River Arts Reimagining the Columbia across Borders
River Arts Reimagining the Columbia across Borders Selkirk College · Castlegar, British Columbia · May 11 –13, 2018
River Arts: Reimagining the Columbia across Borders Š2018 Designed by Robin Mitchell Cranfield
With grateful acknowledgement to Selkirk College, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of the River Arts symposium.
A special thanks to the artists, writers, planning committee, staff and others who helped make this event possible.
Introduction 5
A RT I S TS A N D W R I T E RS Jordan Abel 6 Shawn Brigman 8 Nick Conbere and John Holmgren 12 Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis 16 Dennis DeHart 20 En’owkin Centre 24 Matthew Evenden 28 Blaine Harden 32 Kevin Kratz 34 John Massey 36 Eileen Delehanty Pearkes 38 Wang Ping 42 Genevieve Robertson 45 Linda Russo 48 Emmy Willis 50 Fred Wah and Rita Wong 53
Bios 57 5
Acknowledgements The organizers of the River Arts symposium respectfully acknowledge the timelessness of the Columbia River and the Indigenous peoples who have been connected to this region. With gratitude and appreciation, we acknowledge the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Syilx and Secwepemc, where the symposium was held. We would also like to acknowledge other Indigenous peoples along the entire length of river and are grateful for the traditional knowledge contributed to this symposium.
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Introduction The River Arts symposium is a gathering of artists, writers, scholars and engaged citizens to generate dialogue addressing the complex legacy of the development of the Columbia River. The symposium presents an opportunity to explore how art, writing and other creative practices offer ways to consider questions of power and human values in relation to water and land. The event is hosted at Selkirk College, which is located near the banks of the Columbia and has been an important venue for public discussions of the Columbia River. This catalogue presents samples of work by symposium participants. Additional particpants include Dr. Michael Marchand, Joe Pierre, DR Michel, Shelly Boyd and representatives of the En’owkin Centre.
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Jordan Abel Empty Spaces A deep, narrow chasm. Black rocks. The river lies still on those black rocks. A mile above there is a tumbling; there is a moment. At this very moment there is a tumbling in the air a mile above us that runs straight through the open heavens and into some other place. A deep hollow. No shape. No consistency. No breaking some hundred feet in the air. Some places are softer than others. Some hundred feet up in the air. Some right angles enter into narrow passageways and some right angles break off a mile in the air above us. These rocks are full of cracks. Water has worked through some deep hollows. Breaking here. Wearing there. Breaking and wearing until the chasm separates into two caverns. Some hundred feet in the air there is no danger. There is scattered driftwood and the scent of roses. There are glimpses of roses and rocks and shrubs. There is a steep, rugged ascent. A path that winds among the black rocks and trees. Somewhere in the air there is the scent of roses. Somewhere out there is the wilderness. A reasonable distance through scenes of greenery and nature and glimpses of mountain ranges that disappear just as suddenly as they appear. Among the rocks and trees there are mounds of earth and other rocks and other driftwood. Somewhere there is an islet and another islet and a clear sheet of water and bald rocks just beneath the surface. There are forests and straits and islets and rocks and somewhere in the air is the scent of roses. There are crevices and fissures and rocks. The rocks surround themselves in other rocks. Although there are sometimes mounds of earth in between. On the shore, there are fragments of rocks. In the deeper parts of the river, there is more tumbling. At this very moment, the river pours into a wide fissure where it just becomes more water between rocks. Between the broken rocks and the deep, roaring cavern there is the scent of roses and driftwood and trees. There is light and straight, naked rocks and immovable trees. There are woods and rivers. And the bed of that river is ragged with rocks and intersecting ravines that cut silently across the water above where somewhere in the air is the scent of roses. The woods are full of sounds and rocks and trees. The woods are full. The upper air, where it drifts over the tops of trees, is full of sounds. Just where it breaks over the tops of trees there are slow, intermingling drifts of sounds and scents that brush over the clearing some fifty or sixty feet up in the air. Rocks and logs and mounds of earth and narrow fissures and bottom land and little ponds and a brook that shoots through the narrow fissures, spreading through moment after moment of stretched light. There is a bellowing in the passageways between the rocks. There are moments of admonished madness. There are moments spreading over the acres of bottom land. There are precipices and adjacent lakes and head waters. There is a
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fierceness here that floats through the waters. These rivers are full to the brim. These waters stream down to our feet. In six hours these waters will rush in. And in another six hours these waters will rush out. Salt grows in this water. The water in the woods and on the great lakes and in the higher parts of the sea. Stretching out horizontally until the current flows upward like blood at the throat. On these waters the edges touch the shores and the deerpaths trace back to the streams. In the short distance in between the water and the black rocks is a deep shadow. The breath of the stream. The glancing waters. The throat of the river. These woods are full. Gliding above somewhere up in the impenetrable darkness is the scent of roses. Somewhere there is the sound of rushing waters ringing through the deep stillness of the night. The moon rises and the light glances here and there on the water and down to the river bed. At times, the light hangs in the air on the breath of the river. There are dark waters; there is night. This is the unmingled sweetness of air that sinks into the foaming waters. These are the vaults of forest. There is a stillness here somewhere in the wilderness. There is lightning and then there is stillness. There are echoes that rush through the forest until they disappear. A mile above there is a tumbling. In the foaming waters, there is the colour of blood gushed from some other place. Some other throat. Some other, softer place. Some water carry the dead. Somewhere up in the air there is the scent of roses. Some flames last forever. Some waters thicken with limbs and bodies and trembling voices. Some waters are still. Somewhere in the velocity of the uproar there is a current of air. An unmingled sweetness that sinks in to the forest. The narrow path adjacent to the brook is full of bodies. The blood as natural as water. Glassy mirrors. The sunken hillsides. The shores. The black rocks between the mounds of earth. The glittering stars. The open air floating over the forest. In the valley, the stream overflows onto the banks. Here, the tumbling water washes bones and the waters of the river go in to the salt lake. There is a canopy from the woods spreading over the lake, shadowing a dark current with a deep hue. When the sun is setting, these waters become healing waters. But the sun is not setting and the current branches silently into the dark parts of the lake. Somewhere in the forest, bark is peeled from a tree. Branches break. For many minutes there is a struggle and a deep, cool wind. There is a current of air. There is silent motion plunging and glancing and sweeping over the broken branches. The sound from the rushing waters drifts through the air. There are words and yells and cries. As the air flows up from somewhere in the deep, narrow ravine, there is silence again. With the exception of the sounds that come from the rushing water.
