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1. Village and Town: The Communities Transformed by The Dalles Dam
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
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1 VILLAGE AND TOWN The Communities Transformed by The Dalles Dam T his is a story of two communities located twelve miles apart on the Oregon banks of the mid–Columbia River and the ways in which a federal dam transformed them. The ancient Native fishing community of Celilo Village existed near the treacherous Celilo Falls and Long Narrows for millennia as a hub in a regional network of trade and cultural exchange. Recent emigrants comprising the city of The Dalles settled in the mid-1800s to sell goods to miners, plow bunchgrass into orchards andwheatfields,and,eventually,createamodern American town complete with an international port that would transport goods to and from the interior Pacific Northwest. In the mid–twentieth century, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set its sights on the development of the mid–Columbia River, these two communities would clash over the use of local natural resources and the future of the river. The Dalles confidentlycelebratedthemodernityandeconomicsecuritythatafed eral dam and professional river management promised. Celilo Village and the wider network of regional Indians who fished at Celilo Falls recognized the dam project as yet another reallocation of resources used by Indians. A dam would transform prime fish habitat into a slack-water reservoir that would support transpor14 tation and power production to the detriment of salmon populations . In addition, the reservoir would inundate the abundant basalt outcroppings and islands that provided excellent fishing sites but thwarted river transportation at Celilo Falls and the rapids of the Long Narrows. The dam, completed in 1957, did not simply alter the riverscape of the Columbia; it transformed river communities and the relations between them. Although The Dalles Dam would negatively aªect a relatively small group of Indian people in a still lightly populated region removed from the centers of national power, it represented a continuing history of federal Indian removal and the appropriation of Indian wealth by non-Indian people. Despite the federal reservation policies of the nineteenth century, the stretch of the Columbia River known as Celilo Falls and the Long Narrows and the community of Celilo Village were recognizably nonreservation Native areas in the midst of a region that had progressively “whitened”overthepreviousseveralgenerations.However , Native control over fishing sites and the village were not without conflict. The Bureau of Indian Aªairs1; Oregon State and Wasco County governments; The Dalles City Council and Chamber of Commerce; the tribal councils of the Warm Springs, Yakama2 , Umatilla, and Nez Perce; and local governing structures at CeliloVillageitself allviedtocontroland,insomecases,dismantle the community. Furthermore, whites consistently attempted to encroach on treaty-protected fishing areas by blocking access to the river, harassing Native fishers, and even claiming the sites themselves. Nevertheless, Indian fishers and their families successfully remained on the river and claimed it, like the generations before them, as the center of their economic, social, and cultural world. The proposed dam, championed by The Dalles, threatened to remove Indian people from the river by destroying the fishing stations and salmon runs that sustained Native activity there. It VILLAGE AND TOWN 15 [3.92.130.77] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:27 GMT) was a threat as significant as that posed by earlier federal policies of removal. In addition, river development, particularly in The Dalles, paralleled the mid–twentieth century federal policies of termination and relocation that sought to end the treaty relationship between the federal government and Native people throughout the country. Relocation supported the removal of Indians from reservation communities to urban areas, a federally funded migration that was meant to sever tribal ties. Termination policy would dissolve Indian reservations, remove federal recognition of Indian tribes, liquidate tribal land holdings, and eventually dismantle the Bureau of Indian Aªairs. The federal government’s treatment of Indian people with a claim to Celilo Falls and property at Celilo Village is unsurprising when placed in this context of termination policy and the longer history of removal. The reallocation of wealth from Indian people to nonIndian residents of the region was, for many, an acceptable, even predictable, outcome of national development.3 However, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began its series of public meetings regarding the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1945, it must have seemed both to those who supported the project and to those who hoped to defeat it that anything was possible. Would the federal dam create an economic and cultural gateway that linked the resources east of...