The Warm Springs Reservation, established in 1855, is home to three groups of Indians: Wasco (Dalles, Ki-gal-twal-la, and Dog River), Warm Springs (Upper and Lower Deschutes, Teninoo, and John Day), and Northern Paiute who moved to the reservation in the 1880s. Apart from the Northern Paiute who relied less on fish protein, residents have traditionally lived along and depended upon the Columbia River. The Columbia River and its tributaries like the Deschutes and John Day rivers provided Indians with an enormous supply of salmon, trout, whitefish, suckers, and eels. Salmon were key to an extensive economic trade centered at The Dalles and extending from the Coast to the Great Plains.
What I’ve learned from my mother, my aunts and some of my elders was that when Bonneville was being completed and they were going to flood these sites . . . the Army told the people they’d be flooded and they’d have to get out. They promised other sites on high ground and said they would relocate them — replace the housing and drying sheds. That never happened.
— Johnny Jackson, chief of the Cascade Band, as quoted in Empty Nets
Two important off-reservation fishing sites for the Warm Springs, Cascade Falls and Celilo Falls, were inundated by dams, Bonneville in 1938 and The Dalles in 1957. When the Army Corps of Engineers built Bonneville, the agency promised Indians replacement fishing sites. The Warm Springs have waged a long legal battle to ensure that the government makes good on that promise. The government compensated Warm Springs residents for the loss of their fishing stations when The Dalles Dam was built in the 1950s. Warm Springs Indians protested the building of both of these dams as well as other mainstem Columbia River projects.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Portland General Electric built two dams on the Warm Springs Reservation, Pelton and Round Butte dams. Portland General Electric pays the tribal government for annual use of the land.
