Celilo Village

Celilo Falls, Wyam, a word given as the echo of falling water, was for thousands of years one of the great fishing and trading places on the continent, and the village on its south bank was where the fishing families lived. When The Dalles Dam closed its gates in March 1957 the falls went under within hours. The village did not leave. It stayed on the bluff above the new reservoir, squeezed between the railroad and the highway, home to families from several of the river's treaty tribes.

The government's first replacement, begun by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1948 as the dam was planned, was thirteen small prefabricated houses with asbestos in the siding and in the kitchen and bathroom insulation. By the end of the century conditions at Celilo were among the worst of any tribal fishing village on the river. In 1988 Congress authorized the Corps to replace some of what its dams had flooded: thirty-one treaty fishing access sites along the Columbia, the last of them dedicated in 2012, and, at the request of the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce tribes, the rebuilding of Celilo Village. A 2003 Corps report authorizing the work was unusually plain about the government's responsibility. A new longhouse went up in 2005 and 2006 and held the fiftieth commemoration of the flooding in 2007; fourteen new houses, paved streets and new water and sewer systems followed.

Each April the longhouse hosts the First Salmon Feast that opens the fishing season, and families still fish here under treaty right. Celilo is a home, not an attraction. Look from the riverside park at the same freeway exit, where the reservoir lies over the falls, and leave the village and its longhouse to the people who live there.