Dam's damage lingers in memories

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Completed in 1954, Garrison Dam created a lake that reaches 178 miles upstream, flooding the heart of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The reservoir, dubbed Lake Sakakawea, holds enough water to cover the entire state of North Dakota six inches deep.

NEW TOWN, N.D. -- In the autumn of 1954, construction crews working on Garrison Dam dumped the final load of dirt onto its massive embankment, a 2.5-mile-wide barrier containing 66.5 million cubic yards of compacted earth fill. Blocked in its ancient course, the Missouri River halted and then seemed to reverse direction, its rising waters slithering quietly upstream and swallowing farms and homes like a ravenous serpent.

Casting about for a suitably evocative name for the 178-mile-long reservoir impounded by Garrison Dam, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked to the region's history. Noting that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had followed the Missouri through the area during their exploration of the West, and had spent the winter nearby among members of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, the agency named the Garrison Dam reservoir after the young Indian woman the explorers met there -- a teen-age mother who would become one of the most famous women in American history.

"Sakakawea ... was a Shoshoni whose knowledge of the unknown land and people proved invaluable to Lewis and Clark," the agency says in its brochure about Garrison Dam. "In honor of her courage, Lake Sakakawea was named for her."

It may have been intended as an honor, but the choice of names rankles still among the people who live near Lake Sakakawea, which slices across the heart of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. To many of its residents, the COE's choice was an insult or, at best, the cruelly ironic product of white disregard for Indian culture and history.

The COE's glossy brochure touting the benefits of Garrison Dam omits any mention of the towns that lie drowned beneath the murky, wind-whipped waters of Lake Sakakawea: Shell Creek, Charging Eagle, Elbowoods, Nishu, Red Butte, Lucky Mound, Beaver Creek, Independence. The towns and the rich bottomland surrounding them were home to members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, whose ancestors had farmed and hunted this part of the northern Plains for centuries.

Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes, whose prime ranching and farm land was drowned by Lake Sakakawea, blame Garrison Dam -- one of six big dams the federal government built on the upper Missouri River -- for destruction of the reservation economy and disruption of clan and social ties.

Like many Indian communities in Montana and the Dakotas, the towns on the Fort Berthold Reservation were destroyed and their inhabitants forcibly relocated in the 1940s and 1950s as the COE constructed a series of dams on the upper Missouri. At Fort Berthold, the reservoir inundated important cultural and archaeological sites and drowned more than 152,000 acres of prime ranching and crop land, relegating tribal farmers and ranchers to less fertile acreage and eviscerating the formerly self-sufficient reservation economy. Relocation of the population to far-flung corners of the reservation severed clan and social relationships.

That the COE could think it was paying homage to Sakakawea by bestowing her name on the lake that destroyed her adoptive people's home and way of life illustrates the vast cultural gulf that has long persisted between native tribes and their white neighbors throughout the West -- a gulf that finds expression today in contrasting attitudes toward the Lewis and Clark expedition itself.

A symbol of defeat

Fort Berthold Reservation headquarters is just outside of New Town, a name so assertively bland that it seems to have been chosen explicitly to avoid connection to the landscape, its people or their past. It is the primary urban center in the region, home to about 1,500 people, and appears prosperous by local standards -- a major state highway passes through it, and stores, motels, gas stations and other business catering to its traffic line the main thoroughfare. Technically, however, it lies outside the reservation. Most of the tribal population is thinly scattered among smaller towns that bear the signs of economic impoverishment, with ramshackle housing and dilapidated public buildings cheaply constructed and inadequately maintained.

By the time Lewis and Clark reached the area in October 1804, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (who sometimes refer to themselves as the Sahnish) already had been reduced in numbers by diseases introduced by white traders and trappers. They subsequently banded together for mutual support and protection, after repeated epidemics of smallpox and other diseases had reduced the population even further, and became known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. They were granted the 13.5-million-acre Fort Berthold Reservation by treaty in 1851; subsequent acts by the federal government reduced the reservation's size to 1 million acres.

The reservoir consumed another 152,300 acres in the 1950s and cut the reservation in two. Only a single bridge crosses the narrow lake, forcing tribal members to travel extremely long distances to visit friends and relatives in other reservation communities.

