American Indian and Indigenous Studies: AIIS 103 - Indigenous Pacific NW

For thousands of years, PNW Indians fished, bartered, socialized, and honored their ancestors at Celilo Falls, part of a nine-mile stretch of the Long Narrows on the Columbia River. Although the Indian community of Celilo Village survives to this day as Oregon's oldest continuously inhabited town, with the construction of the Dalles Dam in 1957, traditional uses of the river were catastrophically interrupted. Most non-Indians celebrated the new generation of hydroelectricity and the easy navigability of the river "highway" created by the dam, but Indians lost a sustaining center to their lives when Celilo Falls was inundated. Neighboring communities went through tremendous economic, environmental, and cultural change in a brief period. Katrine Barber examines the negotiations and controversies that took place during the planning and construction of the dam, and the profound impact the project had on both the Indian community of Celilo Village and the non-Indian town of the Dalles, intertwined with local concerns that affected the entire American West: treaty rights, federal Indian policy, environmental transformation of rivers, and the idea of "progress."

When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site of immense importance to Native tribes would be changed forever. Controversy surrounded the project, with local Native communities anticipating the devastation of their way of life and white settler-descended advocates of the dam envisioning a future of thriving infrastructure and industry. In In Defense of Wyam, having secured access to hundreds of previously unknown and unexamined letters, Katrine Barber revisits the subject of Death of Celilo Falls, her first book. She presents a remarkable alliance across the opposed Native and settler-descended groups, chronicling how the lives of two women leaders converged in a shared struggle to protect the Indian homes of Celilo Village. Flora Thompson, member of the Warm Springs Tribe and wife of the Wyam chief, and Martha McKeown, daughter of an affluent white farming family, became lifelong allies as they worked together to protect Oregon's oldest continuously inhabited site.

A River Captured explores the controversial history of the Columbia River Treaty and its impact on the ecosystems, indigenous peoples, contemporary culture, provincial politics and recent history of southeastern British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Long lauded as a model of international cooperation, the Columbia River Treaty governs the storage and management of the waters of the upper Columbia River basin, a region rich in water resources, with a natural geography well suited to hydroelectric megaprojects. The Treaty also caused the displacement of over 2,000 residents of over a dozen communities, flooded and destroyed archaeological sites and up-ended once-healthy fisheries.