Previous to the field school I attended this summer, I had no knowledge whatsoever of the Columbia River Treaty.

I didn’t know about the families (both human and non) who lost their homes to flooding, the Indigenous people who lost their identity to convenience and technological “progress”, the land that lost its shape and ecology and geography to damming.

But then I did know, and what I learned during those fifteen days ignited a desire to share this history with others, especially those who live in the Columbia Basin. I believe it is fundamentally important to know the chronicles of the land one calls home, in particular when those chronicles involve drastic consequences that are present in one’s life to this day. Basin residents are affected by the aftermath of the Treaty every single moment from power usage to water recreation, but so are residents of the US who are connected to our electrical grid, or tourists who use the convenient ferry across the upper Arrow Lakes Reservoir. To quote information from the Columbia Basin Trust, “the Canadian Columbia River Basin generates approximately 50 per cent of the total hydroelectricity produced in BC”.

There’s also a lot to unpack with this, and I know I can’t get to it all. I’m not even sure if I’ll do the subject justice.

But I want to start the conversation and hopefully inspire others to learn more. I urge you to review the resources throughout and at the end of this post if you’d like to deepen your understanding of this important matter.

Let me back up a moment before I dive into the details, though, starting from after our tour of the Revelstoke Dam.

That evening, we met in Revelstoke with Cindy Pearce to learn about the Columbia River and her involvement with it. Cindy is the Executive Director of the Columbia River Treaty Local Governments Committee, which is a group that has been rallying for implementing their recommendations about the Treaty, based on what they’ve heard from Basin residents. They are elected officials from local governments throughout the Basin which “actively and meaningfully engage in decisions around the future of the Treaty”. Their recommendations include salmon restoration, less fluctuation in reservoir levels, and Basin resident engagement, among many other topics; these recommendations need to be addressed by BC Hydro and the BC and Canadian governments in both Treaty negotiations and in decisions made in BC. I wanted to absorb all the information I possibly could from Cindy, but the complexity of it all overwhelmed me. Luckily, she provided us with paper handouts on the Committee and their important work – and the link to their website.

We camped at Shelter Bay Provincial Park that night. The park is right next to Arrow Lakes Reservoir with a pebbly beach that stretches along the edge of the water. When I awoke the next morning at 5 am, I poked my head out of my tent and knew I couldn’t go back to sleep – it was too mesmerizing of a view across the reservoir to look away. So I hurriedly got out my camera and went for a walk along the shore to take some photos. I was accompanied by a friendly swarm of small flies.

It was around this time during the field school that we dove headfirst into the history of the Columbia River.

In 1964, Canada and the United States ratified a treaty that had two main purposes: to maximize electricity production from the mighty Columbia River, and to prevent its flooding downstream. (The 2000-kilometre-long Columbia River is split almost in half between Canada and the US. 801 kilometres wind northwest from Canal Flats until Kinbasket Reservoir, then south all the way past Trail through the border. Therefore, there is still a lot of water that flows after its travels through BC.) It was incentivized by disastrous flooding along the Columbia River in 1948 which killed 41 people, destroyed a community of 18 000 in the US, and left thousands homeless and affected on either side of the border. Around this time, there was also a fast-rising demand for power in the Pacific Northwest. This international agreement to solve these issues was called the Columbia River Treaty.

There were details to the Treaty, of course. Canada needed to provide 15.5 million acre-feet (MAF – I have an explanation of this unit of measurement in my last post) of water storage for the US using a series of reservoirs and dams. Nothing existed for this purpose at the time of the Treaty agreements, so they were to be created. The entities that were appointed to implement the Treaty’s stipulations were BC Hydro in Canada and two equivalent American dam agencies in the US, the Bonneville Power Administration and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Four dams were constructed solely for the Treaty, and three reside in Canada: the Duncan Dam at the tip of Kootenay Lake, built in 1967; the Hugh Keenleyside Dam near Castlegar in 1968; and the Mica Dam (135 kilometres north of Revelstoke) in 1973. Each dam subsequently created its own reservoir (or, as it’s sometimes called, “fake lake”) of trapped water. As I mentioned in my last post, the Mica Dam is by far the largest of all four dams, holding twelve MAF of water storage. Seven MAF of this water belongs to the Treaty’s flood control agreements.

The fourth Treaty dam is the Libby Dam, near Libby, Montana, which was also built in 1973. The purpose of this dam is to flood water back into Canada as the Koocanusa Reservoir.

As part of the Columbia River Treaty, in 1964, the US paid the Canadian government the equivalent of $500 million USD in today’s money for 60 guaranteed years of flood control and protection. This is referred to as the Assured Annual Flood Control provision. (There is another part of this, Called Upon Flood Control, that involves a more complex system of managing years of higher flood risk. I’m not going to get into its specifics but do check out the link if you’d like to learn more.) I’ll write about details of the Treaty reaching its 60-year deadline and coming to renegotiations in my next post.

