Gov. Kate Brown just made a game-changing intervention in Nestlé’s ongoing effort to bottle public water in Oregon.
Soon after receiving three letters of opposition from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Brown instructed the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) on Nov. 6 to withdraw their recent application to transfer water rights with the city of Cascade Locks, urging them to return to a process “which includes consideration of the public interest… along with the opportunity for public input and a broader review of this proposal.”
On the same day, Brown also directed the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) to consider taking a “broader look” at how the state uses publicly owned water.
Nestlé’s proposal to bottle the cold waters of Oxbow Springs has garnered substantial public backlash, and generated more than 100,000 letters of opposition, with opponents citing issues such as plastic pollution, disruption to local water cycles, and harm to salmon.
Both the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla have treaty-protected fishing rights to Columbia River salmon.
The OWRD approved permits for a water exchange between Nestlé and Cascade Locks in February 2012, and was promptly sued by the environmental groups Bark and Food and Water Watch the following month – litigation that may still take years to resolve.
In September 2013, State Rep. Mark Johnson (R-Hood River) labeled opponents to Nestlé “outside environmental and special interest groups,” adding “I believe the ODFW Commission should be responsible for maintaining and protecting healthy fish and wildlife, not for making economic decisions for our small towns.”
Complaining that the initial process was taking too long, Nestlé changed tactics last April, and its allies in the city of Cascade Locks and the ODFW filed paperwork to transfer water rights between the two public entities, eliminating the required “public interest review” in the original water exchange application. Now that state and tribal officials have spoken out against it, the new application is very unlikely to move forward.
Nestlé’s reputation has been taking a beating for several months, with news spreading from California about illegal water extraction, government foot-dragging, and civil disobedience. Back in March, a group calling itself the Crunch Nestlé Alliance shut down a Nestlé bottling plant in Sacramento, saying they were outraged that the company was exporting 80 million gallons of water every year despite the state’s record drought.
In the Central Valley of California, extending from Sacramento to San Joaquin, groundwater extraction is so high that the land is currently sinking at a rate of more than a foot per year – faster than ever recorded before. As a result of the sinking, bridges, roads, canals, and other concrete structures are literally breaking apart, with repair costs alone likely reaching into the billions.
The governor of California, Jerry Brown, has encouraged residents to stop flushing toilets and watering lawns to help cope with the water crisis, while angering environmental supporters who are still demanding a statewide ban on fracking, which consumes enormous amounts of water. Meanwhile, Nestlé CEO Tim Brown told the media in May that his company would be happy to expand California pumping despite the historic drought, saying, “It’s driven by consumer demand. It’s driven by an on-the-go society that needs to hydrate.”
After news of Oregon’s new water application spread to local tribes this summer, members of the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Nez Perce and Yakama came together to denounce the project, forming the group Wanapum Fishing People Against Nestlé, which organized letters of opposition to the Governor’s Office, staged a hunger strike in Cascade Locks, and traveled to Salem to demand that the governor drop the deal.
“It is unethical for one community to force another community into poverty to create just 12 jobs,” argues Klarice Westley of Wanapum Fishing People Against Nestlé. “It’s gonna plunge hundreds of fishermen into poverty, and there’s already 70 percent unemployment at Warm Springs. A lot of our people are relying on fishing for their livelihoods.”
Part of the tribes’ authority on the Nestlé project comes from their unique relationship to the site Nestlé hopes to bottle. Outside of a recent council hearing about Portland’s fossil fuel export policy, Carlos Smith, tribal council member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, explained that what we now call the area of Oxbow Springs was originally the home of tribal members who were forcibly removed to Warm Springs.
“The Dog River Wasco Tribe lived right there at Oxbow Springs,” Smith explained.
And the reason natives don’t live at Oxbow Springs today has everything to do with the hatchery.
From 1933 to 1974, 11 dams were constructed on the Columbia River, with a majority of them built by the federal government. These drastically altered the geography of the river, flooding dozens of Native fishing sites and killing off huge numbers of salmon – the staple food and cultural keystone for the region’s indigenous population. The effect was as traumatic for natives of the Northwest as the extinction of the buffalo was for the indigenous people of the Great Plains.
Once Congress recognized the damage it had done to the salmon, it passed the Mitchell Act, creating 25 hatcheries on the Columbia River to replenish salmon runs. The majority of these are located downstream of the Bonneville Dam, hardly benefiting the tribes above it, whose fishing villages were flooded after the river was stopped and backed up.
“We were never compensated,” Carlos Smith of Warm Springs explains. “They built the hatcheries to give more salmon to commercial fishermen.”
Congress, working together with state fisheries, then forced tribal peoples living at Oxbow Springs to relocate to the Warm Springs reservation to build Oxbow Hatchery.
Despite this history, Smith explains that the tribes are committed to seeing salmon restoration succeed, with the help of hatcheries like the one at Oxbow. And giving special access to Nestlé does not fit with that plan.
“Everyone knows that you need good cold water to run a hatchery,” Smith explains. “That’s why they started a hatchery there.”
According to Professor Mary Wood, an environmental law scholar at the University of Oregon, indigenous peoples of the Northwest managed their salmon successfully because they never took so much that the following salmon run was harmed – the same principle that applies to management of a financial trust, in which beneficiaries live off of the interest, but not the capital. But for dam operators today, any water dropping from the Columbia that does not produce electricity is considered “waste” – an attitude that guarantees dams will remain salmon killers.
