July 28, 2008

Enduring Village, Part 2: Intersection of past and future
Remembering the past’s tragedies, those living at and fighting for Celilo seek justice

By CORY ELDRIDGE
of The Chronicle


     By the time Lavina Washines interrupts, two of Celilo Village’s residents are already to their feet and the government architect sitting within inches of them at the conference table looks determined not to cry. The Wy-Am board meeting’s second agenda item — “location of lot lines for new home sites options” — enflamed more passion than its name could have ever hoped.
     The discussion of whether to center or offset property lines between the village’s new homes started when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers redevelopment designer, sitting stiff and looking scared, declared she didn’t want to impose any decisions — she would just do what the residents and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) wanted. A few of the dozen audience members voiced grievances about the placement of the redevelopment project’s just-finished homes and the fairness of the yard sizes. Within minutes the two women standing up accused the Corps woman and a BIA representative of favoritism and broken promises.
     Then Washines, an alternate board member from the Yakama Indian Nation, speaks.
     “There’s so much wrong being done here; it’s pitiful, and our people are the victims,” she says. “I’m sorry I lived long enough to witness all of it. I want to see changes made. I want to see the people of Celilo respected.
     “This Columbia River belongs to the Indian people and it always has. And all the riches that the non-Indian is receiving, we’re not a part of, we’re not sharing.      All we got was $3,270 as a payment for the destruction of Celilo Falls, which was an insult to us. Look at our younger generation. They never got a penny out of it and they never got to see Celilo, they never got to enjoy it. So there’s a lot of things the non-Indian has done to destroy us mentally.”
     The comments seem misplaced at the Wy-Am meeting; the board members, who advise the Corps and the BIA of the village residents’ desires, are Indians with personal understandings of the abuse and tragedy experienced by their people. The meeting place, Celilo, is that history’s ultimate symbol.
     But the audience includes as many government workers as Indians. At this meeting, only Washines represents the board, which usually includes one member from the Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama reservations and two from Celilo. The representatives from Warm Springs and Umatilla, who attend most meetings, were at a tribal conference and no one knows why Celilo Village’s board members didn’t make it.
     Only one village resident sits at the table with members of the Corps, the BIA and the Umatilla planning office. Each of those people, the people in charge of Celilo’s redevelopment project, is white or an employee of the federal government.
     Washines’ message is for them, and they’ve heard it before. They know that the lease agreements frighten some people, that some residents dislike the new longhouse, that many with family ties to Celilo didn’t receive homes, that any mistake they make will be tied to all the tragedies heaped on the village since before The Dalles Dam destroyed the falls. Washines, and many others from the region, want to make sure they don’t forget.
     They don’t interrupt.
     “I’m not well liked by these people who sit on this board because I object to a lot of things. And these things that I object they don’t understand at all, it angers them, but that’s too bad,” she says. “I don’t know what else you have on your agenda, but you only have one minute.”

     Heritage and anger, pride and frustration embrace Celilo like a fog. Anyone who visits the place — whether tourists for the salmon feast, reporters for a sob story, or politicians for a photo op — hears of what happened to Celilo Falls: How greed and shortsightedness destroyed what the people held dear. Every person at Celilo, from elders to teenagers, tells a different version and the alterations lie in the details they witnessed, turning a government policy into a personal tragedy.
     The day after the Wy-Am board meeting, its chairman, Antone Minthorn, sits in a booth at the Lone Pine McDonalds. He stopped here for coffee and an interview on his way back from a governance conference at Ka-Nee-Ta to the Umatilla reservation, where he also serves as the chairman of the board of trustees. Minthorn regrets missing the Wy-Am meeting, saying he will have to repair the damage and keep people talking with one another.
     He wears a slate-colored blazer with an Obama pin on the lapel. His long hair, the same color as his blazer, is pulled into two tight threads that come around each side of his neck and tie together at his sternum. He passes his empty paper cup between his hands as he considers the question: What is the benefit for Indians to cling to the memories of their people’s suffering? He takes his time answering the question only a non-Indian would ask.
     “What is the next 200 years going to be like looking ahead?” he asks. “I think we need to be always reminded of those stories of what happened at that time: the policy of the federal government in managing Indian affairs and the hostile legislation that came down (the allotment acts, the termination acts, the acts trying to assimilate Indians into mainstream America). I think the historical perspective is very important, that there is this thing of justice. That justice, you have to make it happen.
     “What happened at Celilo,” he says, describing the redevelopment, “is justice, the actual, physical manifestation of justice. The damage, the hurt brought about by arbitrary kinds of ways — well maybe it’s not all that arbitrary — to wipe out that Indian presence. I think it’s important, that Celilo be there just so people can see it and know the history of why it’s there and know how they fought to be there.”
     He agrees that a level of anger, of bitterness, toward what happened is not bad. But, pointing to his tribe, says it can’t be allowed to stop solutions.
“If we had said, ‘Ah, get out of here we don’t need you,’ we would still be back with no economy, no strong government, us still relying on the BIA to do all this stuff or them terminating us because they can’t manage us. We have to step up and we have to do that business, nobody else can do it. We just have to.”

