On the brink. Species and Culture at the Edge of Survival
| Author | Oliver Houck |
| Position | Professor of Law at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana |
| Pages | 8-9 |
Page 8 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2009, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, March/April 2009
There will never be a better
book about the salmon wars.
Or about the courage, intel-
ligence, tenacity, passion,
sheer poetry — and legal
action — of the Native Americans
who have fought to save the keystone
species of their culture and the Pacific
Northwest for over 150 years. And re-
main at it today. If the once-great runs
of Pacific salmon ever do make it out
of the extinction vortex into which
commercial logging, pulp mill pollu-
tion, off-shore trawling, and a lethal
gauntlet of dams choking the Colum-
bia, the Snake, the Salmon, and dozens
of their tributaries have thrown them,
these are the people who will have
made it happen. Part history,
part biography, throw in bi-
ology, engineering, 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 Cat-
ton and David Halberstram,
with a touch for the English
language rarely seen in this
field.
e book rises at a single
spot, the Si’lailo Falls (trans-
lated to Celilo), an almost mythical
cascade of the Columbia River with
the power of the Niagara, and an In-
dian fishing ground from back beyond
memory, drowned by the Dalles Dam
in 1957. From this vantage, the book
leaps back in time to the great treaty
with the white man executed by the
president’s special ambassador, Isaac
Ingalls Stevens, just before the out-
break of the Civil War, and runs its
own gauntlet of moves and counter-
moves by two opposing forces, one
white and one red, over five salmon
species and the steelhead trout, which
in the meantime, were being crushed,
decimated and, for certain runs, driv-
en out of existence. e drivers were
several, but as a causal force the dams
were overwhelming. As they came on
line, in a spree running from the 1930s
to the 1960s, the fish disappeared. It
was that simple. e data are abso-
lutely linear.
e mindsets were starkly oppo-
site. To the Indians, these were sacred
things. To the whites and to their
courts of law there was and is today
nothing sacred about nature. Further,
as the regional director of the Fish and
Wildlife Service is quoted as affirming
in 1951 (in an appendix of all things
— this book is so rich in treasures
it has to hide some of them), “e
beneficial effects of [the Dalles Dam]
would compensate for the detrimental
conditions that exist there at present.
[It] would be easier for a fish to go over
a ladder in the dam than fight their
way over Celilo Falls.”
With biology like this, who needs
enemies? I am reminded of a similar
opinion by the Bureau of Reclamation
for the proposed Orme Dam in Ari-
zona. Bald eagles fed on fish from the
Verde River. e bureau would pro-
vide concrete nesting platforms and
dead fish at the edge of the new lake
for the eagles to eat, having eliminated
the Verde. An obvious win-win for
man and species.
We then flash back to a scene from
an apocalyptic movie, the creation of
the Columbia Gorge. Consider “an
ice dam 30 miles wide,” add a lake be-
hind it 20 miles long and 2,000 feet
deep, then break the dam and send
“520 cubic miles of water on a thun-
dering journey westward through the
Gorge in a span of 48 hours,” 10 times
more water than the combined flow
of all the rivers of the world. “Huge
boulders encased in icebergs rode this
flood like tiny driftwood.” End of
paragraph. en comes a new one in
its entirety: “en repeat this flood up
to 50 times.” I have no idea which of
the three authors wrote this section of
the book, but it certainly sounds like
one of the premiere writers in all of en-
vironmental law, Bill Rodgers.
e book also provides a detailed
and behind-the-scenes look at one of
the most extraordinary negotiations in
modern history, between the
highly intellectual, wary, but
utterly defeated tribal chiefs
of the Pacific Northwest,
insistent, articulate, and, to
the whites, damnably loqua-
cious, and on the other side
Isaac Ingalls Stevens, who
held all the cards, the treaty
before them, the army and
white settlers to the rear, and
the pen ready to sign. e
result of which was a reser-
vation of tribal lands as far
away from the river and its commer-
cial potential as possible, in exchange
for the haunting promise to preserve
the native “right of taking fish at all
usual and accustomed places and in
common with citizens of the territory.”
Most of the next 150 years has been
spent in attempts by whites to break
this promise, and Indian attempts to
maintain it.
We can leave the details to the
book, else you be less tempted to read
it. Suffice it to say that critical flash-
points in the conflict began as early as
10 years following the Stevens treaties
ON THE BRINK
Species and Culture at the Edge of Survival
By Oliver Houck
in T h e li T e r a T u r e
The Si’lailo Way: Indians,
Salmon and Law on t he
Columbia River, by Josep h C.
Dupris, Kathle en S. Hill, and
William H. Rodgers Jr. Carol ina
Academic Pres s. $40.
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