March 10, 2025 — On this day in 1957, 13 miles upriver from the brand-new Dalles Dam on Big River (currently known as “The Columbia”), the ancient fishing and trading emporium of Celilo Falls was swallowed by rising waters within a few hours. The death was witnessed by an estimated 10,000 descendants of the dozens of Native peoples whose ancestors had come to rely on Celilo Falls as the economic epicenter of what we now call the Pacific Northwest.
The long, elaborate, pulsing, three-dimensional maze of river geology that is the currently submerged Celilo Falls is located here, running from what is marked on today’s maps as “Celilo Falls Village” and stretching across the river to its north shore. Moved to higher ground after the inundation, Celilo Falls Village is a stand-in for the dozens of ancient village sites, up and down Big River on both sides, that were also drowned along with Celilo Falls.
Those submerged sites are now watery tombs for an 11,000+ year old civilization driven almost to the brink of extinction: for everything from the ancient burial grounds along both shorelines, to the petroglyphs and pictographs that once filled the basalt cliffs lining both sides of the river.
Until the 1957 drowning, the salmon came back up Big River every spring and fall to spawn where they had been spawned, up hundreds of tributary rivers and creeks in present-day Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, British Columbia and Alberta. Once there, they would thrash around in their exhausted death-spasms from the journey, creating millions of young salmon who would swim back to the ocean, leaving their bodies to feed the waters and fertilize the riverbank grasses and trees.
Located at the narrowest and thus most harrowing spot along Big River, Celilo Falls grew — over the course of several thousand years — into a great trading emporium. Salmon was the staple protein for the entire surrounding civilization, the same way the bison fed the native peoples up and down the great middle of the continent. Piles of newly dried salmon were exchanged for buffalo robes from the east, elk and venison from the north and south, and a wealth of food and fur products from the sea to the west.
When peoples from all over the region gathered at Celilo Falls during the spring and fall salmon migrations, there were ceremonies, marriages, dances, music, alliances forged or strengthened, extended families reunited. The central ritual was the First Salmon Ceremony, where the people gave thanks for the great bounty of the river.
This was the world Lewis & Clark found as they passed through in 1805 on their way to the ocean. As they had with so many other wandering trappers and traders, the Natives who lived along Celilo Falls and made their living operating the flow of traffic and trade around them ferried the famed explorers and their “Corps of [White] Discovery,” provisioning and sending them west. (Corp of “White” discovery because the locals already knew they were there, and had been all those millennia.) Little did those accommodating locals know what would soon follow. But in 1805, and on the time-scale of the Natives’ familial histories and origin stories, the wandering through their world of white people with bearded faces must have seemed like just another random disruption, like after one of the mountains on either side of Big River threw a fit of fire, rock, ash, and mudflows.
Accidents of Geologic History
Over the 10+ millennia prior to their drowning in 1957, Celilo Falls had arisen as the greatest trading hub in the region because – as with the location of all historic towns – that is where the river changed.
In a nearly straight line across Big River, one that ran for hundreds of miles to the north and south, the high desert to the east buckled, giving rise to a long march of sudden mountains glistening with ice and snow. Those volcanoes had once erupted on a scale big enough to cap the entire desert with basalt; ever since, they had been throwing tantrums that produced glaciers, lakes, and rivers in every direction. From the east, on both sides of Big River, a sea of sagebrush and juniper crashed into new foothills, which turned into ponderosa and pinon pine, then cedar and spruce, treeline, and finally two great mountaintops: Wy’East (currently known as “Mount Hood”) and Klickitat or Pahto (“Mount Adams”).
Jealous rivals for the love of Loowit to the west (“Mount St Helens”), Wy’East and Klickitat/Pahto contended for her affection by throwing fiery rocks at each other. The great lava and mud flows that followed each physical confrontation over Loowit re-made the flow of Big River: most spectacularly in the 1400s, at the once mighty cross-river rock garden, the Bridge of the Gods (also innundated, in 1938 behind the Bonneville Dam); upriver from that, the rest of Big Hole (the “Columbia River Gorge”); and further upriver, past Celilo Falls, hundreds of geologic landmarks drowned behind as many dams around the region.
From the east, Big River gathered its strength from those hundreds of rivers and creeks running down from distant mountain ranges and across the desert; to the west, it plunged between Wy’East and Klickitat into a gorge so steep and deep it looked like it had been cut with a great splitting ax from the sky. And for all those spectacular geographic messes they had made, Wy-East and Klickitat still leered at each other across the Big River. Even now, with Loowit horribly disfigured after blowing her own head off in 1980, they were apparently still fighting over her.
