March 11, 2007

Silenced thunder
The raging waters and jagged cliffs of Celilo Falls are gone,
but far from forgotten beneath the deep waters of the Columbia

By KATHY GRAY
of The Dalles Chronicle

     Ronnie Jim remembers the lure of Celilo Falls. Jim was only eight years old when the falls ceased, but he remembers the strict warnings of his parents — and ignoring those warnings.
     “Me and my brother used to sneak down with our other friends, and we used to play down by the canal barges,” he remembers. “And we used to go down to the drawbridge, where they had the cable cars, and get on and make the crossing to the island.”
     Inevitably, one of his many relatives would spot the wayward boys and usher them back to the shore.
     “We’d always get caught,” he said.
     Jim sits in his pick-up truck Tuesday, recalling bits of his brief years before March 10, 1957. While others from Celilo Village may have stronger memories of the way of life that centered on the falls, Jim remembers the sensations.
     “I know there was a lot of thunder that came down on the falls, and a lot of mist in the air,” he says. “You could smell the fish water.”
     Today, the roar comes from the nearby freeway, and the rumble from railroad tracks that front Celilo Village.
     Jim has made his living by the river for at least 40 of his 57 years. Health reasons now keep Jim off the river. Today his son comes from Toppenish, Wash., to fish at his sites.
     “From childhood I was taught by my grandmother and grandfather,” he says. “They always stressed that we should always live by the river. If we left the river, we could lose all our rights to be along the river.”
     While many of Jim’s relatives were spread far and wide as a consequence of the tribal enrollments that divided family members between the Umatilla, Yakama and Warm Springs tribes, he and many of his kin took heed of their grandparents’ lessons. Jim estimates he is related to three quarters of today’s Celilo Village residents in one way or another.
     “Here, we’re one big family that fishes a lot,” Jim says.
Fishing is like gambling for the river Indians, Jim notes, and a bigger gamble today than in the past.
     “You don’t really know whether you’re going to win or lose,” he says. “The price of gas, oil, everything, and the fish buyers want to drop the price. We depend on the public to buy our fish.”
     Even without the falls, Celilo remains a gathering site for tribe members fishing during the seasons, but in days long gone the shores of Celilo Falls were a center of commerce for tribes from throughout the Pacific Northwest.
     “Our people were a lot more richer in means and ways,” Jim says. “They traded for goods with all different tribes. We had people traveling from all different directions for fish and we traded with them.”
     From a child’s eye view, Ronnie Jim can look back on memories of Celilo Falls with fondness. But his elders at Celilo Village, he notes, may be less inclined to share their stories of the falls in the wake of their loss.
     “There were a lot of tears, a lot of bad feelings that never went away,” he says.
     And many of those same people are no longer alive to see the federal government make good on its 50-year-old promises of better homes for the Celilo Village people, including Jim’s father, Chief Howard Jim, who died two years ago.
“My father lived to see the long house torn down and rebuilt,” Jim said. “Homes built were what he wanted to see. He didn’t make it. That was the goal of all the people who were senior citizens. They were hoping.”

     At 47, Chief Olsen Meanus, Jr., is too young to remember the mists and thunder of the falls.
     “Everything I’ve experienced was through their stories,” said Meanus, the oldest grandson of the late Chief Howard Jim.
     Meanus had been working around the house. He takes a moment Tuesday to talk in the shade, pulling up an unsplit log for a seat. Split wood is neatly stacked at the end of the barracks-green hours the Meanus family lives in, and a fishing net waits in the yard. Around the village, his wife, Gina, and other residents clearing away brush, picking up tin cans and other debris, to get ready for the weekend celebration.
     “The stories I used to hear the elders talk about were pretty amazing: the fishing, people falling in, people going across to the islands.”
     He’s also heard the painful stories of the loss of the falls, which are wrapped up with preceding events that tore families asunder, which he calls “the BS of war.”
     “A lot of people had no choices,” he said. “When the wars started, a lot of people got scattered, running from the government and soldiers. Some couldn’t make it back and ended up in Canada, Montana, Idaho, running.”
     Meanus tells a story about members of his family who left to join the defiant bands of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.
     Later, the more family members were scattered during the reservation enrollment, Meanus and Jim both recall, as relatives were divided between the Umatilla, Yakama and Warm Springs.
     “People on the plains still relive the battles they had to go through,” Meanus says, including the loss of Celilo Falls in the list of local battles. “In our way, we had to live with losing something sacred, and that provided food.
     ‘‘But we can’t live in the past. We’re here. That’s it.”
     Instead, Meanus wants to bring the many meanings of the falls forward to new generations. He’ll continue to raise his children, ranging in age from 21 years to 9 months, in Celilo Village. He says his family is the better for it.
“We just need to remember everything we’ve been taught and live our lives in a good, casual way,” he says. “A lot of the old ways are gone and we can’t really bring them back, because it’s different.”
     He looks forward to seeing the new houses promised by the government. Fifty years after the fact, they are finally expect to arrive in the next year to replace the derelict surplus barracks used when the original village was relocated. The modern houses will be a better environment for the children, Meanus says.
     “There were a lot of times in the days past that a lot of kids were ridiculed about living in these houses,” he says. “Everybody’s got their own ways. I tell them never mind, they’ve got a roof over their head and a bed to lay in. We’re not in the world to compete and have better things.”