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Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe, Western red cedar stringers, rocky mountain maple saplings (ribs), artificial sinew ties, ballistic nylon skin, blue pigment. 16' length, 3 width Ă— 1' height at center April 2017 Funded through Spokane Art Grants Award. Photo by Katie Botkin Pictured: Collin Beggs
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Left: Pit House Model, Commission of an educational pit house model and informational package for School District #51 in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Bass wood, balsa wood, tackboard, 12 × 12", scale: 3/32"=1', 2014 Right: Western White Pine Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe Western white pine bark hull, birch bark apron, red cedar stringers, rocky mountain maple sapling ribs, bitter cherry bark ties, split cedar root ties, pine pitch and bear fat, 16' length, 3' width, 1' height at center, Commission for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe of
Shawn Brigman
north Idaho, Summer 2017
Shawn Brigman, PhD, is an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians and descendant of regional salish bands (San Poil, Arrow Lakes, Colville, and Shuswap). As a traditional artisan for 14 years, Shawn has been continuously involved in a diverse array of high caliber cultural recovery projects dating back to 2005. During this time he worked on project based on ancestral recovery efforts in eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and southern British Columbia, exploring and transforming the way people read Plateau architectural space by celebrating the physical revival of ancestral Plateau architectural heritage. Shawn Brigman has worked with communities to connect to sources of indigenous knowledge, often taking participant learners out to ancestral lands to explore and gather materialities for ancestral structures like tule mat lodges, pit houses, and sturgeon nose canoes. In the summer of 2012 Shawn was invited as a learner to participate in a western white pine bark harvest workshop sponsored by the Kalispel Tribe in Priest River, Idaho as well as a sturgeon nose frame canoe materiality workshop sponsored by the Ktunaxa Nation in Creston, British Columbia. His deeplyrooted work is dedicated to delighting the ancestors, past, present, and future, by increasing Plateau cultural and visual literacy awareness in how we read, see, or understand our relationship with a place, habitat, or built environment. Currently, Shawn is researching the carving of traditional and contemporary Plateau paddle design implements. In 2016 he visited the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia to examine a historical sturgeon nose canoe and a paddle design specific to a Ktunaxa sturgeon nose canoe form. In 2013, while reviewing a Plateau ethnography report at Eastern Washington University, he was also inspired by ethnographic notes describing the Sinixt (Arrow Lakes Band) language concept for canoe paddle, hand written as “a’xw m n” (to brush the water). This salish language e e
imagery of “brushing the water” has deeply influenced his work, and it is now his intention to recover Plateau paddles specific to brushing the water in the unique and distinct Plateau sturgeon nose canoe forms. 11
Revitalization of Canoe Culture in Eastern Washington Leading a Journey to the Upper Columbia River in 2016 The most rewarding experience in his dedicated Plateau recovery arts practice
Opposite page, top to bottom:
has been the impact on regional tribal communities during the recent awakening
Medicine Lodge
of spirit and return to canoe culture on ancestral waters of the Upper Columbia
Four rows of tule mats, lodgepole pine, willow sapling secondary support structure.
River in Washington State. Shawn was honored with the opportunity for three
19 × 28 × 14'. 192 linear feet of tule mats, in total.
consecutive years (2015–2017) in building sturgeon nose canoes in multiple tribal
Displayed at the 2nd Annual Memorial Day Round
communities.
Lake Pow Wow in Inchelium, Washington on the Colville Indian Reservation, May 24–26, 2012
In one particular instance of cultural revival, during the months of April and May 2016, he was awarded an artist-in-residence opportunity sponsored by the
Mlqnups (Golden Eagle) Tule Mat Lodge Four rows of tule mats, lodgepole pine frame, willow
Longhouse Education and Cultural Center’s Northwest Heritage Program within
sapling secondary support structure. 19' diameter,
The Evergreen State College. The program sponsored him in conducting a ten-
14' height. 192 linear feet of tule mats
day hands-on sturgeon nose canoe build workshop with adult Salish language learners from the Inchelium Language and Culture Association on the Colville Indian Reservation. After completion of the signature brand Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe, the language learners launched the canoe on a nearby lake to float test the final canoe implement. One month later, this particular canoe then successfully participated in the First Annual 2016 Canoe journey to Kettle Falls in honor of salmon recovery. This completed sturgeon nose canoe further proved its functional art resiliency a couple of months later during a canoe prayer journey when it successfully brushed the water of the Missouri River to Standing Rock, North Dakota. In total, four of his signature brand Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe creations from regional Plateau tribal communities successfully delivered water protectors who brushed the water on the Missouri River during the 2016 Prayer Journey to Standing Rock, North Dakota with gathered canoes from the Pacific Northwest.
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Shawn Brigman
Three day exhibition at the 25th Annual Lewis and Clark Festival Native Encampment in Great Falls, Montana, June 20–22, 2014
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Grand Coulee Panorama, Pen on inkjet print, with collage, 4 Ă— 10' Opposite page: details of Grand Coulee Panorama
John Holmgren and Nick Conbere John Holmgren and Nick Conbere present collaborative artworks that interpret their observations and research of the Columbia River. Their process begins with spending time along the river, documenting their observations through drawing and photography. This imagery is then considered alongside historical visual materials, including maps, technical drawings and archive photographs. Through layered documentation and interpretation, they build landscapes that are both observed and imagined, as they consider implications of alternations to the natural flow of the river.
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Bonneville 2 Etching on inkjet photo 20 Ă— 22"
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John Holmgren and Nick Conbere
Opposite page: Revelstoke 2 Etching on inkjet photo 22 Ă— 30"
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Untitled, Portland Airport, 107 miles from the Pacific Ocean Unique gelatin silver photogram, 21" Ă— 25" Framed
Untitled (detail), Wahkeena Falls, 125 miles from the Pacific Ocean, Archival digital reprint of gelatin silver photogram, 29" Ă— 38" framed
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Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis One element that connects us all is water, and the Columbia River is the lifeblood of our entire region. In 2013–14 collaborative team Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis developed Columbia River Shadows, a series of largescale photograms made at ten sites along the Columbia River from the Hanford Reach to its mouth on the Oregon Coast. The images were created by submerging up to eight-foot-long sheets of photosensitive paper directly in the waters at night, exposing them to a flash of light and then developing the silver-gelatin prints in the darkroom. The work is related to the artists’ earlier collaboration, Shadows, which evoked the shadows left by victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a continuation of the nuclear theme, the artists started at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Site in southeast Washington State where the plutonium was developed for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Reflecting on interdependence, this project alludes to such interrelated themes as migration, water politics, the Great Pacific garbage patch and the atomic era. As a meditation on the challenges of comprehending and bearing witness to the global environmental crisis, the project foregrounds the ideas of presence and immediacy. The river and ocean waters which flowed directly over the photographic paper, along with the smelt fish, plastic detritus and invisible toxins, left palpable traces of their presence. As records and evocations of these ephemeral moments of contact, the photograms invite haptic sensing in addition to visual and intellectual perception and suggest the possibility of embodied and experiential understanding of overwhelming environmental concerns.
Hanford is reportedly one of the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere, where billions of gallons of radioactive waste have been dumped on the banks and into the river itself.
Untitled, Hanford Reach,
Untitled, Hanford Reach,
370 miles from the Pacific Ocean
370 miles from the Pacific Ocean
Ripple-sculpted gelatin silver photogram in shadow box
Ripple-sculpted gelatin silver photogram in shadow box,
50" × 62" × 5.5"
50" × 62" × 5.5"
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Untitled, Portland Airport, 107 miles from the Pacific Ocean Unique gelatin silver photogram 21" Ă— 25" Framed
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Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis
Untitled (detail), Columbia Slough, 106 miles from the Pacific Ocean Unique gelatin silver photogram in shadow box 50" Ă— 98"
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Muddy Boy (Snake River), archival pigment print, 30 Ă— 40", 2016
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Dennis DeHart Confluences: Circumnavigating the Territory is an interdisciplinary, lens-based series of works focused on the Columbia River drainage basin. Spanning the Pacific Northwest, neighboring states and parts of Canada, the works engage with the interconnections of place, through the framework of rivers. Confluences is rooted in the tradition of art photography and contemporary social practice inquiry. Simultaneously while developing Confluences, DeHart created the series entitled At Play. This series places the natural world at the forefront of consciousness, while framing nature play as integral to childhood development and education. Having grown up in the Columbia River Gorge, the river is and was a powerful force in shaping DeHart’s early identity. At Play is celebration of childhood and nature play, while also an expression of the importance of sense of place in shaping his as well as his children’s identities.
Installation view of images, Washington State University Art Museum, variable sizes, 2016
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Warning Sign (Spokane River), archival pigment print, 30 Ă— 40", 2014
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Dennis DeHart
Small town bar scene, near the Snake River, Idaho, archival pigment print, 30 Ă— 40", 2014
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En’owkin Centre — National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training Program The National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training Program (NAPAT) is an Indigenous multi-disciplinary training program leading professional artists to support career development and best practices, to revitalize traditional iconic forms of art. The NAPAT program is highly regarded internationally and across Canada for operating highly advanced culturally excellent programming. The program was developed in 2003 has been in operating successfully for fifteen years. The core team of Indigenous faculty consists of entrepreneurs, academics and community cultural workers. The mandate of the program is to “revitalize” traditional art forms and to disseminate them into contemporary practice. N A PAT is one of the few professional training opportunity programs in Canada that assists artists to develop new skills through peer development/research. The enquiry of Indigenous language weighs heavily as one of the pillars for the programs mandate. Mentorship and critiquing new works is facilitated through instructors providing lab time with peers/mentors in a group setting. Each body of works is aimed at achieving authenticity and revitalization of Indigenous heritage.