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     After Celilo Falls drowned under Celilo Lake, the people there, members of the small, unrecognized Wy-Am tribe, fulfilled their ceremonial and religious needs as they always had and resolved conflicts within the village by their chief and elders. But because of Celilo’s unique status as land held in trust for the Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes and the Columbia River Indians, the village had no self-government to manage its modern issues.
     Unlike other towns in Wasco County, the village can’t collect taxes, if it even had a viable tax base or a willingness to impose them. Unlike reservations that have land to develop, Celilo lies on just 34 acres — constricted by cliffs to the south and a rail line and highway to the north — with little room to build a business bigger than a fruit stand. For five decades the village had nothing going for it, except Chief Howard Jim.
     Almost every village home displays photographs of Chief Howard. One postcard-sized picture shows Chief Howard dressed in a white buckskin and a war bonnet of red and blue feathers. He leans his stout frame against a wooden cane, but his expression and stance declare he can crack skulls with that stick.
     Chief Howard came to prominence as one of the great political fighters of the Salmon Wars in the 1970s and 1980s. The battles, waged mostly in courtrooms but also on the banks of the Columbia River, ended when the government agreed to uphold treaty rights and begin to fulfill promises made after building the dams.      During and after this time, Chief Howard held counsel with governors, senators, and presidents. He even went to Europe to support indigenous people’s rights worldwide.
     In 1976, Chief Howard’s pull with the three tribes helped create the first Wy-Am board. Three years later the board drafted a proposal for the future of the village. It included goals as big as self-governance and as grand as purchasing Celilo Park. Small goals included improved housing. The prime mission: Maintain Celilo’s cultural importance.
     The board lacked executive power and funding and the member tribes could veto any of its decisions. It faded by 1990.

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     By this time several homes had burned down and been replaced by trailers without water or sewer connections. Not that the houses always had those luxuries; plumbing in and to many had broken. Some homes were maltreated and the rest suffered from poverty along with their owners. A lack of funds from either the tribes or the government worsened village-wide problems like the sewer system built in 1970 that failed regularly, making the village stink of sewage.
     Chief Howard and other village leaders scrounged enough money, sometimes through bingo competitions, to visit the tribes, especially the Yakama and Warm Springs, to petition for help. In 1997, Chief Howard, three of his children, a son-in-law, and his brother, Warner, traveled to the Umatilla reservation, which had created a successful government and a growing economy. Though far from prosperous, the tribe had reversed a history of failure. And Minthorn, who had long ago fished Celilo Falls, was chairman of the reservation’s board.
     “I had experienced Celilo and knew of its uniqueness and its significance to tribal economy. I knew it was a very important place that should remain. Celilo should always have a presence,” Minthorn says. “It’s still important to us.”
     The Umatilla committed to the village and quickly brought in the other tribes. The Umatilla planning department examined the village and in September 1998 issued their “Celilo Village Redevelopment Study,” which said that, except for a few homes, everything in the village should be replaced. The various plans cost between $3.5 and $5 million — well beyond anything the tribes could manage alone.
     The project may have foundered then, and many residents expected it to, but every time Minthorn came near Celilo he would run into Delilah Heemsah, a resident and now a Wy-Am board member. Each time he saw her, whether at Biggs Junction or The Dalles or Hood River, she asked about the project. It was this light prodding, not lobbying or political muscle, that led the Umatilla to again approach the organization directly responsible for the lost falls and village.
     Every other time they met with the Corps, its revolving-door leadership provided only best wishes. Then, in 2000 Minthorn and Jim Beard, director of the Umatilla planning office, met Brigadier General Carl Strock and asked if the organization that had destroyed the old village and fishing grounds, built the village and installed the failed infrastructure, would work to rebuild it.
     Strock, first among his colleagues, showed interest. He toured the village and like the Umatilla leaders, he decided to help. He assigned George Miller as the project’s director.
     In 2003, with the support of the Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes, the BIA, the Wasco County Court, the Oregon Legislature, Representative Greg Walden, and Senators Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden, the Corps received $13 million from Congress.
     The document detailing the Corps’ redevelopment plan says: “[T]he Flood Control Act of 1950 specifically authorized the Corps to construct ‘a new Village satisfactory to the Indians and Bureau of Indian Affairs.’ Based on review of existing government records, it is clear that satisfactory compensation for the taking of the Tribal lands and impacts of fishing was never fully provided.”
     From the Corps, this statement was the equivalent of an on-its-knees apology to anyone affected by The Dalles Dam.