The US also agreed to send half of the estimated “extra” power back that would be generated by the hydroelectric dams built for the Treaty. This latter arrangement is what is known as the “Canadian Entitlement”.

However, the name is misleading, as the power is actually sent back to the province of British Columbia as part of the Canada-BC Agreement. BC chose to sell the first 30 years of its Canadian Entitlement to fund the construction of the three Canadian dams. The Entitlement, worth approximately $120 million, is received annually as raw energy and is typically sold to other companies. The revenue from its sale goes into the province’s general account.

This is but one aspect of the story. There’s much more to it yet.

After our night spent at Shelter Bay, we packed up and drove to Nakusp to meet with three guests: Karen Hamling, former mayor of Nakusp and current member of the Columbia Basin Trust Board of Directors; Tom Zeleznik, current mayor of Nakusp; and Aidan McLaren-Caux, councillor for Nakusp and member of the Columbia River Treaty Local Governments Committee. Each shared with us valuable information on Nakusp’s convoluted history with the Treaty.

When the Treaty dams were being built, families were forced off their land and told to leave their homes as areas were prepared for flooding. Around 2 300 people living along the future reservoirs – Arrow Lakes, Duncan, and Koocanusa – were relocated. I believe this figure does not account for the Indigenous groups also living in these areas, who were likely treated even more poorly than the farmers and families who had to abandon the land that provided their livelihoods.

BC Hydro compensated those who lost their homes, but the value of the properties was sometimes totaled as the worth of the land having already been flooded. So, essentially, zero dollars. People were still paid, but the amount was insultingly low. Certainly not always enough for finding other accommodations. Though I don’t think this happened in every case, many people were treated in a manner such as this. And that wasn’t the only injustice mentioned. Some families out of the house for an afternoon would come back to find their possessions on the lawn and their home already in the process of being destroyed.

One can imagine, then, how this kind of treatment and history would affect a family even generations down the line. PTSD and unresolved anger and grief are understandably rife in communities along these reservoirs, in particular Arrow Lakes where the most relocation occurred. Many have felt powerless, silenced, unappreciated. Their homes and land drowned, for a purpose not all agreed with. Even if some appreciated the intriguing construction and progress, the way the government went about it was frankly horrifying.

After meeting with our guests in Nakusp, we drove to a cozy campsite near Burton at which we stayed for the night. At this campground we had access to “HOT SHOWERS” (I journaled about this very excitedly) for the first time since the beginning of the trip. During our group meeting that evening, an activity we did together almost every night to connect and share about our experience of the day, we sat in a circle by Arrow Lakes Reservoir and watched the sky darken. The mood was somber. Many of us were shocked by what we’d learned in Nakusp. There was suddenly a different look to the reservoir we sat by: lifeless, grim, industrial. Beneath its surface lay buried remnants of what once was. The skeletons of buildings and trees, homes and roads, from another time.

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“I had a nice sleep last night and woke up bright and early – 5:30 am – for a fresh start to the day. We had a busy morning packing things up at our campsite, moving canoes to the reservoir edge, loading canoes, and finally setting off.

“We paddled for a couple hours across the reservoir to a small, sandy beach. The area is called Oatscott.”
– day ten

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Above are photos I took upon our arrival at Oatscott, my solo tent shown in the last image.

Oatscott (also spelled Oatescott) is an inconspicuous length of beach tucked into a corner of the Arrow Lakes Reservoir, a few hours’ paddle from Burton. It holds some history as a steamer landing in the early 20th century, but more importantly to the field school, its significance lies in the grave marker that sits lonely and often unvisited set back from a section of the beach.

Though we didn’t visit this grave, our leaders taught us about its past. The land around Oatscott had once been a reserve for the Sinixt peoples established in 1902. This reserve was “rocky, unsuitable for agriculture, insufficient for foraging and inaccessible for many months of the year” (from the Autonomous Sinixt website) where a group of only 30-odd individuals resided. Most people inevitably left from the unfriendly conditions, either to other Canadian reserves or across the border to the Sinixt reserve in Washington.

The small Oatscott community held the only registered members of the Sinixt, or as it was called at the time, Arrow Lakes Band in Canada, and so when the last member passed away in 1953, the people were considered extinct. More hauntingly, and in the Order in Council’s words on the situation, “extinct for purposes of the Indian Act”. The reserve was then taken back as land belonging to the Province of BC.

The grave marker at Oatscott bears the names of fifteen Sinixt people buried at the location. Mostly, this piece of the past remains forgotten in Canadian history and unacknowledged except for in some museums and archives. I certainly hadn’t learned about it before.

