SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. government on Tuesday acknowledged for the first time the damage that the construction and operation of dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific Northwest has caused to Native American tribes.
The report details how the unprecedented structures destroyed salmon fisheries, flooded villages and cemeteries, and continue to severely limit the tribes’ ability to exercise their treaty fishing rights.
The Biden administration’s report comes amid a $1 billion effort announced earlier this year to restore the region’s salmon stocks before more go extinct — and to better work with tribes on actions that are necessary to make that possible. That includes increasing production and storage of renewable energy to replace the hydropower generation that would be lost if four dams on the lower Snake River were ever breached.
“President Biden recognizes that to confront injustice, we must be honest about history – even when it is difficult,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman Brenda Mallory said in a written statement. “In the Pacific Northwest, an open and frank conversation about the history and legacy of the federal government’s management of the Columbia River is long overdue.”
The document was a requirement of an agreement last year to end decades of legal battles over the operation of the dams. It explains how government and private interests in the early 20th century began fencing the tributaries of the Columbia River, the largest in the Northwest, to provide water for irrigation or flood control, reducing the damage already being done to water quality and salmon production increased even further. is controlled by mining, logging and salmon canneries.
Tribal representatives said they welcomed the government’s formal, if long overdue, recognition of how the U.S. government for generations ignored tribal concerns about the dams’ impact on them, and that they with the steps they take to undo that damage.
“This administration has taken aggressive steps to rebalance some of the wealth transfer,” said Tom Iverson, regional coordinator of Yakama Nation Fisheries. “The salmon was the wealth of the river. What we have seen is the transfer of wealth to farmers, to loggers, to hydroelectric systems, at the expense of the tribes.”
Construction of the first dams on the main Columbia River, including the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams in the 1930s, brought jobs to a country struggling with the Great Depression, as well as hydropower and navigation. But it addressed the objections of tribes concerned about the loss of salmon, traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and even villages and cemeteries.
As early as the late 1930s, tribes warned that the salmon migration could disappear because the fish would no longer have access to the spawning grounds upstream. The tribes – the Yakama Nation, the Spokane Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville and Umatilla Reservations, Nez Perce and others – continued to fight the construction and operation of the dams for generations.
“While the entire system of dams and reservoirs was being developed, tribes and other advocacy groups protested and sounded the alarm about the harmful impacts the dams would have on salmon and aquatic species, which the government sometimes acknowledged,” the report said. “However, the government gave little or no consideration to the devastation the dams would cause to tribal communities, including their cultures, sacred sites, economies and homes.”
The report was accompanied by the announcement of a new task force to coordinate salmon recovery efforts among federal agencies.
