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Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty:
Transboundary Governance and
Indigenous Rights
(cid:129)
Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman*

Abstract
This article builds on regional environmental governance (REG) scholarship to explore
alternatives to conventional transboundary agreements. Speciﬁcally, we use two narratives
to tell the story of one river variously known as Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna, or Swah’netk’qhu,
and, more recently, the Columbia River. We suggest that the state-led narrative of the
signing and implementation of the 1964 Columbia River Treaty has obscured Indige-
nous narratives of the river—a trend replicated in most scholarship on transboundary
environmental agreements more broadly. In exploring these narratives, we: situate the
silencing of Indigeneity in the 1964 Columbia River Treaty; highlight the reproduction
and ampliﬁcation of that silence in the relevant literature in the context of strengthened
Indigenous rights; and explore what a multilateral—as opposed to binational—approach
to environmental agreements might offer practitioners and scholars of REG.

The powerful waters known as the Big River, Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna,
Swah’netk’qhu, and most recently the Columbia, have served as the life force
for diverse ecosystems and thriving communities for thousands of years—since
time immemorial. Fed by glaciers from the Rocky Mountains, the Big River starts
as a trickling stream and empties as a wide-mouthed, fast-ﬂowing river into the
Paciﬁc Ocean near Portland, Oregon. Through its journey to the ocean, the Big
River runs 2,000 kilometers, making it the fourth largest river in North America,
with a drainage basin approximately the size of France.

* We are grateful to the editors and two reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments
on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks to Karen Bakker (UBC) for her contributions to a much
earlier version of this article and to Lynda Jenson (Northwest Indian College) for her helpful
edits. We also are grateful to Volker Mell for working with us to create the maps. This material
is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 1461441.
Any opinions, ﬁndings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are ours
and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Global Environmental Politics 18:4, November 2018, doi:10.1162/glep_a_00477
© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.

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Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 5

The Big River was fundamentally changed when the US government
decided to utilize the powerful ﬂow of water for hydropower. The Rock Island
Dam, originally built in 1894 and poured into concrete in 1932, was the ﬁrst to
make its mark on the river; after this, the number and size of dams increased
dramatically with the signing of the Columbia River Treaty (CRT) in 1964. The
1964 Treaty focuses almost exclusively on ﬂood protection, power provision,
and ﬁnancial compensation. The treaty also includes a clause to either terminate
or renegotiate the terms of the treaty after ﬁfty years, given ten years’ notice. This
window of negotiation or termination was opened in September 2014.

The renegotiation of the 1964 CRT presents an opportunity for a different—
and more nuanced—form of environmental governance than the current treaty
provided. Such a possibility, albeit not focused on the CRT, was highlighted in
a 2012 special edition of this journal. In that issue, focused on regional envi-
ronmental governance (REG), the issue’s editors, Balsiger and VanDeveer, wrote
that much of the scholarship on global environmental agreements draws on
regime theory. As they rightly point out, “standard texts in international envi-
ronmental politics scarcely make mention of regional dynamics and typically
lump ‘global,’ ‘international,’ ‘multilateral,’ and ‘regional’ agreements together”
(Balsiger and VanDeveer 2012, 3). In setting out to rectify this overgeneraliza-
tion, they delineate three axes along which REG can be understood. The ﬁrst of
these is the coordinating agency, that is, the degree to which the coordinating
or rule-making agency of a regional initiative is a “formal intergovernmental
cooperation” or an “informal arrangement such as transnational networks of
state and non-state actors” (7–8), citing NGO-led initiatives as an example of
the latter. The second axis along which we can understand REG is in its scope,
with single-issue initiatives at one end of the continuum and broad mandates
at the other. The third axis is the territoriality of the REG initiative under exam-
ination: is a given initiative focused on nation-state borders, or does it cor-
respond more closely with the increasingly popular ecological boundaries
(Cohen and McCarthy 2015)? This latter axis is emphasized in this article, which
focuses on the opportunities presented in the renegotiation of the 1964 CRT.
Since the treaty included factors beyond the river itself (e.g., ﬂooded areas and
power provision), it is a relatively early example of a governance initiative that
aimed to account for—if not fully encompass—the river basin as an ecological
unit.

Recent literature on REG underscores the complexities of regionalism.
Borzel and Risse’s (2016) Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, for example, is
structured region by region, tracing the economic, legal, and governance dimen-
sions of particular regions around the globe. Similarly, Temby and Stoett’s
(2017) edited collection Towards Continental Environmental Policy? North American
Transnational Networks takes a broad view of the governance landscape, situat-
ing North American REG within a matrix of broader issues, including border
security and trade agreements. This approach strengthens and enriches the REG
discussion by imbricating discussions of environmental governance with the

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6 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

transboundary landscape more generally. Indeed, one chapter of that volume
(Mumme and Brown 2017) argues that environmentalists must, among other
things, “aggressively insert themselves into policy debates over infrastructure
[and] mobilize and demand that national security at the border incorporate
considerations of environmental and social values” (Sivaraman 2018, 3).