Tracey Kim Bonneau, NAPAT Coordinator Magic on the Water is a feature documentary capturing poignant stories of the Syilx Nation. This documentary features a visual feast of beautifully crafted interior cottonwood paddles dipping their ores into the crystal clear lakes and rivers throughout the pristine Interior of British Columbia in the Arrow Lakes. Magic on the Water explores the vibrant art, history and oral traditions of the Okanagan first people as they share vivid testimonials revealing their rich heritage, language and culture. The journey is the story of a one hundred year old canoe culminating in the return of the salmon to Okanagan shores. 26
Tracey Kim Bonneau, Magic on the Water 48.00 Minutes 1997
Ira Edward ʔu kʷləncutən
When Ira Edward begins an art piece, he first thinks of a story or legend that that
Oh Creator
he has read or was told. He then brainstorms how to capture that narrative into a
kʷuk̓uɬt ʔispʔus ʕapnaʔ sx̌əlʕalt
specific piece. He favors black and white with bright colors that stand out. He asks
Fix my mind today
himself if this is something he would hang on his own wall.
kʷu xʷic̓t tiks pəx̌pax̌t Give me the wisdom nixʷ tiks k̓ʷəck̓ʷact And the strength mi niʕayp txt̕mistmntm We will forever defend iʔ siwlɬkʷ
Resilience is part of Ira’s identity. In the past, his people, culture, language and history have been bombarded with assimilation, trying to eradicate his identity, to erase it from being. He notes that after everything his people have been through, they are still here holding on to whom they are. His art pulls the stories and identity together as it celebrates his people’s strength and continued existence.
The Water
Breeanne George
—Ira Edward
With the threat of pipelines and oil spills, the Standing Rock movement threw her into action, inspiring her to be the loud, obnoxious activist she was always too shy to be. The people of Standing Rock had many moments that will forever be in her memory, but the one that she always sees when thinking back on that protest is the buffalo. Thousands of buffalo came running to the camp, brushing by the water protectors. These buffalo are, what many say, the ancestors showing themselves in solidarity, showing their support and giving strength to the new generation of warriors. This moment, as short as it was, brought tears to her eyes — something not easily done. A moment so secret, so out of reach to many, was brought to the surface and ran close enough to touch. She realized in that moment that the animals, the ancestors, all know what we are trying to achieve and they thank us for it.
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Ira Edward
Breeanne George
Water Spirit
Where the Buffalo Roam
Left: Laurent Isadore “Kimowan Ekîsikoh” Right: Steve Mackie naxexitkw, which translates to “Ogopogo”
Laurent Isadore Kimowan Ekîsikoh, which translates to “Rain Spirit”, is the one who washes away the past negativity done to the land and provides Mother Earth the nourishment she needs in order to replenish the land so all of the Creator’s creations can live. The rain is like tears in that it is needed to wash away the past negativity of our lives and provide us the nourishment in order to replenish our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual being.
Steve Mackie For Steve Mackie, art has been an escape from lifetime trials, and he has been able to find therapeutic release in simple drawings. Creativity seems to build up inside, and it desires to be made visible. Drawing, carving and paintings allow this to be released in a positive way. His carving at times is physically demanding, and the movements can require constant vigilance. By loving and being completely involved in this work, large amounts of time essentially pass by without him noticing the labour involved. He has been learning that his art work can be utilized as an instrument to deliver many different powerful messages.
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En’owkin Centre
Sophia Phillip
Brenda Powder
The Salmon Run
Rainbow Harmony
Sophia Phillip Even as a child playing in the mud, Sophia Phillip strove to create the perfect mud pie by seeking out and adding other elements to enhance its spherical shape. This process has evolved into being challenged to take a “jumble of mediums� and transform them into harmonious themes of color, texture or contrast.
Brenda Powder Since childhood, Brenda Powder has been writing, singing, painting, sewing and just expressing in many creative forms. In 2016, she began to get serious about her creative passions, and currently she wants to make a living from what she is passionate about and that is to inspire, help, and encourage others around her with her many mediums of artful expressions. In her paintings, she paints the images that come to her mind, with each image having a meaningful, inspirational or helping message, with hidden messages contained within the painting itself.
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Matthew Evenden Does the Columbia River Flow through Vancouver? Does the Columbia River flow through Vancouver? The answer is of course yes, and no. It does flow through Vancouver, Washington, a settlement formed near the river’s mouth in the nineteenth century as a Pacific hub for the fur trade and today a small city of about 175,000; but it does not flow through Vancouver, British Columbia, the second city to be named after the British navigator and today a much more consequential and populous Pacific hub. While the Columbia originates in the lea of the Rocky Mountains in eastern British Columbia, it trends south in the central interior towards the US border, cuts south and west through Washington and forms the border between Washington and Oregon in its headlong drive to the sea. The Columbia is a transnational river, both Canadian and American, but it only flows through one Vancouver. And yet, Vancouver, British Columbia, does have a long and enduring set of relationships with the Columbia River, at once historical, political, economic, social and cultural. The edges of the Columbia Basin do not limit the river’s influence, nor contain the range of historical forces which have shaped it from without. One of the most direct ways in which the river and the city have affected and continue to affect one another is through the systems of hydroelectricity which connect them. In this sense, the kinetic power of the river flows through Vancouver as electricity, while urban political and economic power flows in the opposite direction shaping river uses. People have been drawing electricity from rivers for over a hundred years, and in British Columbia some of the earliest sites of hydro development were on the Kootenay River, a Columbia tributary. In the late nineteenth century, mining and railroad companies built dams across the river, installed power plants and used the electricity to light mines and extract mineral wealth. They also illuminated streets and towns, but only those that were close by. For many years, it was difficult to transmit electricity beyond a few kilometers. Not until the 1920s did engineers develop transmission systems that could carry electricity over longer distances, and even then, the limits were significant. As a result, the upper Columbia was like a small hydro-powered island in the BC interior, driving the local mining industry and the region’s towns. At the coast, Vancouver had its own self-contained hydro-powered system, drawing electricity off of small rivers like the Coquitlam, the Alouette and the Stave. No power lines linked the coast and interior before the late 1940s, and these only reached as far as Lillooet. Vancouver’s relationship with the Columbia began to show signs of change in the Second World War. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, major dams on the American Columbia at Bonneville and Grand Coulee came on line demonstrating the power of the river to produce electricity. American developers looked north to the headwaters, wondering if storage dams in Canada might enhance power production south of the border. A major flood on the Columbia in 1948 underlined the significance of river control and the importance of managing the flow in the upper basin to protect downstream communities. The American interest in river control and flood protection thus led the two countries to consider coordinated development. This required complex negotiations and a balancing 30
