Death of Celilo Falls

Conclusion: Losses

CONCLUSION Losses M any of the Indians who fished at Celilo prayed at a large stone they called Skuch-pa. They filled a naturallyoccurringholeinthisrockwithmud ,smallrocks, and grasses to assure good weather before they ventured out to their scaªolds. One spring morning in 1953, Tommy Thompson was dismayed to find the stone—four feet across and six feet tall—missing. The disappearance became a mystery of sorts, and it represents a larger story of Indian removal at Celilo. The Oregonian initially reported that Army Corps engineers moved the stone to the Seufert cannery, where professional archaeologists stored materials before the Corps dynamited the area where the stone had been located. Later, the newspaper revealed that William Seufert (brother of Arthur Seufert, the president of the cannery) had moved it to the Seufert property several months earlier. Defending his actions, William Seufert claimed that “it was partially buried under soil for some 17 years. . . . at no time were the Indians interested enough to dig it out.”1 Becausethestonewasonhisproperty,ArthurSeufertmayhave decided to care for the stone himself rather than return it to the river Indians for whom it had religious significance. The Seufert brothers had assured Indians that they would not prevent them from praying at the stone as it sat in front of the cannery and 183 that, eventually, they would ensure that the stone was housed properly in “some museum.” According to Arthur Seufert, “we wantedtotakecareof it.They[theIndianswhoclaimedthestone] haven’t been there for eight or so years, and now they started howling about it was so holy.”2 According to Chief Tommy Thompson, however, river Indians cared for the stone, which had been significant for those who fished and lived along the river for as long any of them could remember. The rock was sacred cultural property, and its story represents just one of a series of removals that accompanied dam building at The Dalles. The removal of the prayer rock mirrors the removal of scaªolds from the falls, of residents from Old Celilo Village, of petroglyphs from the river’s edge, of rapids and even salmon from the Columbia River.3 The removals of the 1950s fit intoalargerpatternof Nativeloss,apatternthatbeganwithreservation policies 100 years earlier, the allotment policies at the turn of the twentieth century, and the termination policy of the 1950s. Indeed, the story of the inundation of Celilo Falls and the dislocation of fishers who worked there is shockingly unremarkable and predictable. The removal of the prayer rock epitomizes the larger story of theregionduringthe1950sinyetanotherway.TommyThompson and William Seufert struggled over the custody of the prayer rock, reflecting a larger battle over Pacific Northwest resources. Just as the rock could not be kept in its original location and also be housed in a museum, the Columbia River could not be transformed into a series of lakes and still support significant numbers of Indian salmon fishers. Seufert displayed the same kind of arrogance as the city of The Dalles and the federal government toward Indian-utilized resources when he claimed the rock as his, though it held no spiritual significance for him, because he did not think Indians cared for the stone properly. The stone might be honored in a museum, but the people who used it just a few months prior would not receive similar honor. Again, there is 184 CONCLUSION: LOSSES nothing surprising in William Seufert’s statements; he borrowed from arguments about Indians and their use of resources that hearken back to the earliest stages of American imperialism. Historians have not emphasized enough the eªects of river development on Native and disenfranchised people around the world,butagoodnumberhaveturnedtheirattentiontothisissue. That record clearly shows that the removal of Indians from the mid–Columbia River follows similar activity in other places.4 Although many non-Native residents of the mid–Columbia River celebrated what The Dalles Dam would bring to the region—economic opportunity, flood control, increased navigability of the river, lower energy costs—Indians foresaw a multitude of losses. But the farther one moves from the period of dam construction, the more complicated is the story of loss because non-Indian people in the Pacific Northwest have come to feel the destruction of Celilo Falls profoundly. The white photographers who flocked to the falls just prior to the closing of the dam and the inundation of the mid-Columbia intentionally documented a riverscape and scenes of traditional fishing...