The trouble with using the REG literature as the basis for our theoretical
framework is that it does not provide a conceptual basis for nations within or
across states. The traditional territory of the Columbia Basin tribes, for example,
straddles British Columbia (Canada), Washington, and Oregon (US). Indeed,
the international Canada–United States boundary that makes the CRT an inter-
national treaty is a boundary not recognized by many Indigenous People,1 as it
was a border constructed and imposed by colonial act. A complicating factor
here is that the relationships between government and tribes are different in
Canada and the United States such that the concept of sovereignty holds dif-
ferent meaning and weight for the tribes on either side of the border. As Deloria
and Lytle (1984) discuss in The Nations Within, this complicated relationship
between tribes and the state changes as tribes assert their inherent and acquired
treaty rights.

The CRT and its related actors thus fall outside of the REG typologies
presented in the literature to date and therefore calls for a reimagining of
how we understand and implement REG. Although the exclusion of Indige-
nous Peoples from the CRT was typical of the era’s environmental agreements
more generally, the ongoing strengthening and sharpening of Indigenous
rights presents an opportunity to reconceptualize the CRT (and, indeed, other
treaties) in ways that are more inclusive, just, and representative of modern
legal reality.

The 1964 Treaty’s current renegotiation means that this reconceptualiza-
tion need not be entirely theoretical: because the legal frameworks around eco-
logical protection and Indigenous rights have changed so dramatically in ﬁfty
years, these will very likely feature more prominently in the new treaty and
the original. It is not our intention in this article to make speciﬁc recommenda-
tions about what should or should not be included in the new treaty—indeed,
these recommendations have already been put forward through the regional
process. Rather, our aims here are to explore and build a framework for the
consideration of REG in the context of multistate nations. To do this, we explore
two key themes. First, we track the silencing of Indigeneity in the original CRT
and, relatedly, the reproduction and ampliﬁcation of that silence in the aca-
demic literature on the CRT in the context of strengthened Indigenous rights.
Our aim in tracing this history is both to tell the story of the Big River and to

1. A note on terminology: in this article, we use the term Indigenous to refer to pre-contact inhab-
itants of North America and their descendants. For the purposes of this article, the term is used
to include persons who identify as Indian, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, or Aboriginal. The legal
language used in section 2 reﬂects this broader range of terms, which are used differently on
each side of the Canada–US border.

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Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 7

give an example of the way(s) in which counternarratives can inform a re-
consideration of the agreements that fall under the REG umbrella. Second, we
build on this story to explore what a multilateral (including Indigenous Nations
as the third sovereign), as opposed to binational, approach to environmental
agreements might offer to both practitioners and scholars of environmental
politics. Together, these processes—tracing Indigenous silencing in practice and
scholarship and exploring multilateral environmental agreements—provide a
conceptual scaffolding on which we hope other scholars can build their own
narratives.

To explore these issues, the rest of the article proceeds as follows. First, we
introduce the river—its location, ﬂow, and inhabitants, both human and non-
human. We then detail two narratives of the same river. The ﬁrst story is a famil-
iar one: a tale of two states seeking to (re)establish themselves and consolidate
power—both literally and ﬁguratively—through the control and manipulation
of the river and the establishment of what Donald Worster (1995) calls hydraulic
societies. This is the story that is replicated in the mainstream academic liter-
ature: it focuses on the role of the state, the importance of binational negotia-
tions, and monetary exchange for particular services. The agreement, however,
came at the expense of the ecosystems, the ﬁsh, and the Indigenous commu-
nities whose ways of life were not valued in the decision-making for power
generation. State power, both literal and ﬁgurative, usurped (and attempted
to erase) Indigenous communities, which are the focus of the second narrative:
a narrative of Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna, or Swah’netk’qhu: the Big River. This river
sustained Indigenous populations for thousands of years and, with the devel-
opment of hydropower structures, underwent change that made impossible
ways of life that had existed since time immemorial.

In presenting these narratives, we have three aims. First, we aim to show how
the mainstream literature on international environmental politics—namely,
stories that focus on regime theory and international relations—privilege one
narrative over another. Second, we underscore how and why it is important to
examine the historical contexts under which decisions are made. Third, we use
this space to include narratives that were silenced in previous environmental
(and other) decision-making. We then move to an account of the ways in which
Indigenous rights have evolved on either side of the Canada–United States border.
Although the speciﬁc mechanisms of change are different, Indigenous Peoples
on both sides of the border have seen in the last ﬁfty years a gradually in-
creasing scope and speciﬁcity of acquired rights.2 We, and others, suggest that

2. It is important here to differentiate between “acquired” and “inherent” rights. Acquired rights
are those that have been negotiated through political processes and relate to legal mechanisms
set in place with another sovereign, in this case, Canada and the US. Inherent rights are funda-
mental rights that cannot be usurped by law and policy—rights to maintain a way of life con-
gruent with traditional customs and worldviews. For Indigenous Peoples, rights to ﬁsh in
traditional waterways are an inherent right, codiﬁed through acquired rights, but not always
upheld in practice.

