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Harm to the Rivers
For many thousands of years, our ancestors experienced the ebb and flow of the Columbia River — N’ch i-Wana. They partook in the greatest chinook fishery in the world at the west end of the Columbia Gorge where the river narrowed and poured over falls and through rapids. They fished at the Great Cascades and Long Narrows until Bonneville Dam stilled the waters in 1939; they fished traditionally at Celilo Falls until 1957 when The Dalles Dam silenced the falls.
Celilo Falls, circa 1920.
For those thousands of years, people came together in The Dalles area to fish for their food, to trade, to honor the natural order, to celebrate their existence. Indian people still live nearby. They are still intimately connected to the ebb and flow of the river, such as it is.
The non-Indians’ restless will to re-order and re-fashion the Creator’s work has devastated Columbia Basin salmon. Rivers and streams have been turned inside-out in pursuit of gold and other minerals; some are silted up as trees have been stripped from hillsides and slopes; excessive cattle grazing has turned wet meadows into patches of desert; so much water is diverted for agriculture that some rivers and streams run dry, or nearly so.
But those practices do not compare in magnitude to the impact of the fully developed system of federal Columbia Basin dams, owned by our trustee, the United States government.
Bonneville Dam
With the construction of Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams, the federal government began to convert the free-flowing Columbia, Snake, and other rivers into strings of slackwater pools unfamiliar to Indian people, inhospitable to salmon. While those dams helped electrify the Northwest and magnified its economic prosperity, the federal government went too far. There are now 29 dams in the Federal Columbia River Power System. The other 107 dams that affect salmon are either owned by the federal government or licensed by it. Salmon and our people are paying for the federal government’s mistakes.
Dams that are too high for salmon to get past have blocked over half of the available spawning and rearing habitat.
Many are collected at the federal dams and put into barges or trucks and delivered to a point below Bonneville Dam. It isn’t working. Most transported salmon do not come back.
Young salmon that stay in the river pass as many as nine dams. About 15 per cent of those that go through the turbines at each dam are killed.
Before dams, it took juvenile salmon about two weeks to travel from their
home streams in the Snake River to the ocean. Now it takes about two months.
Many die from added stress and disease from higher temperature and slower
water as well as from longer exposure to animals and fish that prey on
them.
Salmon can also go through “screened bypass” systems at some of the dams. Recent studies are showing that the more often young salmon encounter these bypasses, the less likely they are to survive.
In the final analysis, the system of dams too hungrily consumes the benefits of the river and leaves to little to nourish salmon. Salmon do not need more gizmos at the dams or bigger and better barges: they need a fair and equitable share of the water’s wealth. For many years now, Northwest decision-makers and political leaders have clung to the belief that technology would create a peaceful coexistence between dams and salmon. Vast sums of money have been spent in such an attempt. But technological fixes have failed.
It may be that we can give them enough water at the right times and send them over spillways rather than through turbines or bypasses to assist them on their journey to the sea.
Or it may be that stretches of some rivers must be restored to their natural levels by taking out or breaching some dams.
Salmon are letting us know it is no longer possible for humans to uncompromisingly appropriate all of the river’s benefits. We as a region must leave more in the river for the salmon, and for our children. In moving forward with salmon restoration, we must keep in mind the ebb and flow of the river, as it was.