Anglers and boaters regard the upper Missouri River reservoirs as prime recreational spots. Scores of campgrounds, picnic areas and boat ramps dot the 1,300-mile shoreline of Lake Sakakawea, which tourism promoters claim has the best walleye and northern pike fishing in the country.

Although Lake Sakakawea is a popular destination for anglers and boaters (state tourism promoters boast that it offers "the best walleye and northern pike fishing in the nation"), the Three Affiliated Tribes have done little to capitalize on it economically. There's a reason for that, said Calvin Grinnell, a cultural preservation development specialist for the tribes.

"Because of the trauma of the flooding of Garrison Dam, the lake became a symbol of defeat," he said.

Resentment still smolders among tribal members forced from their homes, forced to watch as the best farmland in the region disappeared beneath the stagnant waters of a reservoir created primarily to facilitate barge traffic serving white farmers downstream in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. Figuratively, if not literally, many members of the tribes have turned their backs on the lake that so visibly symbolizes the losses they and their ancestors have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government.

It's not surprising that the tribes fared poorly when the COE started building its big dams in the Dakotas. Indians had been excluded from any involvement in the planning. As a consequence, according to scholars who have studied the projects, dam sites were chosen to maximize benefits for white farms and communities, while regarding tribal assets as having negligible value and being therefore expendable.

"The MRSC (Missouri River States Committee) lacked any Indian representation; only off-reservation interests participated in the hearings, organizational activities, congressional lobbying efforts, and deliberations surrounding site selection," historian Robert Kelley Schneiders wrote in "Unruly River," his detailed account of Missouri River development efforts over the past two centuries. "Because of this exclusion from the political process, Indian lands and towns located along the Missouri in the Dakotas did not receive the same degree of consideration as off-reservation communities."

Appeals by the Fort Berthold tribes to have the reservoir built at a less damaging site fell on deaf ears. In a plaintive letter, notable for its eloquence and futility, the tribal business council made its case:

Badlands and bison characterize Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which offers visitors a taste of the northern Plains ecosystem that explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered as they passed through the region in autumn of 1804.

"We recognize the value to our white neighbors, and to the people down stream, of the plan to control the River and to make use of the great surplus of flood waters; but we cannot agree that we should be destroyed, drowned out, removed, and divided for the public benefit while all other white communities are protected and safe-guarded by the same river development plan which now threatens us with destruction."

Technically, the Three Affiliated Tribes sold their land to make way for the reservoir. They initially received $5.1 million from the COE, which was to reimburse them for the cost of relocating 325 families (80 percent of the tribal membership) as well as the loss of 94 percent of the reservation's farmland. Continued protests and lobbying won the tribes an additional $7.5 million from Congress several years later, bringing the total compensation to $12.6 million for lands that private appraisers hired by the tribes had valued at $22 million.

Lawmakers who drafted the settlement legislation prohibited the tribe from using the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing or other purposes; rejected tribal requests for the chance to buy power from Garrison Dam at cost; refused to include provisions for a federal irrigation project to bring marginal tribal lands into cultivation to replace those lost to the dam; and denied the tribe royalty rights to subsurface minerals within the reservoir area. In what could only be described as an act of gratuitous disdain, the law also forbid the tribe to cut down and remove the timber that would be submerged by the lake.

To members of the tribes, the indignity of the lopsided deal mirrored countless other indignities inflicted upon Plains Indians, indignities that live on today in the very names attached to the land.

"Everything is 'Fort,' " said Malcolm Wolf, north segment representative on the reservation's Tribal Council, referring with disdain to a host of labels for geographic features scattered across the Plains -- Fort Berthold, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Pierre National Grassland, Fort Union Trading Post, Fort Totten Historic Site. "It sounds like control."

Wolf also disdains the term "reservation."

"It means 'something that will be dealt with later,' " he said. " 'Homeland' is what I would prefer."

Like Grinnell, Wolf is a gracious if wary host to visitors from off the reservation. He offers guests drinks from the miniature refrigerator in his office and teases them gently -- teasing and joking are strong cultural traits among the three tribes. There are, however, some things he doesn't joke about, and some thoughts and feelings he simply will not share with whites.

"We gave up enough already," he said.