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8 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

although the culmination of these rights gives many Indigenous communities
a “seat at the table,” the “table” needs to be rebuilt to include Indigenous rights
at the start (not added on). In so doing, we explore what a more multilateral
form of renegotiation might look like for both practitioners and scholars. We
conclude by exploring what a more inclusive process might look like and how it
might beneﬁt both practitioners and scholars of international environmental
politics.

The Big River
The river spans what is now the Canada–US border, encompassing the prov-
ince of British Columbia and the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and
Oregon. Highly engineered, precisely managed, and ﬁnancially measured, the
contemporary Columbia River3 is a far cry from a wilderness. A complex
amalgam of human, natural, economic, and cultural inﬂuences, the Columbia
has, since time immemorial, blurred the lines between what is human and what
is natural. This hybridity is the underlying premise of Richard White’s (1995)
classic book The Organic Machine, in which he argues that it is impossible to
separate the human from the natural in the Columbia River Basin. Indeed, the
Columbia Basin exempliﬁes hybridities between people, nature, and economies:
White argues that the relationship between people and the river has always
been reﬂexive; that is, technologies have always been used to harvest the bounty
of the river. For example, dipnetting—placing wooden planks over falls in the
river—was used to catch migrating salmon at key ﬁshing sites. Although these
techniques had been used for thousands of years, they did not fundamentally
change the ecosystem of the river, nor did they jeopardize the health and
well-being of the salmon. Prior to the construction of dams, salmon ran all
the way to the headwaters, occupying nearly 13,000 miles of Columbia River
Basin streams and rivers and yielding 10 million to 16 million salmon annually
(Maps 1 and 2).

The same characteristics that brought humans to inhabit this rich ecosystem—
that is, the enormous ﬂow of water, the steep pitch, and the forested riparian
zone—make the river ideal for harnessing energy through hydroelectric devel-
opment. However, the development of hydroelectric technologies and the ﬁnan-
cial push to modernize the river fundamentally changed the river and, in turn,
impacted the traditional ways of life of the Indigenous communities who relied
on it. The decision to build hydroelectric facilities and storage tanks—codiﬁed

3. The river is called Wimahl in the Chinookan language, Nich’i-Wàna to the Sahaptin-speaking
peoples, and Swah’netk’qhu by the Sinixt people, who live in the area of the Arrow Lakes in the
river’s upper reaches in Canada. All three terms essentially mean “the Big River.” Explorer and
cartographer Robert Gray named the “Big River” the Columbia in 1792, after his ship Columbia
Rediviva.

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Map 1
The Columbia River Prior to Dam Construction with Indigenous Traditional Territories by
Language Group

10 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

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Map 2
Columbia River with Dams and Territory Carved by Nation-State and Reserve

through the CRT—impacted the landscape and hydroscape in signiﬁcant ways,
the most controversial of which was the blockage of the ﬁsh runs that have
sustained populations in the basin for at least 15,000 years. These structural
changes had (and continue to have) severe impacts on ecosystems as well as

Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 11

Indigenous populations, whose culture and ways of life rely on intact ecosystems
and healthy ﬁsh runs.

Two Tales, One River
We present herein two stories about the same river. The ﬁrst story may be more
familiar to most readers: it chronicles the development and signing of the CRT
and its dual aims of power generation and ﬂood control. It also provides an
analysis of these processes from a critical geography lens, suggesting that the
treaty and subsequent dam construction were as much about the treaty’s stated
aims as they were about the consolidation of state power. This analysis leads
into the second story: the story about Indigenous perspectives on the Big River
and about the ways of life that were forever changed as a result of the dam con-
struction and the treaty. This second story is also familiar for many but is far less
visible in the literature on, and political discussion about, the basin. This ab-
sence occurred for a variety of reasons, including absence of strong legal rights
for Indigenous Peoples, lack of ecological considerations—including salmon
health—in the treaty, and, of course the widespread racism that did (and
continues to) permeate politics of all kinds. For these and other reasons, the
Columbia Basin tribes and First Nations were silenced in the original treaty and
in environmental politics in general in the CRT era.

What is arguably even more troubling is the reproduction of that silence in
the academic literature on the CRT and on environmental politics more broadly,
perpetuating a biased and state-centric view of the River. With a few exceptions
(see, e.g., Nation-Knapper 2015a, 2015b; Norman et al. 2013; Norman 2015;
Shurts and Paisley 2013; Heasley and Macfarlane 2016), political and academic
debate about the CRT tends to focus on the upcoming Canada–United States
renegotiation without considering how to include Indigenous perspectives
and ways of knowing.

River of Empire: The Columbia and the State

The CRT, like most laws and policies, provides a portal back into state priorities of
the time. In this case, the priorities were job creation, ﬂood protection, and crea-
tion of hydroelectric power generation. These provisions make sense in the context
of public priorities at the time: public concern with respect to ﬂood control spiked
in the postwar years, particularly after the infamous Vanport Flood of 1948, which
displaced thousands of people along the Columbia, swept away towns, caused
millions in property damage, and all but destroyed what was, at the time, Oregon’s
second largest city. The public—and, consequently, political—focus on ﬂood pre-
vention and mitigation helped to secure support for massive (and expensive)
ﬂood control projects.4 At the same time, affordable and reliable power was

4. The strategy of having “crisis” mobilize action is well practiced (see Kaika 2003; Nevarez 1996).

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12 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

needed to support the rapid and extensive population growth taking place in the
American West. Importantly, the conﬂuence of these two priorities was set against
the backdrop of a world—and a North America—obsessed with large, national-
scale water engineering projects (Figure 1).

