Lasers slice through the twilight, illuminating the white spillways of Grand Coulee Dam. Through a loudspeaker, a woman’s smooth voice swallows the visitor’s center lawn. She speaks about hydroelectric power, and a cartoon beaver made of yellow lasers marches across the silky sheen of water. A surfing salmon glides across the dam, waving his fins as the woman explains the recreational real estate the reservoir provides. Acres of green and red apple trees fill the screen, and the virtues of agriculture ring through the loudspeaker. The Grand Coulee Dam Laser Light Show has it all.
Neon blues and yellows dance on the screen, becoming first a river, then fire, then exploding into multicolored rays that bleed onto the dim lawn and splash over the trees. And behind the lasers, behind the water streaming down the spillways, behind the concrete, the turbines, and the concrete again, Lake Roosevelt slumbers in the bed of the Columbia.
To many, the story of Lake Roosevelt inspires. Through American strength and American labor, we stopped the mighty Columbia in its tracks with, in 1942, the largest dam ever built. Grand Coulee Dam quickly became known as the 8th wonder of the world. Besides the dam’s power supply, which can provide electricity to 2 million homes per year, the dam also created Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir that holds back the Columbia and deals it out to half of Washington state’s farms. It’s big. It's impressive. And it’s dam(n) powerful.
The glittering surface of Lake Roosevelt stretches 151 river miles back from Grand Coulee’s massive wall of concrete. At the 130th mile, though, there is another stone— much smaller, but no less monumental.
D.R. Michel, executive director of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, gazes out at the flat expanse of the lake. He smiles and rests his hand on a small amphibolite boulder, different from the craggy chunks of basalt that line this section of river. The rock is marked with hundreds of grooves, gashes, and lines… where tools have been sharpened. Despite its size– no larger than a picnic table— the stone has a magnetic weight: They call it the Sharpening Stone, and the tribes of the Columbia have used it during salmon runs for more than 9,000 years.
One can imagine the stories embedded in this rock: here, a young boy clumsily sharpened a knife for his first salmon run. There, an old woman wore a deep groove with the surety and practice of age. As D.R. 's weathered fingers caress the gouges, he sighs.
Since time immemorial, the tribes came to this place when the salmon did, fishing in the powerful whitewater of Kettle Falls. “Back in the day… ten miles downriver you could start to hear the roar,” D.R. explains, pointing out the falls. There isn’t much to see, since the falls now lay under 90 feet of water. If they hadn’t moved it farther up the bank in 1940, the tribes would have also lost the Sharpening Stone to the rising waters of Lake Roosevelt.
Moving the stone from its historical resting place caused a cry of grief from the tribes of the Upper Columbia. For many, watching Kettle Falls flood was like watching a loved one drown. As the falls were inundated, the tribes lost not only the rush of the falls themselves, but also thousands of acres of root and berry grounds, access to cultural artifacts, and an entire Colville Reservation town called Inchelium. The greatest loss of all, though, was the loss of the salmon that used to pass Kettle Falls by the millions. Because of its height, Grand Coulee Dam does not have a fish ladder to allow migratory Chinook salmon to return to their spawning grounds. So, in 1940, just before the completion of Grand Coulee Dam, the Colville tribes organized the Ceremony of Tears to bid farewell to the falls, and to begin a wait for the salmon’s return that has lasted nearly five generations.
Hours before the Grand Coulee Laser Light show and days before we spoke to D.R. Michel, we took a tour of Grand Coulee Dam. Two Bureau of Reclamation tour-guides with shirts tucked into their belts drove our group across the top of the dam, which is nearly a mile long. Reciting memorized speeches and facts, the guides took us to the powerhouses, to the crane, and finally, to the edge, where we looked over the spillways at the Columbia. Mighty, a word so often used to describe this river, was not the word that came to mind as we peered at the scummy froth of water 350 feet below us. Beneath the foam, a gray shape moved— a fall Chinook salmon, swimming first to one side of the dam, then the other. Our eyes followed the fish back and forth, watching a doomed tennis match.
During construction of the dam in 1937, there was a temporary fish ladder to allow Chinook salmon and Steelhead across the growing foundation, but the foundation is where the luck of the fish ended. Now, the incredible height of the dam means that a traditional fish ladder would have to stretch ¾ of a mile long. “There are some newer technologies that show promise, but like most things, they’re just not big enough for the Grand Coulee Dam,” our tour guide said, with a touch of smugness— understandable if you’re employed by the eighth wonder of the world.
Like so many environmental issues, bringing salmon back to Kettle Falls seems impossible. To keep swimming upstream against money, bureaucracy, and time feels exhausting. But like the salmon, people keep trying.
Traditional fish passage (i.e. a fish ladder) isn’t a possible solution at the current time. However, there are ways salmon can return to Kettle Falls. There are many developing technologies in fish passage, especially technologies focusing on high-head dams like Grand Coulee. One of these is a helix fish ladder, essentially a spiral staircase for fish. This type of ladder has been used in Cle Elum Dam, and its success there gives hope for a similar passage at Grand Coulee. The trapping-and-trucking method, used by the Colville Tribes, has also shown promise for bringing salmonids upriver of Grand Coulee. D.R. Michel and the Colville Tribes have already released 200 salmon this year alone in a cultural release program that continues to draw interest and support from the community.
Some might say salmon are caught between a rock and a hard place. In reality, the hard place stops them so definitely that they haven’t made it to the rock in almost a century. At the Sharpening stone, whose history has been carved into it by loving hands for millenia, the salmon were appreciated and honored. At Grand Coulee dam, whose history is played upon its surface in the neon reds and greens of 20th century progress, they swim back and forth ceaselessly, hopelessly.
The loss of the Kettle Falls fishery and the salmon that populated it was a great tragedy. Greater even than that is the tragedy of the narrative. In the eyes of the government and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit it each year, Grand Coulee Dam is a testament to this country. It’s a monument to be proud of, a triumph to celebrate. This narrative, though, does not account for the pain the dam has caused. Lake Roosevelt can’t just be looked at as a place for recreation, or as a convenient source for irrigation water. If we break out of the colonial narrative, we can see that Lake Roosevelt is an oppressive and destructive presence that has been occupying indigenous land for almost a century.
Still standing by the Sharpening Stone, D.R. Michel looks back on the ghost of Kettle Falls. “We’ve still got some opportunities to correct some of these historic wrongs, but we’re running out of time,” he says. “It’s time for us to start to do some things here.”