama Nation who lives in the settlement of Underwood, Washington, with a fire hydrant located just feet from his home, saw his house burn down within yards of the rushing Columbia River. The hydrant was not connected to any water source, and that hydrant remains unconnected to this day. All that remains of Mr. Jackson’s home is the patch of burned ground it stood on. To stay by the river, and the only home and way of life he’s ever known, Mr. Jackson lives near where his house stood in a piteous, run-down trailer. What was due, agreed upon, and anticipated by Native tribes never materialized.
This disregard for the quality of life is a clear indicator of the environmental racism that the United States harbors. Environmental racism is a concern regarding equity and environmental justice for marginalized minority groups. This marginalization and absence of a voice in politics is a form of a lack of recognition, which is a factor in determining environmental injustice within a population, according to David Schlosberg in his book Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (2009: 20).
The Columbia River’s power and mass held dominion over and through all that it rushed. Its might has a stout historical reputation. 14,000 years ago, the Missoula Flood buried what is now Portland, Oregon under 400 feet of water. Undammed, its waters were more intimidating for pioneers traveling the Oregon Trail than those driving the harrowing steep and rocky toll roads over the Cascade Mountain Range.
The construction of fourteen major dams along the river’s length has reigned in its might for, in part, the generation of electric power. The degradation of the environment for all life in the Columbia Basin has created a “do or die” battleground for those fighting for the survival of the native salmon and steelhead species, and the dignity and well-being of the Native American people whose homes were on the river basin millennia before any dams were built.
The groundwork for the damming of the Columbia River began in the early 1900’s. The piecing together of what would become the Federal Water Power Act in 1920, later the Federal Power Act, paved the way for the federal government to implement the mammoth projects that would change the river.
In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt sanctioned two Public Works Administration projects to build the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River. The dams were promised as delivering multiple purposes, not solely navigability as the Army Corps of Engineers wanted, but also irrigation, recreation, and the generation of electricity. The jobs the projects provided during the depression were covetously accepted by a work-starved populace. The electrification of the rural areas of the Columbia Basin, reliable irrigation for Northwest agriculture, and the creation of abundant energy appeared to many to be a welcome arrival of progress.
However, life for Native Americans along the Columbia River changed forever with the construction of the Bonneville Dam, and later, between 1952 and 1957, the Dalles, and the John Day dams. Flourishing Native American communities were wiped out by the subsequent flooding attributed to dam construction. Native homes, fishing grounds, burial sites, and even ancient petroglyphs vanished under the dammed river waters.
The maelstrom of change on the river may have first evidenced itself in the river basin inhabitants’ forced displacement. At the outset of the construction of the dams, millions of dollars were allocated, and spent, on relocating people living along the river that was to be affected by the damming. The grossly uneven distribution of relocation funds spread out thusly: $52 million dollars were used to relocate seven towns, of mostly white residents, where the monies spent to move 44 tribal communities amounted to $210,000 dollars.
A “white” town, North Bonneville, Washington, which stood in the way of dam construction, was completely moved by the federal government in 1974. $35 million dollars for the 2.6 square mile town purchased streets, sewers, electrical power connections and water storage for an estimated population of 1500. In an almost saccharine cartoon of white suburban life, a summer day in 2015 had children riding their bikes on quiet North Bonneville streets while fathers mowed their lawns. In stark contrast to the idyllic summertime images of North Bonneville, Native American tribes’ sites along the river still stand impoverished.
It required court battles to reverse the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ decision forbidding Native American tribes to establish permanent homes along the river. Afterward, however, there had been no additional support offered by government agencies to address living conditions at the American Indian home sites. Tribes that at one time lived and thrived on the banks of the Columbia River have, for all intents and purposes, been banished to lands of questionable usage and worth. The areas offered to displaced Native Americans vary from less desirable to uninhabitable. Tribe members using these lands struggle with either area of river hardly accessible to boats, or windswept canyon camps that in certain times of the year are unoccupiable.
Casualties of dam construction on the Columbia extend beyond merely societal detriment, with a more familiar issue of declining populations of anadromous (migrating) fish species, especially the salmon and steelhead. Dams that don’t allow fish passage with ladders or other means are known to be permanently blocked. Estimates of between 40–55 percent of once available salmon and steelhead habitat are being obstructed. Historically, 10 to 16 million adult salmon would return annually to the Columbia Basin. Today, less than five percent of the wild species of salmon and steelhead return to the river.
The dams impact the fish in many ways: the aforementioned physical restrictions to what once were native waterways, and the creation of reservoirs that flood spawning grounds affect food webs in rivers. Impacts include altering water temperatures that kill salmon and steelhead. Some salmon have negotiated the onerous ladders and have puzzled out the stream changes created by the dams, and while upstream travel for the fish presents its share of man-made hazards, the downstream return to the ocean is equally fraught with peril.
Juvenile salmon and steelhead must pass through dams evading the power generating turbines that may slice them to bits, hurl them into the walls of the passageways, or kill them with the increased water pressure created by the whirring turbine blades. Gerald B. Collins, in his article Effects of Dams on Pacific Salmon and Steelhead Trout, 1976, estimates that 15 percent of juvenile fish being lost per dam is conservative, and with the fish passing many dams on their journeys downstream, these losses become catastrophic. However, there are strong forces that resist the dramatic actions that many feels need to happen to ensure salmon survival and, subsequently, the well-being of Native American riverside inhabitants.
