Dispatch from the scaffolds: Native fishing culture on the Columbia River
An Indigenous fisherman describes how to hook a salmon, the meaning of life and his faithful dog Sturg.
A flagpole clinks in the wind outside the closed visitor’s center at the Dalles Dam, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. A large American flag, rippling upward in pride, is painted on the dam’s parapets — a strangely static image for such a windy day, as if the dam is stuck in place even as nature moves around it. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the dam in 1957, drowning nearby Celilo Falls — one of the Pacific Northwest’s most important spots for fishing and commerce — and driving away most of the Indigenous population.
Only a few communities remained at the treaty fishing sites on the riverbanks, refusing to leave their homes despite the hostile conditions the United States has created for them. One of them is the Lone Pine community, near The Dalles, Oregon. There, fisherpeople still venture out on scaffolds, just as they always have, to fish for salmon, steelhead and sturgeon. Instead of working in the spray of Celilo Falls, they now labor beneath the angular faces of the dam and its rigid image of the flag.
Lew George, a longtime resident, is a tribal fisherman officially enrolled in the Yakama Nation, though his tribal self-identification is considerably longer and more complicated, meandering to include ancestry from the Umatilla, Modoc, Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Cow Creek Umpqua, Rogue River, Kah-milt-pa (Rock Creek Band of the Yakama Nation) and Pow-un-putt (Pine Creek Band of the Yakama Nation) people. The tribal divisions that we recognize today didn’t exist before colonization, he said, and so he ultimately self-identifies as simply “Columbia River People.” George described his village as “the Fourth World,” meaning it falls short of even Third World conditions; his community has spent decades waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers to fulfill its promise to build housing on the federal land where Lone Pine sits. Meanwhile, the people live in trailers and have to share a single bathroom, relying on bottled drinking water and whatever precious salmon the river continues to provide.
George once considered a career in photography and took a college class to develop his skills. His community rarely allows outsiders to photograph them; George recounted how it felt to see his own image turn up on postcards in an Idaho gift shop. If you don’t consent to a photo, he said, it takes a part of your soul. But during the 1980s and ’90s, he photographed his community from the inside. George met with HCN outside the visitor’s center at the dam to share his photos and the stories behind them. Together, they give those of us from other tribes, or from non-Native communities, insight into the laughter and tragedy, the wonder and the loss, the dogged persistence and the profound sense of caring, of life on a colonized river.
B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster (they/them) is an award-winning journalist and a staff writer for High Country News writing from the Pacific Northwest. They’re a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Email them at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow @[email protected]