of interests that took place against a clamorous background of public debate. Who should pay for the dams? Who should bear the brunt of flooded valleys for reservoirs? Who should benefit from the electricity? And how were national and local interests to be accounted for? Federal, provincial and state governments sought to press their claims and to shape the development and diplomatic process. At the heart of the negotiations was a simple development plan: dams would be built in Canada to benefit power projects and communities downstream in the United States. These dams would flood valleys in Canada and foreclose other development options. The idea of coordinated development on the Columbia provoked a backlash in Canada at a time when economic nationalist ideas were gaining ground. Critics denounced the idea that Canada should become the “continental waterboy” for the United States, and bemoaned the idea of flooding Canadian valleys to produce more power in the US. General McNaughton, the Canadian Chair of the International Joint Commission, with responsibility for international rivers, promoted an alternative: why not divert the upper Columbia into the Thompson River through the Eagle Pass, and dam the increased flow?1 All the power would stay in Canada to electrify Canadian cities and industry. The federal government sponsored surveys to consider the possibility, while barely thinking about the potential impact on salmon. As the Columbia negotiations unfolded, a parallel debate occurred in BC: should the Fraser River, the logical next source of hydro power for Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, be developed for power or protected for salmon? BC Electric, the leading provincial utility, commissioned a team of scientists to investigate how fish and dams could co-exist, power developers promoted the idea of an electrified river, and local economic interests got behind the cause. Lining up in opposition, fisheries biologists, canners, American and Canadian fishers as well as indigenous organizations argued that dams would destroy the salmon runs and cited the Columbia to the south, with its many dams and withering salmon populations, to make their point. The Columbia was not just an object of negotiation in the 1950s, but, according to Fraser River advocates, a warning to be heeded. The provincial government resisted falling into line with Canadian negotiators and chafed at the idea that the Columbia Treaty negotiations fell outside its jurisdiction. Late in the process, W.A.C. Bennett, the province’s development-minded Premier, stated a preference for developing the Peace River in the North. However, when BC Electric indicated that it would not get involved in the province’s northern scheme, the government expropriated the firm, creating BC Hydro. These background debates over the Fraser and Peace played a role in pressing negotiations on the Columbia forward and reminding the United States that Canada and British Columbia had other options. If the United States
1. The phrase ‘continental waterboy’ comes from Donald Waterfield, Continental Waterboy: The Columbia River Controversy (Toronto: Clarke Irwin: 1970)
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wanted to protect its share of the Fraser fishery and commission dams of a certain kind on the upper Columbia, they would have to pay for such dams, and keep paying for their benefits in the years to come. After years of debate, political intrigue and federal-provincial tension, the Columbia River Treaty was signed in 1961. The Treaty ensured that the upper Columbia would be developed to coordinate with US projects downstream and provide flood protection. It also ensured that Americans would pay for the Columbia dams. An additional protocol concluded in 1964 clarified the terms of sale of power assigned to Canada under the Treaty into the United States market. This was not the first time that Canadian power had been sold into the United States, but it was a turning point in western North America. A north-south grid would emerge as a major factor structuring the development, transmission and use of electricity in years to come. Fifteen years later, a sign posted by BC Hydro at Mica Dam, the northernmost dam built under the Treaty in the upper reaches of the basin, revealed the extent to which this river of water had been transmogrified into a river of electrical currents, flowing north and south along transmission lines. The Columbia had become a keystone energy source in a power grid that connected Vancouver to the interior, and British Columbia to the United States. Situated above a silenced river, the Mica dam down below, the sign represented power flows of several kinds, depicted in bright, lively colours, and captured by a photographer for the promotional magazine, Beautiful British Columbia. 2 In this visual portrayal, power was aestheticized and brought to the foreground; rivers by contrast lay underneath, sometimes obscured from view.
The Columbia does not flow through Vancouver, BC, but its power does. And Vancouver’s power demands structure the uses of the river in reverse. The politics of rivers in BC has protected the Fraser from major dams, but only because development pressed ahead full bore on the Columbia and Peace. Vancouverites benefit from power from afar while enjoying the continuing reality of a free-flowing Fraser, one of the few undammed rivers of its size and scale in the northern third of the world. The Columbia may seem far away, way up in the interior. Many Vancouverites may have never seen this river, experienced the gentle roar of its flow or felt its cool spray; but the river’s electricity is all around them. B I B L I O G R A P H I C N OT E The source material and research upon which this essay draws comes from Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydroelectricity during Canada’s Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 2. Royal BC Museum and Archives, BC Special Services Branch, Image I-06596, “Sign at Mica Dam” [no photographer identified], 1980. Please note, this image was part of the Beautiful British Columbia photograph collection but was not published in the magazine.
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Matthew Evenden
Treaty and other large dams of the upper Columbia.
A sign posted at Mica Dam, c. 1979.
Completion dates in parentheses and treaty dams marked by an asterisk.
Note the emphasis on the Revelstoke dam as a power source, as
Cartography by Eric Leinberger.
compared to the treaty dams which were primarily storage facilities. Source: Image I-06596 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
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Blaine Harden The following passage is excerpted from the book A River Lost (W.W. Norton, 2012).
Users of the Columbia — the generous and God-fearing westerners among whom I grew up — remain locked in the habits of pride, denial, and dependence. My story of the river is a memoir, a history, and a lament for a splendid corner of the American West that maimed itself for the sake of subsidized prosperity and that continues not to understand why. To explore the river and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, I traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho. The pilots and deckhands on that barge, like most of the people I encountered on the river, were furious. Their livelihoods depended on subsidized slackwater, the sluggish navigable ponds between dams. They felt betrayed by schemes to save salmon, schemes that would retool the river, speed up its current, and ground the barges. At the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, I got off the barge to see what had happened to the salmon-choked river that Lewis and Clark had discovered in 1805. The waterway I found was a remote-controlled “pool”, the level of which fluctuated on a minute-to-minute schedule to meet electricity needs on a grid that reaches to southern California. In the bathtub river, dwindling numbers of salmon were distilled from the water, sorted by computer, and hauled to the sea in trucks and barges. To follow what the Columbia had become, I could not simply ride downstream in a barge. I bought a car from a farmer who was having trouble with his payments, and drove twenty thousand miles up and down the river. I drove north to Grand Coulee Dam, where my father worked, where I worked briefly (before getting fired), and where the great river of the West was harnessed for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation. From the dam, I tracked a wholly artificial, concrete-lined branch of the river back to my hometown. Irrigators around Moses Lake enjoyed a half century of deeply subsidized security before outsiders — salmon advocates in the Northwest and budget cutters back in Washington — began to question giving so much water and so many below-cost benefits to members of the middle class.
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From Moses Lake, it was an eighty-minute drive to Hanford, where the Columbia skirts around America’s largest nuclear dump and where decades federal dominance in the Columbia Basin, nurtured by decades of secrecy, reached its toxic apogee. Back on the barge below Hanford, I floated west out of the desert, through the Cascade Mountains, and into the rainy, crowded, and affluent West Side of the Pacific Northwest. There, the majority no longer engaged in resource extraction. More people wrote software than felled trees. They went outside to play, not to make a living. On the west side of the mountains, the integrity of the Columbia River and the survival of its salmon had become lifestyle concerns. The river was a major attraction in the giant civic park that the Pacific Northwest had become. Accordingly, the suburban majority favored spending a moderate amount of money to save salmon. They wanted to re-machine the Columbia so that it could resemble, at least during salmon migrations, a river. When I began my travels, it seemed logical and inevitable that the suburban majority — the world of high tech and hiking boots — would win control of the Columbia. But the more time I spent on the river and the more I learned about what was at stake, the less sure I became. The West Side was not losing sleep over the fate of the Columbia. When its residents did pay attention to the river, they behaved like dilettantes, motivated by a passing desire for a pristine playground or by abstract notions of saving endangered species. River users, however, were fighting for their jobs. They were defending a subsidized status quo that they believed to be their birthright.
Blaine Harden, A River Lost, New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 23–25.
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Kevin Kratz Kevin Kratz lives very near the Columbia River, and this has had a significant influence on these sculptures. White sturgeon have a spawning ground at Portuguese Banks at the Hugh Keenleyside Dam. Northern leopard frogs were once numerous in the Columbia Basin, until the dams and industry moved in. The great blue heron have a protected site at Waldie Island on the river, near Castlegar. Kratz hopes to raise awareness of the power and fragility of the Columbia River and its inhabitants. Take note humans.
