Behind Bonneville the river would rise sixty feet to spread over the narrow strip of lowland shrubs and basalt between the old river bank and the high cliffs of the Columbia Gorge. The dam would change the Columbia into a mile-wide stream flowing sluggishly, giving little hint to those eddies, rapids and whirlpools where Indian fishermen had caught their family’s food since time immemorial.
— Roberta Ulrich, Empty Nets
Return to “Cascade Indian Survival” page
The raised water pool behind Bonneville Dam drowned more than thirty-five fishing sites in the traditional Cascades fishery, in addition to inundating and disrupting Native American graves on Bradford and Memaloose Islands. Local Indian fishermen objected in 1937 that the dam would deprive them of food and income. In 1939, Cascade Indian Henry Charley told an Army Corps of Engineers representative that the traditional fishing places had all been damaged, and that Indian fishermen were no longer able to sustain their families. The destruction of fishing sites violated the Native Americans’ treaty rights of “… taking fish at all usual and accustomed places.”
Indians do not want money for their fishing sites … these fishing sites represent food and a means of living for the Indian. They wanted only similar sites or facilities in exchange for the ones that had been lost. — Frank Winishut, of the Warm Springs Reservation, December 1939
In 1940 the Corps agreed to build six replacement fishing sites — in-lieu sites — along with sanitary facilities and incinerators. This represented the only time Native Americans were offered replacement fishing sites instead of money for the damage caused by Columbia River dams. Corps officials said they would increase the combined acreage of the sites to 408, giving the Native Americans more room to camp and dry fish. In the meantime, the Fish and Wildlife Service began delivering dead hatchery fish, their eggs removed, to the Indians for consumption.
Many Cascade area Indians relocated their fishing to Celilo Falls, but that area was drowned when The Dalles Dam was completed in 1957.
In the 1950s the Corps finally made some improvements at some of the in-lieu sites. But, by 1960 the Corps had only provided four sites totaling less than forty acres. In 1963 the Corps purchased and improved one-and-a-half acres at the Lower Cascades Locks. In 1988 Washington State U.S. Senator Dan Evans attached an amendment to a bill that required the Corps to fulfill its 1939 promise by finding 360 acres for thirty-one new in-lieu sites, and to improve the existing sites.
Web site: “Dams of the Columbia Basin & Their Effects on the Native Fishery”
Minutes: 1939 meeting of tribal delegates to discuss damage to fishing sites
Legislation: Public Law 100-581, Title IV
