Essay on Death Of Celilo Falls by Katrine Barber

When first considering the Navajo-Hopi land dispute as a topic of research, I anticipated a relatively light research paper discussing the local skirmishes between the two tribes. However, my research has yielded innumerable volumes of facts, figures and varying viewpoints on a struggle that has dominated the two tribes for over 100 years. The story is an ever-changing one, evolving from local conflict to forcible relocation to big business interests. The incredible breadth of the dispute's history makes it impossible to objectively cover the entire progression from all viewpoints. I will therefore focus on current issues - and their historical causes - facing the two tribes as they mutually approach

In the third section of John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, the author observes the discourse between conservationist David Brower and Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, on the merits of dams in the southwestern United States. Brower "hates all dams, large and small," while Dominy sees dams as essential to our civilization. The Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, which Dominy created, are the main issue of debate between the two men.

The Artificial River, a well thought of 177 paged book written by the author Carol Sheriff whom at the time was an graduate at Yale University and finished it off while an assistant professor at William and Mary. This compelling book captures and emphasis the success and downfall the Erie canal has brought to the people. Sheriff has a clear notion that “progress” viewed differently through the eyes of conflicting people and status. What one envisioned the Canal turn out to be fluctuated from another. Progress to them meant in large part men and women take apart an active role in the community that they are in which the construction of the Erie canal consisted of people doing just that. She apprehended that whomever supported the canal had some dream and hope to actively be apart a wider range or market exchange. In Sheriff words she says that progress would play a central role in defining Northern sectional identity in decades. The book will explore six topics which are titled Vision of Progress, The Triumph of Art over Nature, Reducing time and distance, Politics of land and water, Politics of Business and The Perils of Progress all of which I will touch on throughout the paper.

After the Louisiana Purchase the land gained more and more value. The Indian Removal act was implemented and many were thrown out by force. As Andrew Jackson came into power, bigger changes began to take effect began to come and it was not good for the Indians. People who were okay living with the Indians began to be shunned away. The theme according to Zinn is the mistreatment that the Indians had to go through with whites wanting their land, unfortunately for them, they had no voice in the matter and were simply gotten rid of. He talks about the sadness that overcame them and the greediness of the whites, in which made up most of the population. They did not want to leave and that is where the line “As long as grass grows and water runs”

One thing that it looks at is land allotments that the Indians would receive for moving west. Many of the Indians would receive “320 acres if it was a single family selling or 640 acres to ninety chiefs in the Creek nation” . Many Native Americans took the agreement for these lands that were west of the Mississippi. But soon trouble started. Some of the land companies forced Indians to sell their land even if the Indians didn’t want to move west. Other companies would pay Indians to pretend they were someone else so the companies could claim the land of an Indian who didn’t want to move. Sometimes white settlers would come onto the land they had bought before the actually time they were allotted. During this process many people were cheated out of their land and received very little compensation for their moving west

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe currently fights to save its only water source from natural gas and oil contamination. This troubling current event has a somewhat forgotten historical analogue where very similar themes presented themselves. The Kinzua Dam Controversy, which took place in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, resulted in the displacement of over 600 Seneca Indian families and the acquisition of a large tract of traditional Seneca Land for dam building. Additionally, the acquisition of Seneca land represented a breach of “The Treaty with the Six Nations of 1794,” which explicated prevented such action by the US Government. The dam and its construction, which primarily benefitted Pittsburg, inspired a heated discourse concerning the ethics of native relocation.

In 2012 and 2013 Klamath County on the Southern Oregon border declared a drought in April, after a string of fortunate years of heavy rain and snow. In 2014, a drought emergency was declared in February, two months earlier than in 2013, and in 2015 drought was again declared for the county in April( United State Geological Survey 2015). These successive drought declarations are not surprising to anyone who was following the Western water crisis during those years, where the governor of California declared a state of emergency and urban Californians were mandated to find ways to cut their water consumption drastically . In 2012, 10,000 avian mortalities were reported in the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges because of the shut off of water facilities that support wetland habitat for migratory species (Learn 2012.) During those dry years, an article titled Birds are Dying As Drought Ravages Avian Highways ran in National Geographic, featuring Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge and putting the struggle of its bird species in a regional context, as long distance flyers found fewer and fewer refuges with the water resources to maintain them( Kay 2015). It was these shocking statistics that first attracted me, as a birder, to the basin as an area of study. However, as I began to wade into the history of the basin and its complicated local politics, I soon realized that I could not disentangle the issues experienced by wildlife and wildlife managers in the

