The Columbia River Treaty: Canada Paid for American Power

On January seventeenth, nineteen sixty-one, the United States and Canada signed the Columbia River Treaty, which authorized the construction of three large dams in British Columbia. The dams would store water in Canadian valleys, regulating the Columbia's flow for the benefit of American hydroelectric generation and flood control downstream. In exchange, the United States agreed to pay Canada a share of the power benefits.

What the treaty required, in practical terms, was the flooding of three Canadian valleys. More than fourteen hundred residents of British Columbia were displaced, many of them descendants of Doukhobor religious settlers who had come to the Arrow Lakes region specifically to be left alone. The displaced communities themselves received no share of those power benefits. It was the province of British Columbia, not the people whose valleys were flooded, that received the downstream power payments, known as the Canadian Entitlement, from the start of the agreement.

Canadian First Nations whose territories were flooded were not parties to the negotiations. Their lands, their fishing sites, and their communities were affected by the agreement between two national governments that had not consulted them.

The Columbia River Treaty is now under renegotiation. Its original term structures have shifted, and Canadian First Nations have demanded formal inclusion as co-negotiators, a status the original treaty did not contemplate for any Indigenous people on either side of the border. The river, which has been managed jointly by the two countries for sixty years, remains a shared system with contested governance.

The dam you may have crossed at Bonneville was the first on the Columbia, and it was built on the logic that eventually reached British Columbia: the river was a resource to be engineered, and the people in its path were a problem to be managed.