The Garrison Dam and the Flooding of Fort Berthold

The letter arrived at the Fort Berthold Reservation in nineteen forty-seven. It said the Army Corps of Engineers planned to build a dam on the Missouri River below the reservation, and the reservoir it created would flood approximately one hundred fifty-two thousand acres of tribal land, the river-bottom farms and villages where the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara had lived for generations. The tribal chairman at the time was George Gillette.

On May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight, in Washington D.C., Gillette signed the taking agreement under what he and other tribal leaders described as coercive circumstances.

A widely published photograph shows him at the signing table, his face in his hands, weeping. He said afterward, 'The members of the Three Affiliated Tribes are being uprooted from their homeland, from their centuries-old ties with the land.' The Garrison Dam was completed in nineteen fifty-three.

The reservoir, Lake Sakakawea, is the largest man-made lake in the United States by surface area. The flooding displaced roughly one thousand seven hundred people, nearly the entire permanent population of the reservation, from the most productive bottomland on the reservation. They were relocated to the surrounding upland hills, land that was drier, more isolated, and far less suitable for agriculture.

The federal payment for the taking was substantially less than the tribe's appraisal of the land's value. The legal and moral questions raised by the Garrison Dam taking, treaty obligations, adequate compensation, the weight of federal power against tribal consent, have never been fully resolved. The Three Affiliated Tribes have pursued renegotiation through Congress for decades.

The flooding is considered by many tribal members to be the central trauma of modern MHA Nation history.