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©2007 Cascadia Times

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The Huntington Fraud

The words “remember Celilo” have become an inspiration to tribal leaders and their allies who see the destruction of the Celilo Falls fishery as emblematic of a continuing series of betrayals in which the U.S. government has failed to honor its legal trust obligations to the fish, the tribes and their rights to catch fish.

In the words of the 1855 treaties, the tribes reserved the right to fish at all their “usual and accustomed fishing grounds and stations” forever, while ceding 40 million acres in the Northwest to the U.S. Government. Eventually, the government sold most of the land to white settlers, while allowing the salmon to wither, first by overfishing by non-Indians, and later by hydropower production.

The betrayals began as early as 1867, when unscrupulous federal agent J. Petit Huntington presented a fake “Treaty with the Tribes of Middle Oregon” to Congress for ratification. The agent claimed the Warm Springs Indians traded their off-reservation fishing rights for $3,500. The treaty was a fraud; the tribe did not, would not, sign such a document. The money disappeared, and with it Huntington.

The Huntington fraud not only remains law, but it was used by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1950s prior to the construction of The Dalles Dam. The Army, seeking support for the dam, told members of the Warm Springs Nation that the 1867 treaty disqualified them for compensation payments for the loss of Celilo Falls. Ultimately the Army decided to pay a modest sum, but not without reopening some old wounds.

Huntington clearly wasn't the last federal agent to deceive the tribes. Far from it.

A Cascadia Times investigation has found evidence that Bonneville and the Bush administration are using such tricks as deception, secrecy, gagging key government scientists, censorship of key government documents and lying to further their control of cheap power, regardless of the impact on salmon or the tribes. Their hydro operations are so perilously close to criminal under the Endangered Species Act that a federal judge has sternly warned their leaders that they risk “severe consequences” if the illegal hydro operations continue.

Next: A mugging on the way to the courthouse

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