Desert Hawk Books

Empty Nets
Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River

edited by
Roberta Ulrich

 

 

Paperback
256 pages
6" x 9"

Quantity: $19.95 & S/H

 

Empty Nets is a disturbing history of broken promises and justice delayed. It chronicles the Columbia River Indians' fight to maintain their livelihood and culture in the face of an indifferent federal bureaucracy and hostile state governments. The historic and future role of second-growth forests in the West.

1n 1939, the U.S. Government promised to provide Columbia River Indians with replacements for traditional fishing sites flooded in the backwater of the Bonneville Dam. Roberta Ulrich recounts the Indians' struggles to force the government to keep its promise, documenting a sixty-year battle in the courts and on the river for what became known as the "in lieu sites."

From the beginning, the battle was intertwined with the tribes' larger effort to assert treaty-guaranteed fishing rights. Ulrich deftly examines a host of other issues--including declining salmon runs, industrial development, tribal self-government, and recreation--that became enmeshed in the tribes' efforts to achieve enforcement. The story ends in the present. With the government finally offering to provide replacement fishing sites, the promise may yet be fulfilled by 2002.

Ulrich broad and incisive account ranges from descriptions of the dam's disastrous effects on a salmon-dependent culture to portraits of the plights of individual Indian families. Descendants of those to whom the promise was made and activists who have spent their lives working to acquire the sites tell their stories--revealing the remarkable patience and resilience of the Columbia River Indians.

Roberta Ulrich is a former reporter for United Press International and The Oregonian, where she created the paper's first beat covering Native American issues and came to know many of the families dispossessed by the Bonneville Dam. She retired from reporting in 1996 and earned a M.A. in History from Portland State University. She lives in Beaverton, Oregon.