The major dams on the Columbia are estimated to generate between 40 to almost 50 percent of the total energy produced in the Pacific Northwest. The advocates for maintaining the dams’ status quo are industries such as electrical utilities, aluminum manufacturing, agricultural interests, and parties who use the river for commerce from recreation businesses to freight transportation. Conservative U.S. Representative from Washington, Dan Newhouse, summarizes his constituents’ need for the dams. “Without Snake and Columbia river [sic] dams and the many benefits they provide, life in Central Washington as we know it would be unrecognizable. I represent communities that actually live with the consequences of a forced increased spill or potentially breaching dams, whether, through higher electricity rates, higher transportation costs, reduced access to irrigation water, (or) reduced flood control…we need to safeguard our dams while continuing to invest in fish recovery efforts because the cost of the alternative is too high for rural communities.”
These proponents of the dams see the environment as a means of resource acquisition. This is reflective of the Judeo-Christian, and consequently, the long-time Western ideology of dominion (total rule, mandated by God) over the environment that has led to many anthropogenic problems, such as climate change and habitat destruction, that can be seen in nature today. This perspective of the environment disregards the agency with which the environment contributes to and affects the health of human society. Downriver, predominately-white Portland will not feel the depletion of the salmon population in the ways the Native American tribes will living just one hour up the freeway; unaware that national policy predisposes illusory financial short-term gain with the cost being environmental decimation.
Viewing the Columbia and Snake Rivers as a means of damming for hydroelectric power ignores the ecological benefits that these rivers provide to fish, ecosystems, and humans’ interactions with nature. An acknowledgment that environmental agency (agreeing to the power we give to the environment, with respect to sociality) is fundamental in addressing disagreements regarding the environment, with an end goal in equity within environmental justice.
The complaints against dam breaching and subsequent perils of flooding and higher transportation and utility costs are met with skepticism by environmental groups. These groups claim that flood, irrigation, and transportation worries are outdated and overblown and that industries, such as aluminum manufacturing, have been paying below value costs for energy for years. Others cite that the nature of the power grid is changing with alternative energies, such as wind power, continually coming online. The use of the Snake River as a navigable waterway for economic freight transport has also come under question. With increasing maintenance costs, the use of the river by shippers has seen a steady decline. Instead of barges, freight is increasingly being shipped on double-stacked railroad cars and trucks.
Aside from anthropogenic interests in the case of dam construction on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, the interests that the salmon hold are to survive and to flourish. Because many conservationists place intrinsic value in nature and believe in deep ecology (a lifestyle that includes a close relationship with earth and nature and activity to protect it), animal rights, or similar philosophy advocacy groups can and do work to hold the stake of interest for the salmon on a political platform. Despite the governmental support of dams, polls indicate that “4 out of 5 Washington voters want to prevent salmon extinction”, which has begun to reflect in the growth of environmental movement interest groups.
Environmental and Native American advocacy groups are steadily gathering forces and are giving the heretofore disenfranchised tribes legal and political clout. In regard to Native American archaeological sites and their protection, when a federal judge ordered officials to consider dam breaching on the Snake River, Guy Moura, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington state, reflected on the growing political and legal power of the tribes. “Tribes have not had much opportunity to participate in these things because they didn’t have the professional staff or trained people… [and,] with growth in size, there also came the evolution of what was being done.” Mr. Moura then points out that in 1992 the tribe had only four employees in its cultural resources program but now has 38.
An internet search using the terms “Native American Salmon Fishing”, “Columbia River Dams”, “Salmon Restoration”, and “Dam Breaching” yields results consisting of dozens of advocacy groups. The listings vary from some smaller groups, posing different volunteer opportunities, to larger groups, some national in stature, like the Sierra Club, with stout organizational structures and legal means and power. Native Americans have been marginalized to the extent that the resources necessary to garner governmental and societal support, in actions contributing to their welfare, are not readily available, so working in coordination with environmental groups may be necessary to see any immediate political change. Furthermore, with the inclusion of Native American players, advocacy groups ensure credibility from the first-hand experience of the devastation of Native communities and environment.
In Coalition Building between Native American and Environmental Organizations in Opposition to Development, 1998, sociologist Mik Moore addresses the connection between Native Americans as a marginalized group and their association with environmental organizations to help to reduce environmentally racist burdens placed upon them. Although environmental racism may be most apparent in relationships regarding Western, especially capitalist, nations and the Global South, the United States battles similar issues within its borders, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
These issues extend beyond dam removal; however, it is critical to understand that the marginalization of minority communities has long been associated with governmental unwillingness to support beneficial change for these communities. Most recently, President Donald Trump has both proposed cutting funds to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, causing an increase in health care costs for Native Americans, while simultaneously proposing the defunding of salmon restoration. If one was to acknowledge the fiscal “belt-tightening” as a prudent economic strategy, it is hard to overlook that the President’s policies support dying coal industry communities, of mostly white people, while denying basic legal rights of Native American people.
Since the inhabitation of the Columbia and Snake River Basin, for the tribes who live on the river, the river and the salmon of the river have been fixtures in their culture, religion, and economy. The Native American fishers seek to act as “stewards” of the river and see the salmon as a “spiritual gift”. As Charles Hudson of the Fish Commission says, “Our tribal members are striving to reclaim…a presence, a sense of place on the river, and their identity as river people, the river is where they belong.” The Wykanushpum have long embraced the environment’s position as an actor in their society, cherishing the wildlife bestowed upon them.
Times have changed, and although the environment is now viewed more as an economic resource than the indigenous perspective of a cherished societal agent, we must find appreciation in the expanse of benefits provided by the environment. Society must redefine its perception of the environment and reach bipartisan agreement on the importance of its conservation — only then can we begin to address the looming recompense of our past neglect.
