by Langdon Cook
Kat, as she’s called, is a well-known figure in the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, a union of the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla tribes. That day she wore tinted glasses and a necklace of dentalium shells of the sort that would have been especially valuable as a trade item for her ancestors. She knows a lot about the fishery because she’s served as chair of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission three times. Not everyone appreciates a woman in a high position, she admitted. “When my husband first started fishing, it was considered bad luck for a woman to be fishing and touching the gear. The men would give you a look.”
“I still get that look,” her daughter said. Broad-shouldered and wearing a football jersey, Terrie Brigham looked capable of handling any sidelong glances.
Kat Brigham is Cayuse, her husband Walla Walla. Like most Native Americans living along the Columbia, the family has always fished. There was a time, though, when the fishing life seemed in doubt. The Columbia’s salmon runs had plummeted, and the Umatilla River, a tributary that ran through the tribal reservation near Pendleton, Oregon, was entirely barren of salmon by the 1920s. While the reasons for the decline are many and complex, everyone knows the crux of it is the massive hydro complex that transformed the river and the region in the twentieth century. As the river’s traditional resource diminished, competition increased. Brigham experienced firsthand the wrath of white fishermen during the Indian-rights movement of the sixties and seventies. “We used to leave our boats down at the marina, but non-Indians would come down and sugar the tank, cut the cables. To this day my husband always brings his boat home.” She remembered other insults from that time. Their Boston Whaler was shot full of holes. At a sit-in in Portland, a white woman shoved her. “I was gonna take her on, but my husband drug me out of there.” One event she didn’t remember, perhaps the biggest insult of all, was the flooding of Celilo Falls by the Dalles Dam in 1957. “I’m glad I didn’t see it,” she said. She was a little girl at the time. As Native Americans on the banks wept at the sight of the rising water submerging one of their most sacred sites, her parents took her away to higher ground, away from the river. In 1987 she brought her own children to Bonneville Dam’s fiftieth anniversary, to witness the pomp and ceremony.
“Is that when you made us protest?” Campbell interrupted from behind the counter. All three women broke into peals of laughter.
“Yes, and when they had the seventy-fifth anniversary they made sure to invite us.”
“Back then we thought we could change everything and make it better,” Terrie Brigham said of the dams. By we she really meant the newcomers, the white people; they were the ones who looked at the river and saw something different, something better, that didn’t involve salmon and fishing. “I hope we’ve become a little more humble. We can’t make anything better than what nature has already put out there.” Her mother nodded. Kat Brigham didn’t expect to see any of the Columbia River dams taken down in her lifetime. “We’d like to see the dam operations change, though,” she said. This included spilling more water in the spring and summer months to aid young fish migrating to the ocean, something that the Bonneville Power Administration is reluctant to do unless forced by lawsuits.
The battles their mother fought, Campbell said, were a far cry from their new problems—good problems. Now they have a business to run. Product to move in and out. Debt payments to make. They’re part of the American market economy. Terrie Brigham, for one, didn’t think it was useful to read too much symbolism into this. Columbia River Indians have been participating in the Euro-American market economy for a century and a half. They charged Oregon Trail emigrants to portage their boats and belongings around the Cascade Rapids. They sold salmon to the first canneries. It wasn’t as if capitalism was considered a dirty word. Could the salmon survive in a market system? All of them thought so, as long as there were hatcheries.
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OUTSIDE, NEXT TO A half-finished fire pit, family friends moved picnic tables aside for the ceremony, as more people arrived and curious bystanders came off the street. From my position I could catch a glimpse of the river. Beyond it in the distance rose the broad escarpment of Table Mountain, its sheer red-rock face the remnant of a fifteenth-century landslide that cleaved off the south flank and swept much of it across the Columbia. The natural dam that remained backed up the river for miles and formed what Native American lore called the original Bridge of the Gods, a story confirmed by modern geology. Indian legends tell of fair maidens, jealous rivalries, and the wrath of vengeful kings—stories that tried to make sense of the erupting volcanoes, landslides, floods, and other natural phenomena that once framed their lives. When the river finally broke through the Bridge of the Gods to reclaim its channel, it scattered boulders downstream like a broom sweeping away a pile of dust, creating the Cascade Rapids, at one time one of the most desirable fishing sites in the gorge. Though Bonneville Dam destroyed the Cascade Rapids, many of the river people, the Brighams included, continued to fish traditional sites in the area that had been handed down for generations.