Patient Hunter 2012 Recycled steel Seven feet high Created by Kevin Kratz with James Karthein Photo by Colin Payne
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Top: White Sturgeon 2016 Steel industrial waste Seven feet long Photo by David R. Gluns
Bottom: Northern Leopard Frog 2014 Forged and fabricated recycled steel Seven feet high Created by Kevin Kratz with James Karthein Photo by David R. Gluns
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Josh Massey O U R WI LD RI VI ERA Far from the Rappahannock, the silent Danube moves along toward the sea. The brown and green Nile rolls slowly Like the Niagara’s welling descent. Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire Near where it joined the Cher. The St. Lawrence prods among black stones And mud. But the Arno is all stones. from “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” by John Ashbery This quoted poem by New York’s famous art-for-art’s poet of beauteous abstractions, and the way it names famous rivers around the world until they all connect, recalls my own feeling that the landscapes in this province are contiguous to each other like an organic MC Esher’s impossible construction; somehow the Skeena river is closer to the Columbia river than kilometres can measure and there’s a sort of distance-defying unity to everything here. As if, like in the 115-line Ashbery poem, on some level one river inevitably connects with all the rest, which, aside from being a subjective impression, is also confirmed by the water sciences. Given that many post-secondary schools are physically — in terms of campus location — integrated with river ecosystems, it seems natural that wisdom would flow from the currents into the lives of students and faculty. The last three schools I’ve engaged with (as teacher, reporter, creative writer) are situated by the big flows. In Prince George, the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) peers out over the confluence of the Fraser and Nechako rivers. In Terrace, Northwest Community College (NWCC) sits on the terrace above the Skeena river, and here in the Kootenays, Selkirk College students attend class next to the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia while instructors might be observed pacing the shores in an attempt to collect themselves during a busy semester. These few examples of riverine schools, like the many others in BC, are located away from major urban centres, and even these “major” centres are sort of mountained off from the rest of the continent. This makes us all who dwell in these locations somewhat like nature’s hermits, inhabitants of the backchannels distinct from the mass swellings of humankind, harkening to lines from another poem, “Green Mountain”, by Li Bai: As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown, I have a world apart that is not among men 38
The feeling of meditative isolation lingers on the shores of the distant rivers that becomes our own creative distance. The experiences entailed in this “world apart”, like the Nisga’a new year in the Northwest that celebrates the return of the little oolichan fish up the rivers after the privation of winter, marked by the sliver of moon visible in the clear skies of February. The bull trout mouthing in the natal waters of the Slocan in the autumn as birds trace a southward quill in the sky. All the intrepid salmon of the coast returning to breed and die in the streams that bore the fry they once were, inspiring poems and paintings with the raw truth of their living metaphor. Over in Prince George, poets prowl the rivers and the students head off on white sturgeon reclamation studies. As people interact creatively with their environments, a symbiotic connection between learning and rivers inevitably becomes a thing. River art in the Kootenays, like John Cooper’s raucously coloured oil paintings, will help illuminate another artist’s path upriver in a different area of the province. Perhaps being inspired by the strength and learning from the salmon culture in the Northwest, efforts to bring the anadromous schools back up the Columbia will be realized in the renegotiated Columbia River Treaty. Acknowledging that rivers link people and institutions begs a broader view of our communities. The rivers bring information along, news from other places — warnings from the pains of industry and the hardship of families; the risky play of pipelines and petroleum and the accumulation of impacts over time in different areas. In the movie Watermark by Edward Burtynsky (2013), which concerns itself with exposing the endangerment of global water sources as well as revelling in their aesthetic, Tahltan Nation teacher Oscar Dennis of the Sacred Headwaters region in Northern B C talks about how when we share the same water source, we in essence physically become everyone else in the vicinity as the H2O molecules that form so much of the human body get redistributed. After seeing Dennis’s interview again, I wrote a quip in my journal inspired by his piercing insight: “I’m water, you’re water, we’re all water for crying out loud. Tears, for that matter, are made of water. Would it upset us to learn that if we drank from the same water source as Donald Trump for a few months, we’d be 70 per cent Donald Trump? That’s what cell biology seems to be telling us. But maybe the fact that humans are pretty much one giant H2O molecule means we can at least agree that protecting our Vital Sources should be very near the top of our collective to-do list…” The rivers are part of the identity of these colleges and universities where students and all others on the banks earn the imprint of the waters on the intangible transcript of their lives. The rivers take us somewhere, not upwards to some class-oriented height, but along together, on the rafts our wisdom. The streams of knowledge and tributaries of essays, the seasonal shift of insight, the currents holding the world together, the colourful local scarves and public easels of the Wild Riviera. 39
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes Swimming through a River of Sage: Grand Coulee Dam and the Loss of the Upper Columbia River’s Salmon The following passage is excerpted from A River Captured: the Columbia River Treaty and Catastrophic Change, (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016)
Source: University of Washington Libraries
When I arrive at the Bureau of Reclamation Interpretive Center at Grand
Special Collections
Coulee Dam, the woman behind the counter states her views clearly. The dam wasn’t that big a deal for the salmon. They were just about finished. Out the window opposite the information counter, Grand Coulee’s concrete apron provides a fitting backdrop for her firm opinions. As much as I try to accept the modernity and wonder of all the affordable electricity, another thought pushes its way in. Our culture’s rush to master one dimension of the river’s power has effectively sacrificed another rich, renewable resource. A man behind the counter chimes in, making reference to a visitor who had
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stopped into the center last week and complained about how the dams destroyed the ocean salmon runs. Doesn’t he know that the Snake River canals owe their existence to the dams? How can we get these darned environmentalists to see that if we lose those barges, there aren’t enough trucks in North America to haul all the wheat? I have read about the history of barges on the Snake River navigation system, made possible by several large dams built in the 1970s. Much of the wheat going downstream to the Pacific on these barges had been transported by train to the head of the Snake’s barge system, from as far away as South Dakota. Railways once did all the work. The man speaks again. I always say to people: what do you want, fish or bread? I step quietly away. Could the Columbia basin have bread and fish? The human power to rationalize any decision we make includes the wrong ones, of course. The firmer the human rationalization, the less possibility for change.
