The Columbia River and Grand Coulee Dam

The Columbia River is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest, twelve hundred miles from its headwaters in the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific Ocean at the Oregon border. At its peak flow, before the dams, it carried more water to the Pacific than any other river in the Americas.

For the Colville Confederated Tribes, the Spokane, the Yakama, and the other peoples of the Columbia Plateau, the river was life itself. Kettle Falls, near present-day Colville, had been a salmon fishery and a meeting place for thousands of years. Nations gathered each season to harvest the great chinook and sockeye runs, to trade, to renew relationships.

In nineteen thirty-three, with the Depression grinding the country down, the federal government broke ground on Grand Coulee Dam, a project of almost incomprehensible scale: the largest concrete structure on earth when it was completed in nineteen forty-two. The dam delivered on its promise, hundreds of thousands of acres of eastern Washington desert bloomed under its irrigation, and the dam's generators powered the aluminum smelters and shipyards that helped win the Second World War.

The cost fell heavily on the tribes. Grand Coulee had no fish ladders. The dam was simply too high. Kettle Falls, the ancient fishery, vanished beneath Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake in nineteen forty. The Colville and Spokane tribes lost salmon runs that had sustained them for millennia, receiving no meaningful compensation for decades. Roughly two thousand Colville tribal members were displaced from lands flooded by the reservoir. Ancient villages, ceremonial sites, and burial grounds went under the water permanently.

The Columbia's story is not a simple story of progress. It is a story about who paid for whose prosperity, and who is still paying.