It wasn’t until 2017 that the Oregon Department of Education required schools to teach Native American history. There was nothing in my history or social studies classes about Northwest tribes. Even the region’s iconic farming and timber industries wouldn’t be possible without salmon, whose dying bodies have enriched the Northwest soil with ocean nutrients.īut for decades the injustice at the heart of that story has been systematically hidden. We sacrificed them for cheap electricity. We populated towns to fish for salmon and can them. There’s no one in this region whose life isn’t touched by the fish, whether they think about it or not. I proposed to my wife on a stern-wheeler on the Columbia River, the tourist boat floating on a reservoir created between two dams, in a spot that used to be a series of rapids where tribes fished. My dad’s foundry supply business - the one that housed me, fed me and put me through school - only existed because of the shipping and manufacturing industries enabled by the river and the dams. It sits just south of the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia rivers on land taken from Indigenous people. I live in Portland, Oregon, the city where I grew up. When Whalawitsa said “we pay for that,” he meant tribes like his throughout the Columbia Basin who consider themselves the “salmon people.” And when he said “so everybody else can have that,” he might as well have pointed right at me. “My people have had to sacrifice a lot of these things so everybody else can have that,” Jason Whalawitsa, the father, told me as he fished. But those dams also decimated salmon numbers and wiped out fishing grounds that were central to tribes’ ways of life. Dams through the region’s system of rivers have electrified cities, irrigated crops and powered industry. Only a handful of their tribe still fish this way. Perched on a plywood scaffold over roaring waters, a Wenatchi father and son fished using long nets made by hand and under the cover of darkness so it was harder for salmon to spot them.
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