The treaty was signed in 1961 by federal representatives of Canada and the
US and ratiﬁed three years later, in 1964, after agreements between the national
governments and their respective subnational parties were signed. The CRT
was crafted to provide electrical power and ﬂood control to Washington and
Oregon, which, in turn, ﬁnancially compensated the Canadian province of
British Columbia for the construction and operation of four dams. The treaty
led to the development of four storage dams primarily intended to provide both
power and ﬂood control beneﬁts in the United States—these beneﬁts (in the
form of power and money) were to be shared. The beneﬁt-sharing agreement
between Canada and the United States took the form of a one-time payment
of $64 million from the United States to Canada for ﬂood control for the ﬁrst
sixty years of the treaty (1964–2024) and an agreement by the United States to
send Canada either power generated or the monetary equivalent. The equity of
the cost sharing has been under examination, as both countries claim they
overpaid. Without a new agreement, the purchase of an annual operation of
Canadian storage for ﬂood control will expire in 2024. The terms of the original
treaty state that the treaty can be terminated after sixty years, given ten years’
notice. September 16, 2014, marked the ﬁftieth anniversary of the ratiﬁcation.
At the time of the 1964 CRT, large dams were construed not only as
sources of electrical power and ﬂood control but as a tool of nation building

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Figure 1
The Honorable John Diefenbaker and Dwight Eisenhower at the Signing of the CRT,
January 1961

Source: White House Photo Office. JDG 6880 photo office image member: 6265 C. Public domain.

Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 13

in the Cold War era (Worster 1985). Such societies are described in Worster’s
Rivers of Empire as hydraulic societies: “a social order based on the intensive,
large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting” (7).
Although Worster is writing primarily about California, the concept of a hydraulic
society and the role of water in shaping people, politics, and place hold true for
the Columbia Basin, where the large-scale manipulation of water was (and is)
carried out not for irrigation but for hydropower generation and ﬂood protection.
Of course, the hydropower and ﬂood protection resulting from the extensive
damming of the Columbia was not merely for the sake of local power provision
and ﬂood protection alone; it was part of a larger project focused on nation build-
ing in the Cold War era. Indeed, the development of massive water engineering
projects was deeply intertwined with Cold War–era nationalism, lending signiﬁ-
cant political weight to the pragmatic problems of ﬂood control and the need for
electrical power. As noted in Rivers of Empire, a series of high-proﬁle American
politicians advocated for large-scale water engineering projects using the lan-
guage of national security, identity, and religion. Lyndon Johnson (as a Texas
senator), for example, wrote that “water management is … a decisive tool in our
mighty struggle for national security and world peace” (Worster 1985, 264), and
former Oklahoma governor Robert Kerr argued that such projects were emblem-
atic of the “international struggle of free people against godless Marxists” (264),
stating,

Can a pagan Communist nation [he asked], by enslaving and regimenting its
people, make more efﬁcient use of soil and water resources than the most
advanced and enlightened nation in the world? Can ruthless atheists mobilize
and harness their treasures of God-given wealth to defeat and stiﬂe freedom-
loving peoples everywhere? (Kerr, as cited in Worster 1985, 264)

Apparently not. By reconstructing the local as the global, by turning tragedy and
crisis into political opportunity, and by pulling in jingoistic language and imagery,
the construction of large dams in the West continued apace. As Worster re-
flects, “thus did local ambition and global ideological conflict, a fear of depri-
vation and the loss of control, all fuse and run together toward the single potent
symbol of a dam” (264)—or, in this case, a series of dams along the Columbia
River. Folk songs by iconic artist Woody Guthrie, commissioned by Bonneville
Power Authority, helped to glamorize (and rationalize) the harnessing of the
Columbia River in the Paciﬁc Northwest. His famous song “Roll on Columbia”
includes the lyrics “your power is turning our darkness to dawn” and the verse
“And on up the River is Grand Coulee Dam / The mightiest thing ever built by
a man / To run these great factories and water the land, / It’s roll on, Columbia,
roll on.”

It is this story—the story about nation building, ﬂood protection, power
provision, and the marvels of engineering—that permeates the mainstream nar-
rative of the CRT and its signatories. The dominant narrative of the Columbia,
then, is not simply a story about the Vanport Flood, the political opportunity

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14 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

it created, and the need for power; it is a story about Indigenous dispossession
and accumulation of power by states. In a sense, this is predictable. As Worster
argues, the construction of dams is not just about the dams themselves but
about what they symbolize: state control over nature, a managed—and there-
fore economically productive—landscape, and consolidation of state power.

The foregoing account meshes easily with REG literature that focuses on
the complex relationships between the economic and governance dimensions
of governance in particular regions because it focuses on how states can work
together to manage the Columbia. But such a state-centric approach to under-
standing the Columbia only tells part of the story (Figure 2).