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     But not everyone affected by The Dalles Dam, nor their descendents, would benefit from the redevelopment project. The single biggest problem for the redevelopment was deciding who deserved a home at the village and then how to fit them in. The village has historically been permanent home to a small population and a seasonal home to a group many times larger who come to harvest salmon.
     “I’ve been to Celilo Village many, many, many times over the past several years; it’s hard to tell who’s there and who’s not,” Miller said, echoing a complaint made by a BIA agent in 1942. “It’s hard to get to know a whole community, particularly if they’re mobile.”
     Add to that the problem that the 1949 BIA leases signed by most of the village’s original residents stipulated that property be transferred to the resident’s heir. (For even more complications, the five families who moved in 1955 owned their houses, though only three of those still stood, and several longtime families lived in unauthorized trailers.) Unfortunately, the BIA’s inconsistent involvement at the village meant designated heirs were not always documented.
     From the project’s start, dozens of people who live on all three reservations, along the Columbia River and even Portland have claimed they deserve a home at Celilo. Some lived there most of their lives, some just as children, while others say their grandparents were forced away from Celilo by the dam’s construction, so they deserve a home.
     “Literally hundreds can make that claim,” says Paul Young, head of the BIA’s Warm Springs office. “So somebody is living off-site and says, ‘My ancestors lived there for 10,000 years. I deserve a home.’ The appropriation language doesn’t say anything about you living there 10,000 years nor does it say anything about your ancestry. [It says to] provide safe and decent houses for the current residents. Not for someone who’s lived there before, or someone who will live there in the future. How many houses can you build? It would be endless. We’re not bad people, we’re not bureaucratic people. It’s been wrenching, it’s been difficult; I don’t know how many sleepless nights I’ve had over this.”
     To limit the claims, the BIA decided to grant homes only to residents who lived in the village since 1998 or to their verified heirs.
     Beside the prospect of getting a new home, the people’s motivation to come rests on the history and aura of Celilo. The people there live on the land of their ancestors. Despite everything they suffered, they held on when the government tried to take it and they stayed despite the difficulties. It creates a survivors’ bond.
     “We make up Celilo now. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s got to be. There are people who are from Celilo, but they chose to go away,” Chief Olsen Meanus says about those who have left over the past few decades. “In my eyes, they left Celilo. It’s not like Celilo was taken from them or somebody kicked them out. They got old enough, and they made a decision that the reservation was better.
     “It might be. They’ve got everything they want there: jobs, houses, transportation, everything, assistance in all ways. Not like us river people, man, we rough it. We rely on that river, whatever it provides for us, what we can make out of it, we can eat, that’s what we live on.”
     In the end, after all the arguing and petitions and tears, the BIA decided 15 families would receive the new, stick-built homes. Requests still come.

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     The day the residents moved from their old homes, Chief Olsen veered from feelings of suspicion about the government’s intention with the redevelopment, to approval of the temporary houses air conditioning, to nostalgia for his old place. Despite its water-damaged ceiling and no plumbing, the home still breathed with the memories of his family and childhood.
     When he first looked over his temporary home’s kitchen that day, he said, “Can’t really [complain] when it’s free.” He paused, mulled his statement, then said, “Well, it’s not free. Our ancestors paid for it. All the arguing, all the treaties — I guess our ancestors were just paying for our generation. It’s what we need. It will be good for the kids to grow in a clean environment. I guess it’s the start of a new way for us.”
     The day the demolition of the old homes began, Sam Jim Jr., Chief Howard’s brother and a tribal leader in Yakama, led an Indian Shaker service around the village’s west half. Indian Shakers use no Bible, have no ties to New England’s shakers, and are the smaller of the region’s two main Indian religions. The other is the Washut, or Seven Drums.
     Followed by a procession of women in white dresses and two men clanging hand bells, Jim stood before each house, dipped two white taper candles in a water-filled mason jar, and chanted a blessing to each house, holding the candles out in his gnarled, arthritic hands, letting the water drip on the ground.      The service cleansed the place of any evil spirits, Jim said, and gave the ghosts permission to leave so the new homes could be built.
     When the buildings were done, as his nieces moved in, he blessed their home. At the end and beginning, the people at Celilo didn’t forget their ways, didn’t pass over their traditions.
     “Culture is who you are. Culture is Cayuse, culture is Umatilla, culture is Yakama, culture is Warm Springs,” Minthorn says. “You want to protect that and you want to keep that. And what they fear is that they’re going to lose their culture; that people are going to tell them how to manage their longhouse and how to cook fish. They don’t want that. The way that you protect that is that you manage your own affairs, you make your own decisions.”
     With Sam Jim, Jr. and other elders who remember their parents’ lessons on being Indian, those who can teach of religion and fishing and root-digging and child-naming and everything else, the culture won’t be forgot. But to make Celilo thrive, to help it regain some of its lost brilliance and find a balance between tradition and modernity may take something else.