Columbia Basin Fish Accords

And now for some Washington state/Pacific Northwest history and legislation:

In 1902, the federal government passed the Reclamation Act establishing the Bureau of Reclamation whose job it would be to provide irrigation works to farms of 160 acres or less located in the western United States. This act was revived and put to use (after years of it being viewed as defunct) by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the proponents of the New Deal. The Bureau of Reclamation began receiving federal funds contributing to social and environmental programs. One of the largest projects was the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. The hydroelectric industry was being introduced to the pacific northwest as the great American rivers were being targeted for their energy powers and were increasingly disallowed to free flow.

Here is a map of the Columbia River Basin and the multiple federal and non-federal dams throughout the entire region. This map also includes a list of the fish species affected by the damming of the Columbia/Snake river system:




The Grand Coulee Dam was a large focus of the broader Columbia Basin Project. It intended to irrigate and facilitate settlement by people from different parts of the country in eastern Washington, as well as to generate cheap hydroelectricity to power industrial development in the growing pacific northwest. The Colville Indian Reservation was located on the land where the dam would be built; the flooding induced by the damming of the river inundated the region and forced 2,000 Colville natives into relocation. This was roughly 1/2 of their population. At the time, most of the Colville practiced subsistence farming along the river bank and/or relied heavily on the fish population of the river. Thus they lived very close to the river and two of their towns were flooded as part of the project. The destruction of these place-based communities represents structural violence; decisions came from the federal government, yet they completely upset the daily lives of individuals on a community-wide scale.

Additionally, the natives of the area, including the Colville and smaller Spokane tribe, were frequent users of Kettle Falls: an important spot below a waterfall where salmon would stall before attempting to jump up the falls making it very easy to extract massive numbers of fish. Kettle Falls were still an important fishing site in the 1930's when this dam was being built, and they were flooded as a result of its construction. Fish passage through the dam system was not addressed in plans for Grand Coulee, despite the fact that the structure blocks roughly 1,200 miles of upstream river, most of which was salmon spawning ground. A passage from the Columbia Basin Fish Accords project brochure outlines the cultural, ecological, and historical importance of salmon in this region and some of the reasons for their decline:

Salmon are extremely important for cultural ceremonies, subsistence, and commercial fisheries. Historically, average annual salmon runs returning to the Columbia River Basin above Bonneville Dam were estimated in the range of 5-11 million fish. Due to overfishing in the lower river and the ocean, the loss and destruction of critical habitat, and the construction of hydroelectric dams, Columbia River salmon runs have declined by over 90percent.

In 1939, local tribes gathered to have a Ceremony of Tears in which they mourned the loss of the salmon as a valuable resource. The regret and emotion displayed in the Ceremony of Tears is indicative of the soul wound that occurred to these people as a direct result of the agencies responsible for the Columbia River hydropower project that affected generations to come and upset daily life.


Here is a picture of several Colville tribe members overlooking Kettle Falls at the Ceremony of Tears:



In 1940, Congress was required to provide "just and equitable compensation for land taken". The Colville tribe was awarded $63, 000 and the Spokane tribe was awarded $4,700. The Colville tribes pursued lawsuits claiming loss of fisheries and lost hydroelectric potential.

In 2008, an agreement was reached between The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (the “Action Agencies”) and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) and became known as the Columbia River Fish Accords.

In the introduction of the memorandum, the Columbia Basin Fish Accords states its primary goals and functions as follows:

• To resolve issues between the Parties regarding the Action Agencies’ compliancewith the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) regarding these FCRPS and Upper Snake Projects;
  

• To resolve issues between the Parties regarding compliance with the PacificNorthwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act (“NWPA”) and the Clean Water Act (“CWA”);
  

• To address the Parties’ mutual concerns for certainty and stability in the funding and implementation of projects for the benefit of fish affected by the FCRPS and Upper Snake Projects, affirming and adding to the actions proposed in the draft FCRPS and Upper Snake Biological Opinions; and
  

• To foster a cooperative and partnership-like relationship in implementation of the mutual commitments in this Agreement.
  

You can read the memorandum in its entirety here.

The Columbia Basin Fish Accords committed the federal agencies responsible for building the federal Columbia River hydropower system including Grand Coulee Dam to ten years of funding for a number of projects managed by the state government as well as indigenous tribes. The practical results of this agreement resulted in the formation of multiple salmon recovery and restoration projects throughout the region. This piece of legislation was specifically designed to restore healthy and sustainable populations to their natural region.

Here is a map detailing some of the projects supported by the Columbia Basin Fish Accords and their corresponding locations.


What is remarkable about this legislation is that it actually makes an effort to incorporate, consider, and recognize as legitimate some of the native views of the land. The Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce tribes gathered together to form a comprehensive recovery plan for the area's salmon. They called it Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit (Spirit of the
Salmon) and it combined modern scientific knowledge and information gathered with modern technologies with the ancient wisdom that these people held of their land. This wisdom is an example of "Traditional Environmental Knowledge" (TEK); accumulated through indigenous communities practicing stewardship of the land and forming a relationship with it. It focuses on the epistemology of the human relationship to the land. In order for TEK to be powerful, it must be recognized as a legible and legitimate knowledge, which is often not the case in discourse politics; there is usually a considerable separation between those with TEK and those with power. The Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi Wa-Kish-Wit plan was designed to restore salmon populations in order to make tribes able to practice rights that had been awarded to them by treaty years ago. This demonstrates an application of law being used to promote alterNative approaches to management. The Columbia Basin Fish Accords secured funding that allowed for the continuation of existing projects of this nature as well as funding for new projects. This represents a step in the right direction toward recognizing and incorporating alterNative approaches to land management.


The successes of this program could inspire additional legislation to be passed with attention to alterNative knowledge and for the first time since the beginning of the 500 year old story, the knowledge/power relationship could begin to make a shift, specifically in the kinds of knowledge that are recognized as deserving of power.