Status Updates From Death of Celilo Falls

Through the authorization of the dams, Congress decided that Indians did not have a superior right to fish the Columbia when that right competed with economic progress. Congress and the Corps assumed Indians at Celilo Falls would lose their fishery to a reservoir.

In US treaties with the Yakama, Walla Walla, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and the tribes of Middle Oregon, (all signed in 1855) Indians retained exclusive rights to reservation fisheries and "the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with all citizens of the Territory."

Francis Seifert holds a virtual monopoly over the fish, on account of the fact that the next closest fish market is in Portland, but also because he loans money to fishers on the off season

fish canneries had a strict racial labor hierarchy: native fishers, Chinese canners, and white managers of canning crews (this holds until WWII when the war industries open up to Chinese workers)

The rise in profitability coincided with the introduction of affective refrigeration processes that allowed canners to buy more than they could quickly preserve, thereby increasing demand in the price paid for salmon. Local Indians established the Celilo Fish Committee to ensure that they retained a measure of control over their own fishery.

Electricity would free people of the darkness of night, bring new and innovative industry to the region, liberate women from the worst drudgery of housework, and allow people to live in independent, decentralized centers of commerce.

All of these [sympathetic white] individuals were outraged at the poverty of the Indians around them and sought to ameliorate the worst of the effects of river development. Yet they also all supported the building of the Dalles Dam.

Salmon are anadromous, migrating from freshwater mountain streams to salt water (a transformation that science writer Joseph Cone compared to humans suddenly being able to breathe carbon dioxide) to head for the rich resources of the sea

When armyu engineer HB Elder gave the "gates down" signal to 22 employees, who then pressed 22 buttons to close the Dalles Dam, he concluded a series of events that transformed the environmental, social, and cultural landscape of the mid Columbia River. It is telling the reporter who covered the occasion for the Dalles Chronicle likened it to the destination of an atomic bomb.