No one knew exactly how many thousands of years the peoples who lived up and down Big River and its tributaries had been giving thanks to the ever-returning, life-sustaining fish in their First Salmon ceremonies. For all those thousands of years, they could fish like that – eating and preserving what they could, trading away that much and more to distant tribes who had come to trade — because they figured out how much not to fish each spring and fall. They knew to let the big salmon pass, the females loaded with eggs. They knew to set aside whole days when all the spawning salmon should pass. And they knew to give thanks for this never-ending bounty, ritualizing their gratitude and passing on all that knowledge in the First Salmon Ceremony, with song and prayer, drum and dance, knife and bonfire at places like Celilo Falls. Maybe the seasonal return of the salmon up Big River to all those tributaries – despite all the dams with their mandated concrete “fish ladders,” diesel belching barges, and all the chemicals and other human crap leaching into Big River from all the new towns – was really just biology, and had nothing to do with their prayers. And still they practice the First Salmon Ceremony, believing that the ritual will keep the salmon coming, because it worked, because it had always worked.
And why not? Within the collective living memory of the peoples who still practice the ritual are events like the creation of the Bridge of the Gods in the 1400s, an event that altered their world in no less significant a way than the drowning of Celilo Falls.
The “Shadow Tribe” is Still Here
When viewed on this time-scale, is it any wonder that the descendants of people who grew up on stories that melded human and geologic events would stick it out near (the currently submerged) Celilo Falls?
If they are a “shadow” tribe, as historians call them generically, it is because deep in the shadow of history was the only place they figured out how to keep living as who they are. Most of their great-great-grandparents had been driven, along with three very different tribes from out in the high desert, south to Warm Springs, one of the concentration camps set up in the 1850s to clear “Oregon Territory” for the newcomers. Their descendants in the “Consolidated Tribe of Warm Springs” may never have fully assimilated into “America” but at least they would become “reservation Indians” and at the very least, they would be out of the way.
But not all of them. Some refused to move and stayed right there, living in the old village sites along the river for the last 160 years, so far. When the US government chose to drown Celilo Falls and all the adjacent villages, graveyards, and cliff art, the survivors did not relent and move to Warm Springs; they simply moved their villages to higher ground and carried on, while the dams and power plants and towns went up all around them and the railroad and interstates cut right through what villages they had left.
They never legally organized as a tribe or tribes. But during the odd spasm of liberal feeling in the 1970s, after the Alcatraz Occupation and the bloody stand-off at Wounded Knee, those still living in the villages – and tribes all around the country – won the legal right to keep fishing in their traditional way. In the decades that followed, angry white fisherman and bored or bitter locals did their best to run them out, burn them out, shoot them out. And yet, they are still there, living alongside Big River, maintaining the fishing platforms, trying to protect them from trespassers and vandals, still holding First Salmon Ceremonies with the spring and fall runs.
Historians have come to call them “The Columbia River Indians,” a handy collective term for people who trace their lineage to the Wyam, the Wasco, the Wishram. They do not have a reservation; there aren’t any signs marking where they lived then or live now; and white people in the nearby towns do not seem to know they are there. Instead, the area is now famous for Hood River, the “kite-surfing capital of the world,” where Big River narrows and plunges into Big Hole — and for the Google server farm built next to the Dalles Dam to take advantage of its ultra-cheap electricity.
When I ask locals about the “shadow tribe” or “Columbia River Indians” living in their midst, all I get are funny looks — especially when they realize that I am asking about an actual people whose name the locals on the south side of the river say every time someone asks them where they live: Wasco County, Oregon.
Like half the counties that line Big River – and as with a preponderance of counties all over the continent not named “Washington,” “Jefferson,” “Madison,” “Hamilton,” “Jackson” or “Lincoln” – Wasco County was named for the people the county’s founders drove away, south to Warm Springs. Or at least thought they had driven away, as if this were requisite to the incorporation process, like clearing away a forest to start a farm or draining a wetland to build a factory.
And yet, the Natives are still here, still fishing from platforms suspended from the basalt cliffs in much the same way as their ancestors did, for those few salmon able to navigate the dams downriver. The platforms look like nothing more than a rickety sheet of plywood, held by two cables bolted into the rock, accessed by climbing down from the bluff, and picking your way across the rocks and other platforms.