Considering the enormity of just how much had been lost with the induction of the Columbia River Treaty was poignant. So many people displaced, communities abandoned, land swallowed up by the massive swathes of water that filled in these valleys. Indigenous Nations hadn’t been consulted. Neither Basin residents. Again and again, our lessons on the river kept coming back to the theme of sacrifice. Had all of this grief been worth it? Did the benefits outweigh the loss? At what point does the sacrifice of a smaller population mean more than the comfort and ease of the “greater good”?

“The industrial reservoirs created following the construction of the Treaty-related dams . . . inundated approximately 120 000 hectares (300 000 acres/470 square miles), including over 70 000 hectares (173 000 acres/270 square miles) of lakes, rivers, wetlands, ponds, streams and riparian areas, with related habitats for fish, wildlife, waterfowl, birds and other species” (Local Governments Committee’s Recommendations Update, January 2021).

I enjoyed sitting by the water at Oatscott and looking out across the reservoir and did it often. The fact that there were virtually no mosquitoes present made it even better, but then I had to wonder: why weren’t there mosquitoes? Why didn’t I hear as many birds singing or see as many native plants along the water’s edge?

An aspect of reservoirs is that they are made to constantly ebb and flow in their water storage capacity. The Mica Dam’s water levels are allowed to fluctuate as much as 155 vertical feet. This fluctuation is apparent even on a day-to-day basis, as the dam operators assess if more outflow is needed for water downstream (for more hydroelectricity generation either in Canada or the US, for example) or if they need to hold back water (usually to prevent flooding, typically in the US). Even in the few days we spent at Oatscott, a noticeable drop was seen in the water around us. It was fascinating to see it happen right before our eyes.

Because of this unnatural oscillation, plants are challenged to grow along the reservoir edges. Practically no vegetation inhabits the bottom of these fake lakes, because in summer they are usually exposed mudflats. (Here is an excellent image showing the Arrow Lakes Reservoir during a drawdown.) Dust storms are common during spring drawdown.

Few plants and vegetation means few insects; few insects means few birds; and on and on it goes. Compared to the relatively wild and natural sloughs of the Columbia River near Canal Flats, these reservoirs were beautiful but devoid of life. Eerily quiet and still. The river taught me so much about itself just from observation; here, it seemed to have been tamed.

The low or even nonexistent water levels in these reservoirs affects many different aspects of life in the Basin. Not only is there less biodiversity within the ecosystems, fish populations are also unstable and unhealthy, air quality is poor during dust storm seasons, and boating, fishing, and tourism groups can’t function as well. This isn’t just an environmental issue. It is also connected to socioeconomics, culture, and politics.

On day eleven of the field school, we discussed the importance of letter writing and began drafting letters to Adrian Dix, the BC Minister of Energy and Climate Solutions. Our letters could be about anything related to the Columbia River or the field school; the idea was that this letter held the invitation to create a request that would hopefully earn a response and even inspire some action. I began forming my introduction but couldn’t decide what exactly I wanted to write about. I chose to mull it over.

These were photos I took on day eleven after our first night at Oatscott. The moody weather was refreshing and stunning; again, I woke up early to walk along the shore and admire the scenery with my camera. The second photo shows where the Sinixt Reserve would have been located (around the cliffs and beach).

Our backcountry camping at Oatscott was very enjoyable. By this part in the trip, we were all working together as a well-oiled machine and our teamwork on meals, dishes, camp organization, and group activities was excellent. (Us sickies were also mostly recovered, hooray.) Since the third day of the field school a role called “leaders of the day” had been introduced, where two random students would be chosen to delegate responsibilities and ensure the group was staying on schedule. On this day I was appointed, as well as my comrade Maya.

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“Maya and I were chosen to be leaders of the day today (!) and so this morning we told people about plans for the day. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be – Maya’s been good at getting the group’s attention, and I don’t feel so nervous to speak in front of everyone now.”
– day eleven

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Slowly but surely, I found myself enjoying my leadership position. By the time the day was over, I almost wished I could do it again. I can’t stress how much I learned, in an inadvertent way, from the Columbia River about myself. I could like taking charge? I wanted to participate in group discussions? Without the safety and familiarity of home, I was realizing my potential, my resiliency, my strength.

That evening, we hopped into the canoes and played around in the mischievous waves as the sun set, laughing and joking and splashing around. I found myself paddling from the stern without even thinking about it. The ease and automatic movements of my J-strokes, sweeps, draws, pries seemed to just click.

Before we paddled back to shore, we rafted up in our canoes and made a star shape so we could all face each other and have our evening meeting. I looked at the welcoming, smiling faces around me, the salmon-pink sunset lighting up the sky and painting the water. The sense of belonging I felt among my peers and leaders was suddenly right in my face and unmistakable. “For the first time, I think,” I wrote in my journal later, “I felt bittersweet about leaving.” I knew I would miss this.

to be continued

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