KETTLE FALLS, Wash. — Before the Grand Coulee Dam flattened Kettle Falls into Lake Roosevelt, back when the upper Columbia River ran thick with salmon each summer, tribes from across the region met here to fish, trade and socialize.
"This is where people met, got married, had babies, settled disputes," said Patti Stone, water quality coordinator for the Colville Confederated Tribes' environmental trust office. "It was the second-largest fishery on the Columbia River."
The huge falls are gone, and so are the days when the last salmon chief shared pieces of the first fish caught with everyone present in honor of abundance and friendship.
But the salmon culture and the river remain historically and spiritually important to the nearly 9,000-member Colville tribe. "This is our home," Stone said.
That's why, in 1999, the Colvilles initiated the first step of the Superfund process by asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study the level of contamination in the upper Columbia River, including the lake.
It's too early to say if Lake Roosevelt, a national recreation area that attracts 1.5 million visitors a year, would ever be listed for Superfund cleanup, said Monica Tonel, a site assessment manager for the EPA in Seattle.
But this fall, the EPA will release a draft report on pollution in the upper Columbia River watershed that will help determine how much more needs to be done.
For decades, the early heavy industry of the West -- mines, mills and smelters -- on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border dumped their waste into the river, counting on its powerful flow to disperse and dilute the poison.
In 1937, the Grand Coulee Dam -- the biggest hydropower producer in the country -- was built, and behind the mammoth dam, the Columbia River became Lake Roosevelt, a 130-mile-long reservoir.
"The river has always been a convenient sewer for industry. Once the dam was built, the sewer started backing up," said Don Hurst, president of Fulcrum, an environmental consulting firm hired by the Colvilles.
The shores of the lake glint in the sunlight where fragments of glassy black slag catch and collect to form transient sparkling beaches, a deceptively pretty testament to more than a century of heavy-metal pollution.
"We do have some indication that there are some problems out there," said Flora Goldstein, the state Department of Ecology's acting regional director in Spokane. "We're not talking immediate health threats."