In January 1939, the US secretary of the interior, Harold L. Ickes, announced a plan to relocate the dwindling stocks of spawning salmon expected to arrive from the ocean. The US government purchased eight specially equipped tank trucks for the bureau, to capture the fish before they reached the dam. “The 1939 run of steelheads and salmon will be handled on a temporary but adequate basis,” said John C. Page, commissioner of reclamation. The plan, designed by R.D. Calkins, W.F. Durand and W.H. Rich of Stanford University, involved taking the fish destined to spawn above the dam, and planting them in rivers below the dam — the Wenatchee, Entiat, Methow and Okanagan — to enhance fish stocks in these four tributaries. The theory was that the migrating fish would quickly adopt these streams as their new homes and enhance declining runs in those locations in a win-win situation. The federal government would create four hatcheries — three downstream of the dam to produce salmon, and one more above the dam to stock the new 243-kilometre (151mile) Grand Coulee reservoir with sport fish such as trout. The fish hatchery for the reservoir — funded as a part of the Grand Coulee project — did not last long. The reclamation plan for the ocean salmon and steelhead trout also failed. Predicated on an engineered structure of planting, harvest and intensive management, based on scientific theory, the plan to “re-educate” the salmon had failed. As little as seven years later, substantial mortality of adult salmon was observed both in the hatchery holding ponds and in the more extensive natural holding areas. The hatcheries were plagued with many problems. Brood stock died, disease was rampant, fish food was considered costly and nutritionally inadequate, the rearing system was not receiving enough water flow, nor, ultimately, was 41
funding meeting the needs of the program. The transplants failed to become established in their new streams as they searched in vain for olfactory clues, for memories of a stone or a current, for any sort of trigger that told them they had arrived home. Today, the large species of Chinook that the Salmon Chief had once beckoned into his trap, fish that weighed between 18 and 45 kilograms (40–100 pounds) are considered by some fish biologists to be extinct as a genetic type. In the indigenous, pre-Contact world of the Interior Plateau, fish and people once inhabited an intuitive rather than theoretical world. At Kettle Falls, the Salmon Chief listened to various seasonal and other-worldly signs to know when it was time to move to the edge of the river. Then, word came from a runner sent by downstream tribes. They’re coming. At that point, the Salmon Chief would position the main J-shaped trap above the section of falls that the people called nlhelhewikn, “spearing on back.” The Chief kept a silent vigil through the night, calling on the power of his guardian spirit — Salmon, the fish they called Good Swimmer, en-tee-tee-uh. At sunrise, the Chief chose four young men to help him lower the trap into position. He watched carefully until two large Chinook — a male and a female — had fallen back into the trap. The young men lifted the fish from the basket. A chosen woman eviscerated and carefully poached the fish in the water-worn hollows or “kettles” of stone beside the falls. When it was cooked, this first fish was divided gratefully among all present. At the ceremony’s end, the bones were returned to the water as an offering of thanks. Only then could the harvest begin. The position of Salmon Chief was loosely hereditary, a responsibility usually passed within a family. One of the last hereditary Salmon Chiefs, Kee-KeeTum-Nous, died in 1862, a victim of smallpox. From about 1866 on, the prayers of the next Salmon Chief, Kin-Kan-Nowha, seemed powerless against the influence of fish wheels operating on the lower Columbia to feed the voracious appetites of new canning facilities. The number of spawning fish returning to Kettle Falls fell rapidly after that, as the people watched their life-sustaining resource disappear. In 1896, Sipas received the power from Kin-Kan-Nowha. By 1930, a decade before Grand Coulee’s completion, Sipas had died, and with him, the title of the Salmon Chief ended, too. James Bernard, then chief of the Arrow Lakes/Sinixt tribe, described the fishery at that time: “Sometimes we get five or six fish a day in the baskets for all the Indians of all the tribes — one day we got 30 fish — some days we get none. Before the whites destroyed the salmon fishing, 300 to 400 fish a day were caught in the baskets at Kettle Falls, besides the hundreds caught with spears and gaff hooks. Some Indians used to catch 20 to 30 salmon a day by themselves that way. Now a person may fish all day with a spear and never get a fish.”
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Eileen Delehanty Pearkes
In 1939, members of many tribes gathered at Kettle Falls from around the Interior Plateau for the “Ceremony of Tears,” to say goodbye to the salmon. Some of them comforted themselves with Coyote’s prophecy: he had gone away in the West but would be back, and when he came, he would bring back the salmon.
I leave the interpretive displays and step into the fierce desert sun. The imposing hydro-electric project has restructured the soft bluffs and dramatic basalt hillsides of the plateau desert. A cleanly drawn geometry now tells water exactly where it can go and what it can do. At the centre of this project is the dam itself – an impressive and effective wall of concrete. A maze of transmission wires loop evenly across the air, supported by a forest of steel towers. Neatly placed rip-rap covers the riverbank below the dam’s tailrace. Before the Columbia River Treaty between the US and Canada, water passed over the spillway regularly. Greater efficiencies in the upper system made the spill unnecessary and wasteful, other than for a few days, during high-water spring melt. For a number of years, a light show used to stain the foaming overflow with the story of the dam’s construction and accomplishments. The light show has been updated to include some of the immeasurable losses and is now broadcast on a concrete surface that is almost always dry. Thanks in part to storage in the Canadian portion of the system, generators at Grand Coulee process water more efficiently than they ever have. I return to my makeshift campsite, pack my tent and set out north again across the clumps of sagebrush forest. In the 1970s, Sinixt/Skoyelpi elder Martin Louie told researchers about hemp fishing lines and nets, how the women split apart the stems from hemp dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) and rolled the fibres back and forth across their thighs with the palms of their hands. From the rhythm of their own flesh, the women produced a string sturdy enough to capture the river’s flesh, the wild and profuse salmon species that once swam the Columbia to its headwaters. Hemp string was long, strong and resilient, in many ways like the flow of the Columbia River system used to be, with its fish, floods and pulsing rhythms. Settlers brought values from elsewhere, values that were not well-woven into the landscape. The new people did not realize that the river’s great salmon runs in the lower reaches depended upon their access to the rich spawning grounds upstream of Grand Coulee, in the mountains where I live.
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes. A River Captured: the Columbia River Treaty and Catastrophic Change, (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016).
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Wang Ping
The River Within Us: A Ghazal In my throat, the sea is brewing a storm of blood Mountains’ braided fingers, will there be blood? Dantian — burning earth below my navel Memory along the spine — river of fossil blood Loess bluffs smoldering with Permian dust Home — here, there, everywhere — in my blood 10,000 eyes in my palms, 10,000 hearts in the sky 10,000 wishes in a raging sea…older than blood Give me feathers, I’ll weave you wings of hope Give me dreams, I’ll build boats to cross this bleeding Sea. Oh home, ghost on our breaths! Lingering Prayers at each twilight, pulsing through our blood Under our skin, a kinship of rivers Black, white, yellow, red, brown…thicker than blood
NOTES Dantian: place below the navel, the origin of life, source of our chi in Chinese meridian system Loess bluffs are made with sheer dust blown from around the globe then settled. It’s sheer soil and dust from the Permian period. The biggest and deepest loess is the Yellow Plateau in China.
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“Kinship of Rivers” is an international project that uses public art, poetry, stories, music, dance, food and film to create a network of kinship among people and communities along rivers. Since its launch in 2012, I’ve travelled along the Mississippi, Minnesota, St. Croix, Yangtze, Ganges, Amazon, Po, Milk, and many other rivers around the world, engaged thousands of people, and made over 3000 river flags with poetry and art for clean water, air, and land. In 2013 and 2016, I climbed to the Everest Base Camps (both the North Face in Tibet and South Face in Nepal) to install the river flags along the trek, and release people’s wishes for world peace and harmony. As peace ambassadors, these prayer flags have inspired many people encountered in person and online. Dalai Lama has blessed the project and river flags in person. All water wants is to move to the river. All rivers want is to flow to the sea. All we want is to be one with water. A river runs within each of us — Holding the world together Keeping the planet alive. We are water. Water is us.
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Wang Ping
Genevieve Robertson Study of a Lost Shoreline comprises 170 individual drawings that were produced using silt from the Columbia’s Rosevelt, Wanapum, McNarry and Kinbasket Reservoirs. From plankton to sturgeon, this piece calls attention to the loss of biodiversity that has occurred along the shoreline of the Columbia River due to fluctuating reservoir levels. It is an elegy to the life force of the river and what it sustains, writ large. Still Running Water is a two-channel video that follows the Columbia River from source to mouth, documenting both the imposition and effect of hydropower along its main stem, and the water itself. Still Running Water is a collaboration between Genevieve Robertson and Ron Luther.
