On the Brink: Species and Culture at the Edge of Survival

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 90-93

90 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

On the Brink:

Species and Culture at

the Edge of Survival

By Oliver Houck

The Si’lailo Way: I ndians, Salmon, a nd Law on the Columbia

River, by Joseph C. Dupris, Kathlee n S. Hill, and William H. Rodgers Jr.

Carolina Academic Press. 450 pages.

From the March/ April 2009 issue of The Environmental Forum .

There will never be a better book about

the salmon wars. Or about the cour-

age, intelligence, tenacity, passion,

sheer poetry—and legal action—of the Native

Americans who have fought to save the key-

stone species of their culture and the Pacic

Northwest for over 150 yea rs. And remain

at it today. If the once-great runs of Pacic

salmon ever do ma ke it out of the extinction

vortex into which commercial logging, pulp

mill pollution, o-shore trawling, and a lethal

gauntlet of dams choking the Columbia, the

Snake, the Salmon, and dozens of their tribu-

taries have thrown them, these are the people

who will have made it happen. Part history,

part biography, throw in biology, engineer-

ing, and the mindsets of players who did not understand or trust each other

back in 1855, and still don’t, here is a war history in the tradition of Bruce

Catton and David Halberstram, with a touch for the English language rarely

seen in this eld.

e book rises at a single spot, the Si’lailo Falls (translated to Celilo),

an almost mythical cascade of the Columbia River with the power of the

Niagara, and an Indian shing ground from back beyond memory, drowned

by the Dalles Dam in 1957. From this vantage, the book leaps back in time