Oahe Dam: A Great Reservoir, a Greater Loss

Just north of Pierre, the Missouri River is held back by one of the largest earthen dams ever built. Oahe Dam was authorized by Congress in nineteen forty-four as part of the Pick-Sloan Plan, a post-war scheme to tame the Missouri with a staircase of enormous reservoirs. Construction began in nineteen forty-eight. President John Kennedy came to Pierre in August of nineteen sixty-two to dedicate the completed project. Lake Oahe, the reservoir behind the dam, stretches two hundred thirty-one miles north to Bismarck, North Dakota. By volume it is the fourth-largest reservoir in the United States.

The engineering achievement was real. The dam controlled flooding, generated electricity, and enabled irrigation across thousands of acres of semi-arid farmland. But the human cost fell almost entirely on people who received almost none of the benefits. The reservoir flooded more than two hundred thousand acres of land belonging to the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Nations, destroying more Native land than any other single public works project in American history. Across the Missouri River main stem dams built under that same plan, roughly ninety percent of the two nations' remaining timber and bottomland, the most productive and habitable land on their reservations, went under water. Entire communities were relocated to bare upland sites with no trees, no shelter, and no infrastructure. Burial grounds, ceremonial sites, and hundreds of archaeological sites were submerged permanently.

The compensation the tribes received was a fraction of the land's worth, negotiated under duress, and the social damage to the communities that were uprooted lasted for generations. When the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy erupted at Standing Rock in twenty sixteen, the wound of Oahe Dam was part of what made that protest resonate so widely. The lake that surrounds you here is beautiful. The story of how it was made is not.