Professor Wood explained, “Under tribal stewardship, the Columbia River carried between 10 million and 16 million fish a year. These populations were sustained with concentrated human use for 10,000 years.” By contrast, “State and federal trustees (managing agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers) have run the asset into bankruptcy within just the last century and a half by allowing the eradication of natural capital across the entire basin – everything from dams, clear-cuts, pollution, paved-over wetlands, to over-harvest of fish.” By 1995, wild salmon runs had dropped to about 2 percent of their historic abundance. That same year, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, or CRITFC, announced a plan for salmon recovery based on indigenous knowledge and indigenous land management. Since that plan was implemented, Columbia River salmon runs have actually stopped declining, and some are showing important signs of recovery.
According to Professor Wood, this is precisely the type of management we need to stop the rapid depletion of the natural environment.
“To arrest the hemorrhage of natural systems brought about by federal and state trustee mismanagement, tribes must reclaim a measure of their ancestral environmental sovereignty.”
Besides being ineffective from a historic perspective, colonial administration of the environment has also carried with it a prevailing cultural attitudes of white supremacy and manifest destiny. Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw the creation of the National Park and National Forest systems, also celebrated the destruction of their native inhabitants, calling the newly acquired lands “the heritage of the dominant world races.”
John Muir, a close friend of Roosevelt, described the natives of Yosemite as “fallen” and “unclean,” and complained that he did not experience the “solemn calm” of the forest in their presence. He therefore asserted they had no place in the landscape – a position he would successfully advocate with the federal government.
In similar fashion, early fishing commissions of Oregon and Washington were notorious for going out of their way to harass, intimidate and control native fishing peoples, using environmental protection as a pretext for the continuation of racism, genocide and cultural annihilation by other means.
In 1954, the federal government began proposing in-lieu fishing sites to replace the ones that had been flooded by the Bonneville Dam. But because salmon runs were in decline because of severe commercial over-fishing, the chairman of the Oregon Fish Commission wrote, “We formally protest the granting of these sites to the tribes for it is our belief that the major use to which they can be put is that of fishing, and fishing is a threat to the continuance of the salmon runs.”
These efforts were across-the-board violations of treaty rights, which guarantee Native Americans the continued right to hunt, fish and gather at their “usual and accustomed” places – affirmations of rights that pre-existed the United States.
The historic tendency of state and local governments to defy these guarantees, and to continue promoting the cultural extermination of indigenous peoples, has created intense conflict between state and federal government in the past, earning states the reputation of being the “deadliest enemies” of local tribes (U.S. v. Kagama, 1886). The trend away from such conflict, and toward direct consultation with tribes from both state and local governments, offers a way out of this historical dead-end, and an opportunity to manage natural resources wisely with the help of traditional ecological knowledge.
In 2012, a ballot initiative called Measure 81 attempted to ban the purchase of salmon caught by native gillnets. Supporters said gillnets did harm to the salmon runs and worked against conservation, but in reality, this was a traditional fishing technique that worked fine with the salmon for many generations. Naturally, CRITFC opposed the measure, with Executive Director Paul Lumley calling it “a distraction from the real issues this region faces – rebuilding healthy and abundant salmon populations,” adding “We need to be working together to rebuild salmon runs, not fighting over who gets to catch the fish.”
In 1974, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla chose to suspend all fishing in the upper Grand Ronde River to protect weak runs of spring Chinook salmon, hoping to inspire similar sacrifice from dam operators, timber companies and ranchers.
Donald Sampson, the former executive director of CRITFC, explained back in 1999 that the Umatilla were legally entitled to half of the fish, “but we’re not catching that at all. We have cut back on our fishing voluntarily, but no one else has stopped killing fish. The big, indiscriminate killers – the dams – operate 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.”
In 2000, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission reported that their treaty tribes had voluntarily reduced salmon harvests by 80 percent to 90 percent to protect weak runs of wild salmon.
On Nov. 2, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla announced their solidarity with Warm Springs against the Nestlé bottling plant. Chuck Sams, communications director for the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla, emphasized “that territory… is Warm Springs territory. It was ceded to them in their treaty. But we have rights to that and to the water uses ...”
Wilbur Slockish, a hereditary Klickitat Chief whose relatives lived at Oxbow Springs, said that the Nestlé proposal is emblematic of a disrespectful and destructive approach to land that has gone unchecked for too long.
“Water is being harvested for somebody that doesn’t live here, that will never live here, will never come here, and are not even a local people – they’re from Switzerland. They’re here and gone – when the water’s gone they’re gone. But the damage will have to be paid by the taxpayers. This is the problem with the ‘free market’ and the ‘American dream,’ where you take a resource for wealth and don’t look at the consequences.”
Slockish said this attitude moved west with the extinction of the buffalo and the destruction of the salmon as dams were constructed in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
“The same thing is going on with Nestlé,” he continued, “and nobody ever pays attention to the water rights of the first animals that lived there, like the salmon and all the fish species. That’s their home – that’s where they lived.”
Across the border in California, the same conflict is still playing out.
On Nov. 5, a coalition of Native American and environmental groups in California sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer urging her to drop a plan to raise Shasta Dam, which they say would harm native fish populations and violate both federal environmental laws and the cultural rights of the Winnemem Wintu people.
The letters reads: “For too long, dams have been used to solve our water problems with no consideration given to their community and environmental impacts. The time has come to stop this thoughtless, unethical behavior. … Raising the dam will harm the Winnemem Wintu people who have already been harmed by the dam. Shasta Dam flooded most of their sacred sites and traditional homelands, including their cemeteries. Raising the dam will flood out the little that remains.”
On the other side of the issue, Cascade Locks City Councilor Jeff Helfrich and state Rep. Mark Johnson have famously called opponents of Nestlé “outsiders” – a charge that makes Chief Slockish laugh.
“Does he want to call me an outsider? Someone should ask him where his burial sites are. We’ve been here thousands of years – not a hundred years.”