They stand on those platforms, hovering over the raging whitewater, holding their dipnets out over a rocky stairstep in the falls. Motionless, waiting for a migrating salmon, some up to three feet long and 60 or 70 pounds, to leap its way upriver, and – whoosh! — there it is in a flash of silver, in the net: a flailing of silver and gray at their feet on the platform, another gleaming salmon, like the color of ocean water and sky mixed together.
Tribes on both sides of the river – many of them migrating from hundreds of miles away for the season – had fished exactly like that on all of those rivers, every late spring and early fall, for thousands of years. It takes balance, strength, patience, lightning strike reflexes, and sheer nerve. There are platforms like that suspended out over every cascade too high for “the Columbia” to have drowned out Big River; there are dozens more of them up and down every tributary running into the river from across the high desert – rivers named for the people who have lived along their banks for all those millennia: the Klickitat, Walla Walla, Okanogan, Yakama, Spokane, Umatilla, and Deschutes; the Mah-hah, or what the maps call the “John Day;” and the Yam-pah-pa, or what the maps call “the Snake,” which reaches all the way back into present-day Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
For all those thousands of years, the Natives could fish like that – eating and preserving what they could, trading away that much and more to distant tribes who had come to trade – because they figured out how much not to fish each spring and fall. They knew to let the big salmon pass, the females loaded with eggs. They knew to set aside whole days when the spawning salmon should just pass. And they knew to give thanks for this never-ending bounty, ritualizing their gratitude and passing on all that knowledge in the First Salmon Ceremony.
Maybe the seasonal return of the salmon up Big River to all those tributaries – despite all the dams and their paltry concrete “fish ladders,” all the diesel-belching barges, and all the chemicals and garbage leaching into Big River from all the new towns – was really just biology, and had nothing to do with their prayers. But it’s what the Natives believed, they believed it because it worked, because it had always worked, and they say they still believe it.
Celilo Falls is Still Here Too
Today, Big River up from the Dalles Dam now broods where it once raged. A turgid, manufactured back eddy roils in confusion, 50 feet above the elaborate, three-dimensional maze of river geology that was Celilo Falls and all those drowned villages, graveyards, and artwork.
Viewed from the high and dry plateaus rising quickly from both shores, it floods out as a giant, metallic blue expanse of water, wide and long as any other “impoundment” from the great dam-building days. Most days, the sun is out and the shimmering surface is flecked with dozens of barges, tugboats, sailboats, speedboats, fishing boats, and down at one end, the rainbow dots of windsurfers and kite-surfers skittering over the surface like waterbugs.
Underneath it all, Celilo Falls will flow again, one way or another.
There are calls to remove the Dalles Dam as part of the broader eco-restoration movement — from Northern California and throughout the Pacific Northwest — to remove dams and resurrect all our once wild rivers. But there is fierce political opposition, as there is against all other dam removals in the region. The objections, dressed up as worry over energy or transportation, are part of the culture war that resists any change to the status quo, especially change that would benefit the natural world and/or redress historic racism and social injustice.
It is true: for hundreds of miles upriver of the Dalles Dam, and all the way west to the Pacific Ocean 180 miles away, Big River currently serves as a dam-controlled, flat-water freeway for barges getting commodities to market, even as two lightly used railroad lines run along both banks shipping the same commodities. The Dalles Dam also still produces electric power, far more than the region needs as new solar farms spread across the high desert to the south and east, and giant windmills spike the ridges to the north and east. And the area west of the dam all the way through and past Hood River, has been turned into another adventure playground: the strong, steady winds blowing up and down “the Columbia” inspired the invention and popularization of windsurfing and kite-surfing, another bucket list check-off item that has made the rounds in all the adventure sports magazines since the 1990s. But the kite-surfing — not to mention the fishing — would get only bigger and better with a free-flowing river.
But this is a culture war, and the side resistant to changing anything about a landscape wins by endless delay if not default. Given the opposition to the removal of the Dalles Dam, Celilo Falls is more likely to flow again not through direct human intervention, but as a consequence of inevitable environmental collapse — the one set in motion by the two centuries of newcomers who overwhelmed not just this region, but the natural carrying capacity of most of the rest of the American West. After the cataclysmic drought, conflagration, and agricultural collapse that will reclaim the region, the Dalles Dam will eventually topple beneath the massive, accumulating weight of the silt trapped behind it; Big River will flow free once again; and the salmon will return in their original numbers, as they had for millennia.
Such an apocalyptic end to the culture war may or may not happen in our lifetimes. But it will occur on the same time-scale that plots human habitation amidst geologic events active enough to inspire stories about jealous mountains throwing fire at each other.
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