Spokane Tribe: The Grand Coulee Dam Took Their Salmon

The Spokane Tribe of Indians, whose name for themselves translates as 'Children of the Sun,' had inhabited the confluence of the Spokane River and the Columbia River and the surrounding plateau for at least eight thousand years before the first Euro-American settlement. Their economy was organized around one of the continent's richest salmon runs. Every year, Chinook salmon moved up the Columbia from the Pacific, through what is now eastern Washington, into the Spokane River and its tributaries. The tribe fished these runs at established sites that had been in continuous use across generations.

In nineteen thirty-three, the federal government began construction on the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. The dam was the largest hydroelectric project in the country, and it was built without the consent of the tribes whose resources it would obliterate. No fish ladder was designed for it. No fish ladder has ever been built for it. When the dam closed in nineteen forty-two, it blocked the Columbia River salmon runs completely. The upper Columbia, including the Spokane River, was cut off from the ocean entirely. The salmon did not come back.

The Spokane Tribe filed for compensation. Congress authorized a settlement in nineteen ninety-four, approximately fifty years after the dam's completion, for the fish runs that would never return. The settlement amount has been described by tribal leaders as inadequate given the magnitude of what was taken and the duration of the deprivation.

The Spokane Tribe's reservation sits near Wellpinit, Washington, about fifty miles northwest of Spokane. The tribe maintains a cultural center and tribal government there. The river that bore their name runs through Spokane's downtown and over the falls where Expo seventy-four was built, while the Columbia below the Grand Coulee dam continues to flow toward a sea the upper-river salmon will never reach again.