Wimahl, Nich’i-Wàna, or Swah’netk’qhu

Standing on the banks of the Big River, the hereditary chiefs and community
members watched stoically as Celilo Falls disappeared under the rising waters.
For more than 15,000 years, Celilo Falls served as an important ﬁshing and
trading site for Indigenous People throughout the Columbia River Basin. The
site, considered the longest continuously inhabited village in North America,
brought thousands of people together every year from as far away as Alaska and
the Great Plains to trade and exchange goods and ideas. The falls themselves—
the ﬁrst of a series of waterfalls spanning twelve miles, now referred to as the
narrows—was an incredibly signiﬁcant ﬁshing site. Prior to settler inhabitants,
an estimated 15 million to 20 million salmon passed through the falls annually.

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Figure 2
Traditional Chiefs of the Colville Indian Reservation in 1941 Gather to Witness the
Completion of the Grand Coulee Dam

Source: US Bureau of Reclamation.

Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 15

In the upper reaches of the river, First Nations communities also experi-
enced great loss as their traditional territory was ﬂooded to make room for stor-
age facilities and reservoirs for the beneﬁt of hydropower. The deal to increase
storage facilities in British Columbia was negotiated between the United States
and Canadian governments, with no involvement of First Nations, despite the
fact that the ﬂooding had direct and immediate impacts on their communities,
such as the Ktunaxa, whose traditional homeland is in the headwaters, as well
as the Sinixt (or Lakes People) and the Shuswap (Secwepemc), who reside in the
upper reaches of the river.

Up and down the river, Indigenous Peoples were signiﬁcantly impacted
by the ecological changes of the river that resulted from dam construction and
were accelerated by the CRT. In the upper reaches of the Columba River Basin,
the Ktunaxa (or Kutenai), Sinixt (or Lakes People), and Shuswap (Secwepemc)
were all severely impacted by the construction of the dams, which not only
blocked the salmon from migrating but had extensive implications for eco-
systems, including the ﬂooding of culturally signiﬁcant territory.

South of the international border, the Colville, Spokane, Coeur d’Alene,
Yakama, Nez Perce, Cayuse, Palus, Umatilla, Cowlitz, and Confederated Tribes
of Warm Springs all have a deep and sustained presence along the Columbia,
whose relationship was impacted drastically with the construction of hydro-
power; while the Shoshone Bannock tribes reside along the upper Snake and
Salmon River, the Chinook tribe, who remain federally unrecognized, live near
the lower Columbia River.

The cultures, languages, and economies of the Indigenous populations
that reside along the Big River are intrinsically tied to place and directly link to
their identity. The stories, songs, culture, and foods all connect to place in a pro-
found and reciprocal way; that is, they care for and protect the river, and in turn,
the ecosystem (river) provides for them. Drastic changes in the river’s ﬂow
therefore affect not only a change in diet or economy; they also have deep cul-
tural and spiritual implications. The decision of the United States and Canadian
governments to prioritize hydropower, ﬂood control, and large engineering
projects over maintaining ecological diversity was also a decision to knowingly
adulterate and compromise an Indigenous way of life.

Along the Big River, salmon plays a fundamental role in cultural identity
and practice. The Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) is an
example of the kind of governance initiative that is not accounted for in the REG
literatures: it is a regional initiative led by tribes and designed, in part, to hold
the state accountable for its commitments to Indigenous Peoples. Moreover,
the CRITFC and other groups like it have an essential role to play in treaty
renegotiation but are overshadowed in the REG and international relations
literature by a focus on the state, in large part because decision-making author-
ity remains concentrated in provincial and national capitals. A key role of the
CRITFC is to tell the stories of the connections between communities, culture,
and salmon: as members explain, salmon is always placed as the main dish

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16 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

for cultural events and ceremonies. This is to show respect and reverence, as
salmon is a gift from the Creator. Although each community has its own
creation story, many include salmon. For example, the following story is high-
lighted on CRITFC’s web page, showing the importance of salmon and contex-
tualizing their work of honoring the spirit of the Salmon, Wy-Kan-Ush-Mi
Wa-Kish-Wit:

When the Creator was preparing to bring humans onto the earth, He called a
grand council of all the animal people, plant people, and everything else. In
those days, the animals and plants were more like people because they could
talk. He asked each one to give a gift to the humans—a gift to help them
survive, since humans were pitiful and would die without help. The ﬁrst
to come forward was Salmon. He gave the humans his body for food. The
second to give a gift was Water. She promised to be the home to the salmon.
After that, everyone else gave the humans a gift, but it was special that the
ﬁrst to give their gifts were Salmon and Water. When the humans ﬁnally ar-
rived, the Creator took away the animals’ power of speech and gave it to the
humans. He told the humans that since the animals could no longer speak for
themselves, it was a human responsibility to speak for the animals. To this
day, Salmon and Water are always served ﬁrst at tribal feasts to remember
the story and honor the First Foods. (Upper Columbia United Tribes 2015)