Study for a Lost Shoreline Ink and river silt on paper 132 Ă— 225"
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Details of Study for a Lost Shoreline Ink and river silt on paper 132 Ă— 225"
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Genevieve Robertson
Still Running Water Two-channel video 4 minutes
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19 24
1 13 14 2
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7 29
26 25 21
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31 20
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South Fork Palouse River & Paradise Creek: The Confluence Pullman, WA U.S.A
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8
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5 27
46.7325° N, 117.1717° W
15 23 3022
4
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28 10
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Linda Russo
46.7325˚N, 117.1717˚W 1) muse grasses quiver & brown grasses breeze, 2) flickers of white on water velocities meeting, 3) drifting & churning, suds on water, 4) missing footbridge no walking here, 5) quick water, 6) slow water, 7) sparrow whisper chirps, 8) & wind perking up yells, 9) & the sound of a passing (car), 10) rusty honk of Pheasant, 11) & inconsistent Magpie layered in, 12) single glint of windshield afar, 13) floodplain grasses rapt like nests around the multiple trunks of Cottonwood, 14) & flood grass blossoms, 15) damp green brown dirt paths, 16) & cables forming a skyward brim, slicing it, 17) & taut green grasses poking through flattened beige stalks (waterswept), 18) chirps a few pine trees, 19) roto-tiller ribboning out (intermittent windstreams), 20) small plane demarcates an upper boundary erased (called sky), 21) glint of sun (on water), 22) shadow of strands of hair whipping about on thigh, 23) & wind cool to the cheek, 24) swinging little chirps scattered far away, 25) unexpected embroidered mews (cat or bird or motor), 26) grasses hanging off low hanging branches dipping in swift water, 27) Robin in the path still, 28) flash of Magpie’s white wings, 29) Chickadee announced (the verdant green leaves), 30) Crow spreading low little speckles, ants, dirt on pants, 31) little scattered quick water far away ribboning out (between windstreams) slow water walking here, low frequencies dipping in swift water (of confluence)
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Emmy Willis Greetings from the Arrow Lakes Reservoir
The Keenleyside Dam was completed in 1968 as the second of the three
2-channel video
Columbia River Treaty dams, flooding entire towns and displacing over 2000
12 minutes Permission to use archival photographs has been generously granted by the Arrow Lakes Historical Society
residents from their homes. The two-channel video installation, Greetings from Arrow Lakes Reservoir, is a visitation by the artist to the site of its flooding to observe and document the lasting social footprints that are left behind when man-made destruction of home and place occur. Driving footage of landscape, audio interviews and archival photographs collected during these visitations are arranged to form a transient, contemplative account of the current environment and attitudes of residents fifty years after the event.
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Greetings from the Arrow Lakes Reservoir 2-channel video 12 minutes
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Greetings from the Arrow Lakes Reservoir 2-channel video 12 minutes
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Emmy Willis
Installation view of beholden: a poem as long as the river 8.5" × 114' printed on Tyvek fabric
Fred Wah and Rita Wong
Pages 51–53, details of beholden: a poem as long as the river
The function of beholden: a poem as long as the river has been to explore a field of conversation not only between two poets but, more precisely, between poetry and the river. The river has been gracious in gifting us words, thoughts, and astonishments that have validated the conditions of openness and attention in making art. This is where our words come from. We ask about the different meanings of the River. We ask about the trauma and historical devastation of the River, and how we can respond to it. We listen for the language of the River’s body and the people’s names for its parts. Finally, our poems seek to reciprocate. How can making poetry’s words give back to this awesome presence of water?
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Fred Wah and Rita Wong
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Memory Canoe
Columbia Clutch
Before the canoes of memory
some rust maybe
were perpendicular
or an old tire on the shore
to the Columbia’s “own-goal”
but internal combustion
North was stolen
makes no sense the shape
by Wacky Bennet’s road map
of the current isn’t diesel
substance and democracy
though the trains get grade
bored into interior stratagem or poker face the porker disliked the hyphen in ThompsonShuswap no credit, social or intellectual property rights yet tried to narrate gauze over the river where the source kicks in ‘round Kinbasket
geology all comes down to history the nation an imitation locomotive rolling stock ‘ol “Roll On Columbia” time traces depth never thought of a car as deep. Maybe the canoe, too.
who knew we’d be left with this silhouette of greed
Fred Wah
this litter of a old domestic bliss.
Fred Wah
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Fred Wah and Rita Wong
River Arts Bios
Jordan Abel Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from BC. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University where his research concentrates on intergenerational trauma and Indigenous literature. Abel’s creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayword). Abel is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize).
Tracey Kim Bonneau Tracey Kim Bonneau is from the Syilx Nation from the Okanagan, born and raised on the Penticton Indian reserve in British Columbia. Tracey is the coordinator for the NAPAT Program at En’owkin Centre. Tracey operates the company “Of the Land Productions Inc. (OLP) based in Penticton, BC Tracey has more than 30 years of experience in print, radio, television and multimedia. Her most recent accomplishment is producing, writing and hosting her documentary series Quest Out West: Wild Food for which she has produced, 26 episodes currently airing on APTN.
Shawn Brigman Shawn Brigman, PhD is an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians and descendant of regional salish bands (San Poil, Arrow Lakes, Colville, and Shuswap). As a traditional artisan for 14 years, Shawn has been continuously involved in a diverse array of high caliber cultural recovery projects dating back to 2005. During this time he worked on project based ancestral recovery efforts in eastern Washington, north Idaho, and southern British Columbia, exploring and transforming the way people read Plateau architectural space by celebrating the physical revival of ancestral Plateau architectural heritage.
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Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis
how the damming of the upper Columbia helped to insulate
Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a multi-disciplinary,
the Fraser from hydro development. His most recent book,
collaborative artist team and cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery
Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-electricity during Canada’s
in Portland, Oregon. Davis studied photography and film-
Second World War (University of Toronto Press 2015), situates
making at Portland State University and Oregon College of
the damming of the Kootenay River at Brilliant in the context
Art and Craft. Daedalus earned her BA from Reed College.
of wartime hydro development across Canada.
They began working together in 2011 as part of 13 Hats, a collective of artists and writers in Portland. The team’s first major collaborative project, Shadows, was developed with the help of a 2013 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council; and their related projects, Leaping Darkness and Columbia River Water Shadows, showed at Portland State University’s Littman Gallery in 2015 and The Schneider Museum of Art in 2016. Their 2017 project, Bas-Relief, was supported in part by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Their individual work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Blaine Harden Blaine Harden is an bestselling author and international journalist. His book A River Lost, updated and reissued in 2012, told of the story of a journey he took down the Columbia while also discussing effects brought on by the damming of the river. Harden and his book were featured in a PBS documentary about the Grand Coulee Dam. His other books include King of Spies, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot and Escape from Camp 14. He has worked for The Washington Post as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia as well as in New York and Seattle.
Dennis DeHart Dennis DeHart’s artistic practice manifests itself through photography and interdisciplinary projects. The works are project based and weave together interconnected themes of identity, place, and the natural world. A central, expressive tenant throughout the projects derives from the connections, conflicts, and intersections of the natural and cultural worlds. Dennis is an Associate Professor of Art with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Most recently he travelled extensively with his family internationally for a year, to thirteen countries and four continents, focusing his world travel on art,
John Holmgren and Nick Conbere John Holmgren and Nick Conbere have collaborated as artists for over four years. Their collaborative artwork has been exhibited at venues including the International Print Center in New York, Punch Gallery in Seattle, and, most recently, the Touchstones Museum in Nelson, BC. Holmgren lives at his home in Ellensburg, WA but also works as Associate Professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. Conbere works as Associate Professor at Emily Carr University in Vancouver.
education, and research with water often being the underlying current that connected them all.
Breeanne George Breeanne George is a member of the Penticton Indian Band
Ira Edward Ira Edward is from the Lower Similkameen Indian Band of the Okanagan Nation. His primary focus in his art is painting and sculpture, although he is expanding his skillset into print making, drawing and incorporating the use of traditional materials into his works of art.
Matthew Evenden Matthew Evenden is a Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia who studies the environmental history of rivers. His first book, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge University Press 2004) explained
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and is multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on writing and painting. Since childhood, she has been passionate about wildlife, the earth and conserving the natural state of our planet. Recently, she has grown more vocal about her stances and her connections to what is occurring nationally and globally is reflected in her art work.