A day that has passed

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where wild horses still roam, preserves remnants of the undisturbed prairie just west of the Fort Berthold Reservation.

There are two highly visible exceptions to the Fort Berthold Reservation's general aura of economic impoverishment. One is the relatively new tribal museum, which has a small but exquisite collection of Plains Indian artifacts. The other is the 4 Bears Casino. Built in the 1970s as a lodge, it recently was remodeled and expanded to capitalize on the growing popularity of Indian gaming.

"Gambling is a tradition among our people," said Grinnell, whose ancestry includes Mandan and Hidatsa. "They would bet on everything. We're just being practical."

During a tour of the reservation, Grinnell talked about growing up there, and about the palpable sense of history that hangs over the haunting northern Plains landscape. His grandfather was French-American, fought in the Civil War, and made his living selling grain to Fort Union, a trading post and military base established not far away at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, on the border of Montana and North Dakota. Grinnell wears a thin beard in honor of his French blood, which allows him to grow facial hair other Indians cannot.

"Our association with European-Americans has been a long one," he said, noting that the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara villages were an important trading center on the northern Plains, the nexus of a vast network of commerce that extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and reached from the desert Southwest to the shores of Hudson Bay. European and American fur traders tapped into this network in the 18th and 19th centuries; many of them -- including Toussaint Charbonneau, Sacagawea's husband -- lived among the Mandans and Hidatsas, sharing their way of life and introducing European bloodlines into those of the Plains natives.

Although the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara played an important role in the Lewis and Clark expedition (see accompanying story), which followed the Missouri River through the heart of what would later become the Fort Berthold Reservation, the Three Affiliated Tribes have so far done little to capitalize on the bicentennial.

There is a single signed Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail site on the reservation, but visitors have almost no hope of finding it without a guide. An unmarked dirt road leads to a placard on a knoll overlooking a lobe of Lake Sakakawea dubbed Reunion Bay.

A pipe railing surrounds the sign ("Cows kept knocking it over," Grinnell said), which informs visitors that beneath the water is the spot where Lewis and Clark were reunited after their separate explorations of the Yellowstone and Marias rivers during the expedition's 1806 return from the Pacific to St. Louis.

Grinnell is a member of the Fort Berthold Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Committee. The tribes could do more to prepare for the bicentennial and to tell their part of the story, he acknowledged, but probably won't. Part of the reason, he suggested, is that native Americans do not accord Lewis and Clark the historical significance and heroic stature granted them by whites.

"The Hidatsa leadership did not like the Lewis and Clark expedition," Grinnell said. "Why? They were accustomed to French and English traders who brought things of value to barter. Our people were eminently practical; if they (the explorers) had nothing to trade, what use were they and what were they doing here? The majority of the other traders came from the north and traveled in smaller parties. The (Lewis and Clark) expedition came from the south and could have been considered interlopers. They came with a great show of military might and gave pompous speeches telling our people to pledge allegiance to some unknown 'great father.' It is no wonder they were disliked."

That view of Lewis and Clark as pompous interlopers rather than heroic explorers is common among native Americans all along the expedition's path. To many tribes -- struggling to be recognized, to achieve economic independence, to preserve their languages and traditions -- the journey of the Corps of Discovery ushered in an era not of glorious progress but of genocide, dispossession and decline.

"To many Indian people, the story of Lewis and Clark is not separate from the story that followed, which includes decimation of whole animal populations, taking of Indian lands and suppression of tribal cultures," according to Julie Cajune, an Indian education coordinator and enrolled member of the Salish and Kootenai tribes in Montana, who wrote an essay on the subject for a special bicentennial edition of the Northern Region newsletter published by the U.S. Forest Service.

A 19th century chief among the Flathead tribe of Montana offered a poetic analogy:

"We were happy when he (the white man) first came," said Charlot, who traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1884 to plead for his people's right to remain in their beloved Bitterroot Valley.

"We first thought he came from the light; but he comes like the dusk of evening now, not like the dawn of morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him."

The rest of the story

Amy Mossett, tourism director for the Three Affiliated Tribes and chairwoman of the Circle of Tribal Advisors for the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, dons a buckskin dress for a presentation about Sacagawea. The bicentennial, she says, offers tribes a chance to present their view of the Lewis and Clark story.

