Fighting For The Salmon Tribes Have Waged An Upstream Battle For Dwindling Fishery

On the bluffs overlooking the Columbia River, Indians gathered in sorrow to watch Celilo Falls disappear.

“They stood up on the hillside for three days,” remembered Bill Yallup of the Yakama Indian Nation. “Some of them sang songs like a funeral. They were very sacred songs. Three days and nights with no sleep. It was a sad day for them.”

For thousands of years, Indians had fished for salmon at Celilo, where the wild Columbia thundered over rock cliffs on its unencumbered way to the Pacific.

“I still hear it,” said Yallup, a tribal council member and former chief judge of the Yakama Nation. “It was loud and deep.”

In 1957, completion of The Dalles Dam drowned the falls, one of many historic Indian fishing sites that disappeared as the powerful river was transformed into a series of placid reservoirs.

They were sacrificed in the name of cheap hydroelectric power.

Foremost among creatures revered by the Indians, the salmon began a steady decline toward extinction in a river where their incredible abundance had, less than 200 years ago, left explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in awe.

“When I caught my first salmon, I had to have a ceremony, to be initiated, to be a fisherman,” said Johnson Meninick, a Yakama religious leader. “This is a ceremony to respect a sacred resource. We treat it with honor. The words I was told and always use are, ‘The resource does not belong to us. We belong to the resource.”’ At the root of the Indians’ faith is the understanding that the fish were provided by Earth’s creator as a renewable source of food.

“People along the Columbia have been taking these fish probably for 9,000 to 10,000 years,” said Kenneth Ames, professor of anthropology at Portland State University. “The salmon have been central to their economy in one way or another for that long. It’s like bread is our staff of life. It’s at that fundamental level.”

Before the white man arrived, the unspoiled habitat, with moss-covered stream banks, cool water and plentiful gravel spawning beds, provided a perfect home for remarkable fish that migrate hundreds of miles to the ocean.

Three or four years later, the salmon return to the exact spot where they were born, to spawn and die.

“They came to provide us an example of sacrifice and because of that sacrifice we thank our creator for the divine intervention that gave the salmon the feeling of servitude,” said Ted Strong, executive director of the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and a member of the Yakama Nation.

Yallup and Meninick cannot count how many times they have been in court over salmon issues. The Yakamas’ legal fights date to the early 20th century, when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a dispute with a white man who attempted to fence off a section of the Columbia.

“The salmon cannot fight for themselves, so we must fight for them,” Meninick said.

The Indians suffered significant setbacks in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s as one dam after another was built on the Columbia and its main tributary, the Snake.

The government shrugged off Indians’ concerns in the name of the national interest.

With the construction of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia and Hells Canyon Dam on the Snake, the salmon disappeared from about one-third of the river system because neither dam has fish ladders.

From this low point, the Indians began to fight back on the white man’s turf - in court.

“What’s happened in that 30- to 35-year period of time have been a number of important court cases, which generally have been won by the tribes, defining and in some ways expanding their rights,” said Oregon state fisheries director Doug DeHart.

In the 1970s, bureaucratic battles were waged over how many salmon Indian and non-Indian fishermen should catch. Attorney Tim Weaver, who has represented the Yakama tribe for 26 years, recalled loud, angry meetings where white fishermen would carry signs saying “Save the Salmon, Smoke an Indian.”

Each faction of fishermen wanted its share of the dwindling salmon runs.

U.S. District Judge Robert Belloni ruled in 1969 - in a lawsuit known as United States vs. Oregon - that states could not regulate fishing by Indians who had treaty rights and that those Indians had a right to a “fair share” of the fish.

In 1974, U.S. District Judge George Boldt ruled that fair share was 50 percent of the harvestable runs. Angry non-Indian fishermen hung Boldt in effigy, but Belloni adapted the allocation to his ruling.

The court decisions were based on treaties signed in 1855 by the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes.

The treaties guaranteed the Indians the right to fish in their “usual and accustomed” places.

When the dams went up, and later as the state sent a parade of biologists to the stand in U.S. vs. Oregon, the Indians realized they needed their own experts who relied not on traditional Indian wisdom but on facts and figures that would hold up in court.

Thus was born the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, established in 1977 by an initial allocation of money from the Bonneville Power Administration to represent the fishing interests of the four treaty tribes.

The salmon allocations mean nothing to the Indians if the fish disappear. At one meeting of various fishing interests, a tribal leader raised the prospect of fighting over how to carve up the last salmon.

So, lately, the Indians find themselves on the side of their former adversaries - fishermen, states and conservation groups - against their old court ally, the U.S. government.

The new fight is over how to restore salmon runs, a struggle much more difficult than the one over allocation.

The Indians scored a major victory this year when the Clinton administration decided they must be consulted by federal agencies in determining how money should be spent to restore salmon and steelhead runs.

Along the calm reservoir where Celilo Falls lies submerged, there is a small park developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates most of the big dams.

A few hundred feet away, across Interstate 84, stand a few ramshackle Indian houses and a longhouse, where each spring a “First Salmon” ceremony honors the return of the fish.

The scene is far different than the one depicted in a photograph at the Yakama tribal headquarters.

As he looked at the photo, Joe Jay Pinkham, a Yakama elder, identified a tiny dot on a rock in the river as himself, then rattled off the names of many others in the picture. He knew exactly where they were because their fishing spots were handed down by families from generation to generation.

The Indians’ deepest hope is that somehow all their legal and administrative wrangling will bring about the only result that will truly satisfy them.

Someday, they believe, the waters of Celilo will roar again.

“The hardest way, but the best way, is to blow all the dams up,” Meninick said.