Laurent Isadore Laurent Isadore obtained his spirit name through the Naming Ceremony at the age of one and earned his manhood through the Rites of Passage Ceremony at the age of twelve where he fasted in the mountains for four days to seek his spiritual vision that would show him the path in which the
Creator wants him to walk. He started to honor his vision
Ditch, Thimbleberry and elsewhere. His literary film work has
by becoming an Oskapew (Traditional Helper) to various cere-
screened at The Ottawa International Writers Festival and
mony lodge holders, learning, working and living with them at
other festivals.
different periods of his childhood. Laurent gained vast amounts of ancestral knowledge and was well on his way to becoming a young ceremonialist. Laurent draws inspiration for his art and everything he does from the life he’s lived, the ancestral knowledge and stories he’s obtained and from the spiritual guidance from the ancestors and Creator. His goal is to obtain a fine arts degree and earn his masters in Indigenous Governance, so he can help the people on a national scale, as that was the vision he received on a mountain years ago.
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes Eileen Delehanty Pearkes explores landscape, history and the human imagination in a wide variety of literary forms. Born in the United States, educated at Stanford University (BA, English) and the University of British Columbia (MA, English), she has been a resident of Canada for 30 years, most of them in the upper Columbia River region. Her books include A River Captured (2016), The Geography of Memory (2002), Heart of a River (2004 & 2015) and The Glass Seed (2007), with many
Kevin Kratz
anthologized essays on mindfulness, landscape and history. In
Kevin has been a metal artist for over 20 years. He has
2014, Eileen curated an exhibit on the history of the Columbia
created many one-of-a-kind sculptures and commissioned
River Treaty in Canada for Touchstones Nelson Museum. The
works. After high school, Kevin joined his father and brother
exhibit received the 2015 Canadian Museum Association’s prize
in the family business, Precision Engraving, where he spent 12
for excellence. Eileen writes popular columns on landscape,
years becoming a metal engraver. It was here that he started
water policy and indigenous history for The North Columbia
building sculptures from steel and stone. Soon after moving to
Monthly, the Nelson Star and the online news website, The
BC, Kevin set-up his own metal studio, Goose Creek Forge, in
Nelson Daily. In 2017, she was appointed Cultural Ambassador
the Slocan Valley. Here, nature fuels the production of his over-
for the city of Nelson.
sized idealized portraits in steel of the local flora and fauna. Currently, Kevin spends his time making art, teaching blacksmithing techniques at Kootenay Studio Arts at Selkirk College,
Sophia Phillip Sophia Phillip is a member of the Penticton Indian Band. She
and fermenting kosher-style dill pickles from the cucumbers
is drawn to the endless possibilities to experiment with other
he grows in the back forty, by the creek.
mediums, even though it takes time to go from learning the basics to mastering each medium. The skills she continues to
Steve Mackie Steve Mackie is an Osoyoos band member of the Okanagan
learn become a part of her vision of creating art that ebbs and flows
nation. With a preference for visual arts, his chosen mediums to work with involve wood sculpting and acrylic painting. Steve is also expanding his repertoire into creative writing, sculpture and print making.
Wang Ping Wang Ping was born in China and came to the US in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry
John Massey
from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The
Josh Massey is originally from Ottawa and has lived in British
Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, The Last Communist Virgin,
Columbia for ten years along the Skeena, Fraser, Bulkley,
Flashcards: Poems by Yu Jian, Ten Thousand Waves, and Life of
Kootenay and Peace rivers. He teaches English Composition
Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (AWP 2017 series for
and Literature at Selkirk College and is the author of the novels
non fiction). She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best
We Will All Be Trees and The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree. His
Book in Humanities and is the recipient of NEA, the Bush Artist
poetry, fiction and literary criticism have appeared in Grain,
Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for non-fiction,
Prairie Fire, The Capilano Review, Subterrain, Rampike, Matrix,
and many others. She received her Distinct Immigrant Award
Event, Filling Station, The Minnesota Review, Dreamland,
in 2014, and Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015.
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She’s also a photographer, installation artist. Her multi-media
include Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman,
exhibitions include “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three
2015) and Participant (Lost Roads, 2016), winner of the Bessmilr
Gorges,” “Kinship of Rivers” at schools, colleges, galleries,
Brigham Poets Prize, and a collection of lyric essays, To Think
museums, lock and dams, and confluences along the Mississippi
of her Writing Awash in Light (Subito, 2016). An co-edited
River. She is professor of English at Macalester College and
work, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the
founder and director of Kinship of Rivers project.
Anthropocene, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
www.wangping.com www.behindthegateexhibit.wangping.com www.kinshipofrivers.org
Emmy Willis Emmy Willis is an emerging artist working within the interdisciplinary fields of film, animation, and community-engaged
Brenda Powder
art practices. Previous works in independent filmmaking have
Brenda Powder is a Traditional and Passionate Cree Woman,
focused upon the documentary, examining the significance
born and raised in a small town in Northern Saskatchewan,
of individual artists, makers, and farmers to the overall cultural
called La Ronge. She is an inter-generational residential school
climate of rural communities in British Columbia. Her recent
survivor whose parents are amongst the most influential people
research and animated works explore contemporary animation
in her life. Teaching her important lessons such as how to be
in the context of experimental and independent production
accepting to people of all walks of life and always help others
and reject industry influences towards commercial standards.
whenever the situation arises. Her parents have and continue to Willis completed her education at Emily Carr University of Art inspire her to be the best version of herself as she can be. They & Design, and has worked as media arts curatorial assistant at are always there when she is needing a helping and caring
Western Front and festival coordinator at New Forms Media
hand through all her trials, tribulations and triumphs.
Society. Although currently based in Vancouver, Willis grew up in Cranbrook, near the Columbia headwaters.
Genevieve Robertson Genevieve Robertson is a drawing-based interdisciplinary artist
Fred Wah
with a background in environmental studies. Since her initial
Fred Wah is Professor Emeritus of English of the University of
artist work related to the Columbia River three years ago, she
Calgary and a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada
has begun a research-creation project that involves interviewing
(2011–2013). Much of Fred Wah’s writing, particularly evidenced
women who advocate for the health of the Columbia, Fraser,
by the recent publication of Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems
Athabasca and Peace Rivers. Robertson has exhibited her art-
1962–1991, has had as a focus the geography of southeastern BC.
work in venues including the Libby Leshgold Gallery (Vancouver), He has spent most of his life in the Kootenay region, and his poetry the Pensacola Museum (USA), the Touchstones Museum (Nelson), addresses the physical and social terrain inhabited by the Kootenay Or Gallery (Vancouver), the Nanaimo Art Gallery, the New
and Columbia watersheds, its mountains, forests, rivers, and lakes.
Gallery (Calgary) and the James May Gallery (USA). She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University (2016) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2009). She presently resides in Nelson, BC where she serves as Executive Director for Oxygen Centre.
Rita Wong Dr. Rita Wong is an award-winning author and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, on unceded Coast Salish territories. Her most recent book of poetry,
Linda Russo
undercurrent, addresses water through personal, cultural and po-
Linda Russo writes mostly within walking distance from her
litical lenses She also recently co-edited with Dorothy Christian
back door in the inland northwestern US where she’s lived for
Downstream: Reimagining Water, an interdisciplinary anthology.
the past decade. A creative-critical writer, her work engages
As a resident of the Sto:lo (Fraser River) watershed who benefits
ecopoetics, human/non-human landscape/land use, and
from electricity generated through the dams on the Columbia,
experiential and ideological geographies, and increasingly
Wong considers the relationships that exist across watersheds
includes other biome inhabitants. Her most recent books
and what reciprocity entails in such contexts.
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Jordan Abel
Kevin Kratz
Tracey Kim Bonneau
Steve Mackie
Shawn Brigman
John Massey
Nick Conbere
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes
Anna Daedalus
Sophia Phillip
Kerry Davis
Brenda Powder
Dennis DeHart
Wang Ping
Ira Edward
Genevieve Robertson
John Holmgren
Linda Russo
Matthew Evenden
Emmy Willis
Breeanne George
Fred Wah
Blaine Harden
Rita Wong
Laurent Isadore