A dark-skinned middle-aged man wearing braided pigtails and a salmon-colored dress shirt asked everyone to put away their cameras and segregate by gender. Behind him stood four drummers. “Today we come here to show our hearts to our creator,” he began. “As Indian people we try our best to follow examples of the people before us. This belief was given to us way before the white man came here.” He explained that today the assembled would sing three songs—one for the body, one for the heart, and one for life—to bless this ground, this new building, and the family that owned it. He rang a bell and the drumming began.
From my place among the men, I watched the Columbia below while listening to the percussive rhythms of the drummers. It was hard to believe the river wasn’t always flat and nearly featureless, and picturing it roaring through a rock garden of its own making took effort. I tried to imagine the legendary watercourse as Lewis and Clark had seen it: a mile-wide beast raging toward the ocean, a wild river like no other. Wouldn’t it be something to see that again? But such a fantasy is probably a minority position today. The river, such as it is, rolls on, in the words of Woody Guthrie.
Chanting voices and drumbeats brought me back to the little parking lot high above the south bank, where a Native American family was busy making history of a sort. When the three songs were over, the pigtailed man addressed the crowd again. “Our old people have told us this land was created first. The land spoke and said, ‘I have prepared myself for the Indian people. I will take care of them.’ This is what the land spoke when time was new.”
Hearing these words and looking across the gorge, at the mountains and the river that parted them, at a rock face suddenly and irrevocably created several hundred years ago and still visible today—even if the results of its formation, the Bridge of the Gods and the Cascade Rapids, were now buried beneath Bonneville Pool—I felt myself fall into a sort of vertigo, a feeling of tumbling through time. The speaker told of the creation of man and woman, how the salmon came next. “Today we honor the salmon as sacred to our religion, to our language, to our tradition and custom. This is what our old people have taught us. Since time was new, salmon has been a part of our life, and today the salmon is still part of our life.” Boys played a game of pebbles in the dirt as he spoke. A man in work boots and a flowery vest came over and told them to knock it off. The sun continued to rise high above the river on this, the longest day of the year, and I heard the ringing of another bell. Brigham Fish Market, the first Native American brick-and-mortar fish market in the Columbia River Gorge, a place where people have been fishing for ten thousand years, had been blessed.
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AFTER THE CEREMONY, still feeling the odd sensory confusion of centuries condensed into a droplet of time, I walked on slightly unsteady legs down to the former locks to take a closer look at the river. This stretch was one of the first to be transformed by American industrialists. Lewis and Clark portaged around the Cascade
Rapids in 1805, calling it the “Great Shute,” with water “foaming & boiling in a most horrible manner.” It was an equally treacherous passage for steamships trying to move goods and people upriver and down. The locks were started in 1878, finished nearly twenty years later in 1896, and became obsolete with the completion of Bonneville Dam in 1938.
Today a museum and park mark the site, with a concrete-lined channel where Kim Brigham Campbell’s fifteen-year-old son, Brigham, was fishing from a traditional Indian platform suspended from a stone retaining wall. He figured he’d been fishing since he was six or seven. The scaffolding that supported him hung over the river, connected by high-tension cables. With one hand gripping a long pole, he sank a net ten feet down, while his other hand held a line tied to the back of the mesh. “Sometimes on the pole I get a little tweak sideways or it’ll shake a little bit,” he explained of the technique. “But mostly I feel it on the string.” And just like that, he pulled up on the line and hauled in his net. Several shad thrashed in the mesh, their large silver scales lighting up like strobes in the sun. He dumped them in a bucket and continued to fish. Earlier that morning he had caught a seven-pound steelhead. Sockeye are harder to catch. “It’s lucky to get just one. Two is really good. My mom got two yesterday.” Spring chinook require extra vigilance; otherwise, they can do damage. “Your pole shakes. You’ve got to get it up fast. If it gets its head down and shakes, it’ll break the net.” The steelhead and sockeye were all filleted and sold in the market. The shad got pulverized into fish cakes or sold as bait to sturgeon fishermen, who fished for the prehistoric-looking bottom-feeders in the deep pools behind the dams.