When the Rock Island Dam was completed in 1933, the communities knew it
would disrupt the delicate balance that they had with the river. However, they
could not have predicted that over the next sixty years, the water flow would be
so drastically changed that fish would no longer reach the upper reaches of the
river; that fish hatcheries would need to mechanically produce fish runs; that
their intricate relationships with trading partners and other tribal communities
would be strained and out of balance. The decision to dam the river—without
consultation of tribal communities—was another form of cultural genocide.
Disrupting a way of life that is integral to the well-being and structure of a
community was part of the colonial project of disposition. Just like boarding
schools were designed to take away language and culture and erode strong
life that was
the construction of dams disrupted a way of
family ties,
incompletely connected to the natural world. Yakama chief Meninock reflected
in 1915, “My strength is from the fish; my blood is from the fish, from the roots
and berries. The fish and game are the essence of my life. I was not brought from
a foreign country and did not come here. I was put here by the Creator” (Upper
Columbia United Tribes 2015).

The construction of these dams was a direct violation of previous agree-
ments. For example, the 1855 treaties signed between the US government and
the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes assured continued
access to ﬁshing and hunting grounds in all “Usual and Accustomed” areas (U and
A). These tenets were determining factors in relinquishing traditional territory to
move onto reservations. Thus the construction of these dams not only adulterated
access to U and A but violated treaty rights. As Yakama chief Kamiakin ominously

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(cid:129) 17

foreshadowed in 1855 at the Walla Walla Treaty Council, “Let them do as they
have promised. That is all I have to say.”

The promises, of course, were not met. The powerful documentary Empty
Promises, Empty Nets documents the erosion of these promises almost immediately
from the time they were made. The 1969 litigation Sohappy v. Smith and United
States v. Oregon afﬁrmed the U and A for Columbia River tribes. The 1974 case
United States v. Washington (known as the Boldt decision) further afﬁrmed tribal
ﬁshing rights of coastal tribes of Washington, speciﬁcally through the interpreta-
tion of “In Common With” to mean 50 percent of catch and co-management. A
large body of case law now exists that interprets the 1855 treaties to limit state
and federal regulations of tribal ﬁsheries and establishes tribes as co-managers.
However, structural issues, such as the hydropower facilities—which were created
without the consultation of Indigenous communities—violate these promises.

Indeed, the contemporary legal climate with respect to Indigenous rights is
dramatically different from the legal climate in which the 1964 CRT was signed.
Within Canada, Indigenous rights are protected under section 35 of the Canadian
Constitution (1982) which recognizes and afﬁrms existing Indigenous and treaty
rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada. The courts have interpreted this
provision as protecting traditional practices, such as salmon ﬁsheries for food
and social and ceremonial purposes, from government interference. Furthermore,
courts uphold that governments are obliged to consult meaningfully with Indige-
nous communities in an actions that may potentially adversely affect Indigenous
rights and practices. Thus provincial laws are subject to meeting a three-part
test: there is a duty to consult and accommodate, government’s actions must be
backed by a compelling and substantive objection, and the government’s action
must be consistent with the Crown’s ﬁduciary obligation to the affected First
Nation (Upper Columbia United Tribes 2015).

With the CRT now up for renegotiation, this is the time to remedy the
impacts of these previous decisions. Recognizing this opportunity, the tribes
and First Nations along the Columbia provided leadership roles in the develop-
ment of the regional recommendation plans. Most signiﬁcant of the changes
that were suggested in these regional recommendations were the inclusion of
Indigenous rights, the focus on ecological integrity, and the inclusion of climate
change adaptation. A priority for US Columbia Basin tribes and Canadian First
Nations is integrating ecosystem-based function into the treaty, with the goal of
increased ﬁsh passage and reintroduction of anadromous ﬁsh (Upper Columbia
United Tribes 2018).

Indigenous Law, Policy, and Rights

The preceding narratives show how perspective changes what factors are included
or excluded from ofﬁcial agreements. Importantly, no matter how transparent
and inclusive the process is, decision-making power remains concentrated in
provincial and national capitals. As such, it is ultimately up to the provincial

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18 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

and national governments to decide if, and in what capacity, to integrate Indige-
nous governments into the renegotiation process. The ongoing strengthening
and sharpening of Indigenous rights on either side of the border, however, pro-
vides a legal basis for inclusion in treaty negotiations. In addition, events such
as the Idle No More movement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
in Canada and Xwe’chi’eXen (Cherry Point) and Standing Rock in the United
States have put pressure on federal governments to uphold treaty trust responsibil-
ities (see Norman 2017). Together with international initiatives like the develop-
ment of the Arctic Council and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights
of Indigenous Peoples, these movements have contributed to a growing
consciousness of injustices and maltreatment of Indigenous Peoples in North
America and elsewhere.

