The Yakama Nation, the Treaty That Promised Fish, and the Contamination That Came After

On June ninth, eighteen fifty-five, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation signed the Treaty of Camp Stevens with Isaac Stevens, the Governor of Washington Territory. The Yakama ceded more than ten million acres in exchange for a reservation in the Columbia Plateau and a guarantee: the right to continue fishing, hunting, and gathering at all their traditional sites, including along the Columbia River. The fish were not a minor provision. They were the center of the Yakama economy, their spiritual foundation, and a food source they had used for thousands of years.

Ninety years later, the federal government began operating the Hanford nuclear site sixty miles upwind of the Yakama reservation. For twenty-seven years, from nineteen forty-four through nineteen seventy-one, Hanford released radioactive iodine, cesium, and other isotopes into the Columbia River and into the atmosphere over the plateau. The Yakama's treaty-protected fisheries, the river they had been promised access to for all future time, were contaminated by the releases. The foods their treaty had secured, river fish and camas root gathered in plateau fields, carried radioactive material that the Yakama had no way to detect and no governmental warning to avoid.

The Yakama Nation has been a named party in Hanford environmental litigation and has conducted its own environmental monitoring program on the Columbia River and surrounding plateau lands. The tribe's data has consistently documented contamination in treaty-protected food resources. The treaty of eighteen fifty-five is still in effect. The contamination is ongoing at levels that remain subjects of active monitoring.

The fishing sites along the Columbia where the Yakama have fished since long before any treaty was signed are still in use, through rights that no level of government has ever formally extinguished. What the fish have carried has changed.