Everyone in Brigham’s family fished. For his grandparents, the fishing life had been fraught with problems for many years. As the era of big-dam building came to a close, a pair of landmark court cases reinvigorated Native American salmon fisheries. The 1969 Belloni and 1974 Boldt decisions clarified language stretching all the way back to the original treaties of the 1850s, which guaranteed the tribes’ fishing rights at “all usual and accustomed grounds and stations…in common with all citizens of the Territory.” Consequently, the tribes in Washington State and along the Columbia River can once again fish at their traditional sites—and perhaps more significant, as a result of linguists unpacking the nineteenth-century terminology “in common with,” they get half the total catch, with the other half split between non-Indian recreational and commercial fishermen. Years of acrimony and general lawlessness followed these decisions. White fishermen protested, and state officials allowed a free-for-all flouting of fisheries regulations to go on in Puget Sound and elsewhere, prompting the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to call Washington State’s role in the controversy “among the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”
Now the tribes work with state and federal fisheries officials to manage the harvest. The early years of co-management were difficult. The tribes didn’t have any scientists. The white technicians laughed, Kat Brigham recalled, when a tribal elder said the salmon were coming because the dogwoods were blooming. “How tribal people saw the world was not technical. It was based on Mother Nature’s signs. The non-Indians didn’t see it that way. Rather than try to understand it, they made fun of it.” Undeterred, she joined a tribal fish-and-wildlife committee and began meeting with state fisheries managers. “I used to drive my grandfather and father-in-law to meetings.” They had to make their way through crowds of angry people carrying signs that said BELLONI IS FULL OF BOLOGNA and SAVE A SALMON, CAN AN INDIAN. Brigham remembered meeting a sport angler who said he’d rather have zero fish than share the catch with Indians. The comment made me think of white anglers I’ve met through the years who think nothing of maligning Indians for their fishing rights, anglers who would never utter disparaging words about African Americans or Asian Americans—“That’s racist”—yet somehow feel that the first Americans do not deserve the same consideration.
In recent years, to ensure an adequate supply of ceremonial and subsistence fish, the four main treaty tribes along the Columbia—the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce—have actively pursued a strategy of building salmon hatcheries, much to the chagrin of environmentalists. This is one of the central ironies on the Columbia River. One might think the tribes and environmentalists would be natural allies, but it hasn’t turned out that way. “We work with the environmentalists, but at the same time we’re not environmentalists,” Brigham told me. “Because of the dams, these hatcheries have to mitigate for the losses. There will always be a need for hatcheries. As tribal leaders we’re willing to sit down and talk, but always in the back pocket is that treaty right. We stand on our treaty right. If we don’t, our kids’ children and their children won’t be able to fish.”
Listening to her, I was reminded of an environmentalist I had met recently, a biologist by training who, I suspect, loves salmon just as much as Kat Brigham does, but for different reasons. When I asked her opinion of Kathryn Brigham at a fundraiser, she smiled enigmatically, drained her vodka martini in a single gulp, and composed herself. “Kat Brigham,” she said finally, “has been a very strong leader for her people.” With that, she looked at her empty glass and excused herself to the bar.
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WALKING TO MY CAR to head home, I passed beneath the man-made Bridge of the Gods one more time, where a small bazaar of Indian goods was for sale in its shadow. A gaunt, toothless man who said he’d driven over from the Warm Springs reservation had an eight-pound steelhead for $7 a pound. I told him I’d already bought some salmon at the market. “That’s okay, I know those people,” he said. His Bonneville scaffold a few miles downriver was next to a Brigham scaffold. “They’re good people. I’ve watched their kids grow up.”