The renegotiation of the CRT has the potential to actualize the strength-
ened and sharpened Indigenous rights and governance mechanisms developed
since the signing of the 1964 Treaty. These new rights and frameworks have
emerged through two mechanisms. The ﬁrst mechanism is the creation of inter-
tribal organizations like the Columbia River Treaty Inter-tribal Commission and
the Upper Columbia United Tribes (both of which played central roles in the
development of regional recommendations for the “modernized Treaty”), the
Northwest Indian Fish Commission (which co-manages the coastal ﬁsheries
with the State of Washington), the Coast Salish Gathering (which provides a
governing body for Coast Salish Peoples), the Yukon River Inter-tribal Water-
shed Council (a governing body for the protection of the Yukon River), and
the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (a governing body that
addresses water quality issues facing the tribes in the Great Lakes) (for a full
description of each of these governing bodies, see Norman 2015). These
groups have substantially helped to redeﬁne (and reclaim) the role of Indig-
enous governance in the wake of colonial occupation and are examples of REG
that falls outside of the typology presented in the 2012 special issue of GEP: the
groups here are not issue focused or based on ecological boundaries but instead
are based on linguistic or cultural boundaries not captured in either ecological
or state boundaries.

A second mechanism through which Indigenous Peoples in the basin have
been involved is the parallel—and mutually inﬂuential—development of na-
tional policies and laws in Canada and the US with respect to Indigenous rights
and governance. Three areas of evolving Indigenous legal rights have particular
relevance in the basin. The ﬁrst of these is the realm of water, land, and title. The
1973 Calder case in Canada and the 1909 Winters Doctrine in the United States
established land and title rights for Indigenous Peoples—rights that continue to
be strengthened and redeﬁned through the courts. Second, ﬁshing rights for
Indigenous Peoples continue to be (re)deﬁned. The Sparrow (1990) and Marshall
(1996) cases in Canada recognized that Indigenous Canadians have an exist-
ing right to ﬁsh and, in the case of the Marshall decision, earn a “moderate living”
from ﬁshing activities. In the US, the landmark 1974 Boldt decision resulted in

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Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 19

tribes being allocated 50 percent of the allowable catch, and the ﬁsheries are
comanaged with the state. Third, outside of law speciﬁc to particular resources,
the question of process has also evolved. In Canada, the Supreme Court cases in
2004 (Haida and Taku River) and 2005 (Mikisew Cree) ruled that “the Crown has
aduty to consult” with Indigenous Peoples in situations where Aboriginal or
treaty rights may be impacted; in the United States, the government-to-government
relationship was afﬁrmed in a 2004 Executive Memorandum recommitting the
federal government to “work with federally-recognized Native American tribal
governments on a government-to-government basis and strongly supporting
and respecting tribal sovereignty and self-determination” (US General Services
Administration 2017).

Importantly, these “acquired” rights were negotiated through American
and/or Canadian (and British) colonial legal systems. It is important also to
consider the role of Indigenous inherent rights, which is the framework of gov-
ernance structures that lie parallel to, but are often unrecognized in, the Western
legal structures. Inherent rights are the social contracts Indigenous Peoples have
with the natural world and within and between their communities. Understand-
ing the difference between these systems is fundamental to rethinking the power
structures that are set up in the contemporary legal and governance systems.
Indigenous legal scholar John Borrows has written extensively on the topic of
Indigenous law and governance, including the limitations and opportunities
for overlap with colonial law (Borrows 2016; Borrows and Coyle 2017; see also
Harris 2001). The evolution of acquired rights for the Columbia River tribes is
connected with the legal and political structured as colonial law (and thus as
binational systems). In the US, the tribes that signed treaties with the US govern-
ment are considered sovereign nations and are in the position to negotiate di-
rectly nation to nation. However, in Canada, First Nations do not hold the same
sovereign status. Thus, in transboundary cases such as the Columbia River, the
legal relationships between tribal sovereigns and nation-states are complicated.

Analysis: Nature, Society, and Opportunity

The foregoing sections show how Indigenous perspectives were absent from the
original CRT, and we have argued that mainstream political literature has rep-
licated this absence by focusing on one narrative (i.e., the state-centric narrative)
at the expense of the other (i.e., the story of Indigenous dispossession). In the
following paragraphs, we explore what a multilateral approach that includes
Indigenous Nations as sovereign might offer both practitioners and scholars
of environmental politics.

The renegotiation of the treaty, and the talks that occurred in preparation of the
regional recommendations, provides an opportunity to insert an Indigenous-led nar-
rative into the conversation, in essence, shifting the conversation from binational to
multinational and recognizing tribes’ sovereign and inherent rights to the river. Such
a perspective builds on, and extends, contemporary REG scholarship in several ways.

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20 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

First, it broadens—and modernizes—the discussions on transboundary
water politics to include nonstate nations as partners in modernized negotia-
tions. Much has been written about conﬂict and cooperation over the world’s
263 transboundary water bodies, especially in response to popular media’s pre-
dictions of water wars and assertions that “water is the new oil” (e.g., Brookes
2011; McGee 2014). Here scholars have conducted extensive research on the
likelihood of cooperation or conﬂict along international waterways (Sadoff
and Grey 2002; Wolf 1998), while others have focused on redeﬁning the terms
of the conﬂict–cooperation debate, suggesting a spectrum rather than a binary
(Zeitoun and Mirumachi 2008). Broadly, this work is predicated on the nation-
state: it explores the conﬂict–cooperation question through the lens of state
boundaries by focusing on the likelihood of state-to-state conﬂict and coopera-
tion. This state-centric mode of understanding transboundary resources has been
under scrutiny, both for obscuring intra- or subnational-level conﬂict (Blomquist
and Ingram 2003; Castro 2008) and for reinforcing—rather than dissolving—
borders. As Norman (2015, 181) writes,

