Indigenous
Peoples Specialty Group Selected Sponsored sessions, |
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Cain Allen, University of British Columbia "Damming Nch’i-Wána: Columbia River Development and the Modern Colonial Landscape" The colonial relationship
between Indians and non-Indians in the Columbia River Basin is manifest
in the landscape. In 1957, the federal government built a large multiple-purpose
dam on the mainstem of the Columbia near the city of The Dalles, Oregon,
flooding Celilo Falls, an important Indian cultural site and the center
of a thriving salmon fishery. The lack of regard for Indian conceptions
and uses of the landscape exemplified by this radical modification of
the biophysical landscape had important precedents in Progressive-era
water development projects. Turn-of-the-century progressives constructed
a culturally empty resource landscape out of the Columbia, a landscape
open to appropriation by the nation-state for the “common good.”
Columbia River Indians did not passively accept such colonial constructions
of what they considered fully inhabited cultural landscapes, however;
they resisted in the ways available to them. I conclude by showing how
both the colonial appropriation of the river and anti-colonial resistance
continue to the present day and by speculating about the directions
a conceptual and material decolonization of the landscape might take. KEYWORDS: Columbia River,
colonialism, Native peoples, dams, landscape Email: caallen (at) interchange.ubc.ca
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