Nearby, in the shade of a canopy, a Yakama man with a long ponytail jumped out of his beach chair to show me what a June hog looked like. He threw open his big Igloo cooler and grabbed by the gill the lone fish that lay in its ice bed, hoisting it up with tensed biceps. “This is the real deal.” It was an impressive fish, maybe twenty pounds, lustrous with just a hint of rose beginning to show underneath, and deep in the belly, just the way Kevin Davis likes them. Historically, the June hogs, as they were called by white settlers, were summer chinook bound for the highest headwater tributaries of the Columbia, sometimes as far as a thousand miles upriver from the ocean, all the way into Canada. At Kettle Falls, whose Salish name means “noisy waters,” Native Americans from many different tribes would catch the hogs in baskets lowered into the boiling river, an ancient fishery erased by Grand Coulee Dam. Like the spring chinook that preceded them, the hogs were known for having high fat concentrations to see them through a long migration and many months in fresh water without feeding. They were also known for being exceptionally large. Fish of fifty pounds were common, and tales of June hogs tipping the scales at a hundred pounds were not unknown. I’d seen black-and-white pictures: white men predating the dam era, dressed in their finest dinner suits and standing next to a salmon as tall as themselves dangling from a hoist. As far as I knew, I’d never tasted one. Most people hadn’t. Grand Coulee snuffed out the run of June hogs, and even though many anglers swear there are still a few to be found below the dam, fisheries biologists question whether the strain that gave rise to these tremendous fish is still in the gene pool. Hatcheries on the upper river tried to maintain the stock, but their efforts came to naught.
I looked the fish over. Experienced anglers say they can tell June hogs by sight. They have more girth than spring chinook, blunter faces. They’re heavier overall for their size. A few are rumored to be hanging on in unnamed tributaries just downstream of Grand Coulee. This stocky salmon fit the bill. At $10 a pound, it was a $200 fish. I studied it more closely. The salmon had an adipose fin. A wild hog, possibly? It was easy to feel conflicted about the taking of a wild fish, especially one from a run that was veiled in such myth. But then I thought about it within the con
text of Native American fisheries and ten thousand years of salmon fishing—and I continued to think about it as I drove away, my wallet $180 short of a sale. That big fish stuck in my head. Exits went by, and each time I considered jamming on the brakes and turning around. I could find an ATM somewhere….
Several miles west of Cascade Locks, my phone rang. “When a star explodes,” the voice on the other end said, “one of the last things it does is expand exponentially at an astonishing rate, using up all the matter around it before collapsing back upon itself into a black hole.” It was Rene Henery, my ecologist friend in California. He was calling from the road, on his way across the Sierras for a fisheries meeting with other scientists, wanting to hear about my trip to the gorge. “I think we’re seeing the exploding star right now,” he said, “and while collapse may be imminent, the dawn of recovery could also be right around the corner.” Despite his work as an ecologist, which seemed to me to be an exercise in occupational depression, Rene was always trying to see the bright side of an otherwise dreary picture. “There are multiple paths,” he liked to remind me. I told him I was wrestling with the tribal paradox in the Columbia Basin. Money, lots of it, was flowing into salmon restoration efforts, some of it considered dirty money. Conservationists were frustrated with the tribes for taking payouts from Bonneville Power in exchange for their silence on the hydro complex—the Fish Accords, as they were known. The amount was something like a billion dollars over ten years. “Selling out” was the expression I heard a lot.
“You know, that’s funny to hear,” Rene said, “because down here in California the Columbia restoration is being held up as a model for the future. Down here we’re envious of all the money and resources the Northwest has in salmon recovery. We don’t have any. The idea is simple: Make the resource extractors pay for salmon recovery. Make Big Ag and its federal enablers pay for it in California.”