when the primary mechanism for transboundary water governance is state or
federally controlled, the nation-state boundaries are inherently reiﬁed. Even
if the stated purview of the state/federal agency is “transboundary,” they are
deﬁned by systemic nation-state boundaries and associated policies—that
are colonial relics. The work towards collaborating with partners on the other
side of the border, continue to reinforce national identities and national
interpretations of landscape. They do not (and cannot) genuinely include con-
nected ecosystems, nor traditional territories for Indigenous communities.

Second, a multinational approach builds on REG’s increasing focus on ecologi-
cal boundaries as meaningful iterations of the regional. Indeed, such an ap-
proach can be understood as situated at the conﬂuence of three evolving
conversations: REG’s focus on ecological boundaries, ecology’s focus on gover-
nance at environmentally relevant scales, and a legal and political focus on the
implementation of evolving rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, in the water
arena, there is an ever-increasing number of basin-scale water organizations
that aim to overcome—rather than work with—state boundaries. Community-
based watershed groups, community forests, and regionally based environmental
groups have all become increasingly important actors in the environmental arena
These rescaling efforts come not only in response to the putative restructuring of
decision-making structures and the (critiqued) “hollowing out” of the state but
also in response to the rise of the ﬁeld of environmental management, which
pivots on the notion that environmental governance decisions should be made
along ecosystem boundaries (Cohen and McCarthy 2015). In the case of water
governance, this means governance along hydrologic, that is, watershed or river
basin, boundaries rather than political ones. The use of watershed boundaries for
environmental decision-making, for example, has been critiqued in political ecol-
ogy and elsewhere for, variously, not aligning with other ecological boundaries

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Alice Cohen and Emma S. Norman

(cid:129) 21

(Molle 2009), not being subject to the same kinds of public debate and account-
ability as their jurisdictional counterparts (Wester and Warner 2002), creating
false expectations with respect to public engagement and empowerment of
local organizations (Norman and Bakker 2009), and having become an end
unto themselves rather than a means to other clearly articulated policy or envi-
ronmental goals (Cohen 2012; Cohen and Davidson 2011).

Third, such an approach problematizes the “region” by refusing to sepa-
rate people (and their activities) from place. In the case presented here, a place is
physically impacted by people—actors and politics—that stretch far beyond the
region in question. Although the notion of breaking down problematic nature–
society binaries and focusing instead on hybridities may be novel for political
scholars, for many Indigenous communities and worldviews, the idea that an
area needs to be either “natural” or “human impacted/nonnatural” is a false bi-
nary. Indigenous communities in the Columbia River Basin, as elsewhere around
the world, successfully thrived on manipulating their environment to sustain their
populations, and their worldviews already recognize the complexities of human–
natural entanglements. The difference, of course, is a matter of scale and impact.
Newcomers to the Columbia River Basin manipulated the rich lands through
imported agricultural practices from Europe, which focused on monocropping
and decimation of forestlands (Langston 1995; White 1995). Indeed, as Indige-
nous scholars and knowledge holders remind us, knowledge comes from place.
This is distinct from other Linnaean traditions of science, in which knowledge
systems are generalized and then applied to place. In an era of changing climate
and declining salmon populations in the basin, understanding the connections
between people and place is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Finally, this case adds a temporal dimension to current REG frameworks:
having a party (or group of parties) at the table who have oral history knowl-
edge of an ecological timescale that tracks back beyond the time of Western
science and hydraulic monitoring has the potential both to disrupt and to
enrich the ecological scope of the treaty. Almost entirely silent on ecological fac-
tors, a renegotiated treaty has potential for environmental innovation, particu-
larly if it adopts a “two-eyed seeing” approach, a term ﬁrst coined by Mi’kmaq
elder Albert Marshall, that aims “to see from one eye with the strengths of
Indigenous ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of
Western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” (Hatcher
et al. 2009).

Alice Cohen’s work focuses on environmental policy and governance. Speciﬁ-
cally, her work examines the complex relationships between water and ecolog-
ical, political, and social boundaries. Through her various projects, she explores
the political and material implications of the policy frameworks, governance
arrangements, and discourses used to understand and manage water at global
through local scales. Currently she is working to better understand governance
arrangements as they relate to community-based water monitoring in Canada.

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22 (cid:129) Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty

Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental
Science at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Emma S. Norman’s work engages in the intersection between water governance,
political geography, and environmental and social justice. Her research and
teaching explore the impacts of colonial bounding on transboundary water
governance processes, with a speciﬁc emphasis on Indigenous rights in North
America. Her latest book, Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States
and Indigenous Communities, won the Julian Minghi Award for Best Book in Political
Geography in 2015. Norman currently serves as department chair of the Native
Environmental Science Program at Northwest Indian College on Lummi Nation,
where she has been on the faculty since 2001.

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