ROCK AND
A HARD PLACE
the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit
think tank based in Seattle, Pacific Northwest coal exports could
create greater national and worldwide environmental impacts, including on climate change, than
a Canadian company’s controversial proposal to ferry Albertan tar
sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast via
the Keystone XL pipeline.
As Jewell Praying Wolf James
put it: “Once the coal gets to China, it’s pollution for all of us.”
For more than 11,000 years,
Celilo Falls served as the center
of trade and commerce for Native Americans of the West. The
upwards of 15 million salmon
that passed through the milelong span of rocky chutes in
the Columbia River every year
functioned as a sort of currency.
“Some tribal people call it precontact Wall Street,” said Charles
Hudson, intergovernmental affairs director with the Columbia
River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Portland, Ore.
Lewis and Clark called it “the
great mart.”
But within a few short hours
on March 10, 1957, Celilo’s era of
plenty came to an abrupt end. Rising floodwaters from a newly completed hydroelectric dam engulfed
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02.09.14
the rapids. Salmon runs soon
shrank to a small fraction of their
former numbers.
Davis Yellowash Washines,
chief of enforcement for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish
Commission, was only five years
old when the Dalles Dam opened
and drowned Celilo Falls. “I can
still feel its mist. I can still hear
its thunder,” he said over dinner
the night before the September
longhouse ceremony.
“Opening up this main line of
cheap American coal is a pretty
important signal if you are a
Chinese official thinking about
how much to invest in what kind
of energy infrastructure.”
Warren Spencer, a Yakama elder, was serving in the military
in Germany that year, but he recalled the time-lapse photos of
the inundation he received by
mail from his mother back home
in Celilo Falls. “I sat there on my
bunk and cried,” he said.
Now, Spencer is deeply concerned about how this new energy
project might affect the futures of
his four children, 17 grandchildren
and eight great-grandchildren.