“I’ll stay here until the water comes up and float down with it when it does,” Mattie Randolph, a housewife from Eastern Tennessee told a TVA worker on his first visit to her family’s house. The TVA worker was there to buy her property which was scheduled to be submerged after the construction of the Norris Dam in 1936. The Randolph’s were one of three thousand families that were being forced to relocate in order to complete the project. Even though all of Mattie’s neighboring families had accepted government offers to buy their land, Mattie and her family were the only to refuse government purchase offers. This is a similar story to those that played out across Eastern Tennessee in the 30’s, 40’s as the newly formed TVA sought to transform

Clearly the Native Americans and Lewis and Clark's group did not get along all the time and had some miscommunication along the way. The encounters

It is also this depressing lost of Native Americans’ culture that has motivated them to never stop trying to return home. However, in the memory of the speaker’s dad, these Native Americans were just “swollen bellies of salmon coming back to a river that wasn’t there” (CR 123). Salmon have the nature of returning back to the place, where they were born in, to reproduce. Comparing the Native Americans to salmon, the author identifies the importance of their land to their nature. That is, losing the land is the same as losing their reproduction. Therefore, taking the land away for the modern developments, the western culture has ultimately become the nightmare for the Native Americans.

Rivers of Empire tells the epic tale of how the desolate West became an irrigational Mecca for the United States of America. Donald Worster begins his tale by describing how water irrigation has been used throughout history and how those methods compared to the modern American Western usage. I found Worster 's text to be a very solid method of telling the history of water irrigation, but like with many of the texts in this class, I am left with a very pessimistic feeling about the future of the subject.

“The River” by John McPhee tells the story of a raft trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The two leaders of this expedition are David Brower and Floyd Dominy, who are considered to be two of the biggest rivals and influential people in conservation history. David Brower was the former Executive Director of the Sierra Club. Brower was a huge conversationalist and was very passionate about protecting natural landscapes from human destruction. Floyd Dominy was the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and he believed that natural resources should be used not just preserved for aesthetic reasons.

The essay “Letter to President Pierce” written by Chief Seattle in 1855 lays out some of the biggest differences between white American culture and the culture of Native Americans. The essay is very brief in length but it does address many points that can be take farther. Chief Seattle begins the essay with simple stating the obvious; that everyone already knows white men and natives do not understand each other’s ways of living. He continues this by saying that even though the land that each of them hold is the same the way that it is handled could make you think otherwise. Chief Seattle believes that white man tires to fight and pillage everything rather work with it. This is the start of one of the biggest differences between the two cultures. By acting this way Seattle thinks that white man has no real connection to his culture because he continuously moves on from place to place leaving behind anything that was built by his ancestors. However, he contradicts himself by saying that maybe his thoughts are wrong because he is only a savage. The next main point that Seattle addresses is how he compares the silence of nature rather than all of the manmade noise of cities. He questions his stance on the noise pollution made by cities and asks if the only reason he does not like it is because he has not learned the “civilization” of it. Seattle believes in working with nature and what the world has given us, so that humans will last. He makes a strong point that if something

One thing that was interesting was White’s idea that workers dangling from cliffs are much like rock climbers doing the same (p.61). This idea leaves one with the impression that the workers were still very much attuned with nature. Again it circles back to the idea presented in the first chapter, the idea that the river can be understood through the labor of humans. Although the labor drastically altered the river, understanding the river was essential in doing so. The issue that is presented though is that the workers are often overlooked, which seems counteractive if they are the ones truly attuned to the river. Their understanding provided the most important step in making sure the dams were built in ways that were beneficial, both for producing power and maintaining the flow of the river. The centralization of hydrological power under the BPA helped this attitude manifest its self in the Pacific

Despite the overwhelming beauty of Amicalola Falls, my orange blossom scented hand lotion that moysitrized my hands that was smelling really great this morning when i put it on, but every single mosquito was attracted to it like a piece of fruit.