Wanapum Heritage Center

The Wanapum, the River People, lived along the Columbia from above Priest Rapids down to the mouth of the Snake, and they are the people of Smohalla. Born around 1815 near Wallula, he had taken a name from the Sahaptin word for dreamer by 1850, and after a quarrel there he led his followers north to P'na, an old fishing village at the foot of Priest Rapids. From P'na he taught the Washani, the Dreamer faith: shun the settlers' ways and live as the ancestors had. Followers came to him from across the Plateau. He refused to move to the Yakama reservation and died in 1895.

The last of the Dreamer prophets was his nephew Puck Hyah Toot, known to settlers as Johnny Buck, who from 1917 led the Washani at Priest Rapids in a mat longhouse. When the Grant County utility district built Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams in the 1950s and early 1960s, the reservoirs flooded the riverbanks where the Wanapum lived. With no treaty to stand on, the band negotiated with the utility directly: a settlement beside the dam, an archaeological salvage before the water rose, and a partnership that has now lasted more than sixty years.

The heritage center opened in October 2015, a 50,000-square-foot building beside the ancestral village that the band's longtime leader, Rex Buck Jr., worked with his wife, Angela, to build. In the lobby is a 29-foot canoe Puck Hyah Toot carved with the Tomanawash brothers in the 1800s.