The National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial has gone to great lengths to involve American Indians in planning for the three-year celebration, reaching out to 58 "trail tribes" it considers to have some connection to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Response has been varied, some tribes enthusiastically seeking a share of the millions of dollars being spent to promote the bicentennial and accommodate tourists, others angrily denouncing the hoopla as inappropriate in light of the events that followed that first contact between their ancestors and the U.S. government.

In some cases, the effort to involve Indians in the planning has produced striking incongruities. Members of the Chinook, a family of tribes originally found along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, were invited to participate in the bicentennial commemoration at the same time that the U.S. government was resisting their decades-long quest for formal federal recognition.

Federal recognition could make the Chinooks eligible for government funding to pay for medical care, schools and social services and would enable them to negotiate potentially lucrative gaming compacts with state governments. Recognition was granted the Chinooks in the final hours of the Clinton administration but put on hold after President Bush took office. The dispute still has not been resolved.

Some tribes have questioned the use of federal and state tax dollars to promote the bicentennial and to help local communities construct parking lots, signs and other visitor-oriented facilities to accommodate the crush of tourists expected to retrace portions of the expedition route during the next three years. During an early planning meeting two years ago involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and tribes along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington, native representative balked at the COE's offer of $200 million for such projects, according to an account in a local newspaper.

"What good will parking lots, bathrooms and bike paths be in a few years?" said Roberta Conner, director of the Tamascslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon. "We are thinking about where we will be in 200 years. What about funding language preservation, or habitat restoration, or tearing down some of your dams?"

To other tribes, however, the bicentennial represents a welcome chance to present an Indian perspective on western history to a wide audience, and that is the focus members of the national bicentennial committee encourage.

They have a powerful ally in that quest: Two years ago, the National Park Service appointed Gerard Baker -- a full-blooded member of the Three Affiliated Tribes who was born and raised on the Fort Berthold Reservation -- as superintendent of a special traveling education center that will retrace the Lewis and Clark trail, offering exhibits and other materials about the expedition and its historical context. Baker's primary job is to serve as liaison between NPS, which administers the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, and local communities and tribes along the route.

"This is the first time the tribes have been given the opportunity to participate in telling the Lewis and Clark story," said Amy Mossett, tourism director for the Three Affiliated Tribes and chair of the Circle of Tribal Advisors for the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. "In the past, most Americans believed that Lewis and Clark succeeded on their own in their monumental mission, when in fact, they probably wouldn't have survived without the tribes. This time around the tribes are being asked to tell the story from their points of view."

The Corps of Discovery did rely for help on the people they encountered on their way across the West. They traded for food with the Mandans and Hidatsas during the long, cold winter they spent in North Dakota; they acquired from the Shoshones the horses needed for the tortuous crossing of the Rocky Mountains, during which they were led by native guides; they stumbled, half-starved, out of those same mountains and were rescued by the Nez Perce, who fed and sheltered them while they regained their strength.

As the expedition traveled down the Columbia River, native tribes supplied fish and roots; when the travelers arrived at the Pacific Coast, the Clatsops offered them advice as to where the best winter hunting might be found.

But the most compelling evidence of tolerance was the simple fact that native tribes allowed the greatly outnumbered explorers to come and go in peace, instead of killing and robbing them. Despite Lewis and Clark's ignorance of tribal politics and their attitude of cultural superiority, which often annoyed their native hosts, the Corps of Discovery for the most part was welcomed and treated with respect. They usually got along with their hosts, and with each other, despite enormous cultural and linguistic barriers.

Perhaps no phase of the journey better demonstrates this than the long, cold winter among the Mandans and Hidatsas, after which Lewis proclaimed his small traveling community -- Americans of Irish, English and Scottish ancestry, French-Canadians, French-Indians, a Shoshone woman -- to be acting "in the most perfict harmony." As Lewis was never shy about recording incidents of conflict and insubordination during the trip, there seems no reason to doubt his sincerity.

To Monica Mayer, a physician on the Fort Berthold Reservation, the bicentennial offers an opportunity for everyone -- white and Indian alike -- to embrace the expedition's example of multicultural tolerance and cooperation.

"If Lewis and Clark and the Mandan-Hidatsa did it two centuries ago," she said, "surely we can do it today."