Dam foes dangle a literary hook for salmon event

Subject:         Dam foes dangle a literary hook for salmon event
   Date:         27 Feb 2000 16:42:52 -0000
   From:        kolahq@skynet.be
     To:         aeissing@home.nl

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[article provided by JH. Thanks!]

Seattle Times: Dam foes dangle a literary hook for salmon event
Saturday, February 26, 2000, 08:55 p.m. Pacific

by John Zebrowski
Seattle Times staff reporter

   While in school on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Sherman Alexie sang
Woody Guthrie's testaments to the Grand Coulee Dam. He was too young, Alexie
says, to understand that he was praising his enemy.
Today, Alexie sees Grand Coulee as a killer, a concrete monster that took
salmon from his tribe. And by stopping the runs, the dam on the Columbia
River slowly began destroying the Indians.
"Salmon is our Bible, salmon is our Koran," says Alexie, a poet, novelist,
screenwriter and Seattle resident. "That dam took away our religion."
   To save the fish, Alexie wants to tear dams down. He has joined a
movement to save salmon by ridding the Lower Snake River of four dams. Along
with David James Duncan, author of "The River Why," Alexie will lend his
celebrity to the cause at 7 p.m. tomorrow with a reading at Seattle Town
Hall.
   The event, a benefit for the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, will begin
with Alexie and Duncan presenting work on salmon - their own and others'.
Representatives of the coalition then will prep the audience to speak at a
Tuesday public hearing on federal salmon-recovery issues, including
breaching the Lower Snake River dams.
   Call it the celebrity bait and switch.
   "Our goal is to draw a crowd," says John Sterling, program manager for
clothier Patagonia, the evening's sponsor. "Sherman and David will do that."
Salmon are weaved throughout Alexie's and Duncan's work, taking on mystical
properties, becoming more than fish.
   "Salmon is the needle, and their migration is the thread that sews the
broken parts of this region into a whole," Duncan says from his home in
Montana.
   Although he lives 100 feet from a trout stream outside Missoula, most of
Duncan's fiction is set in his home state of Oregon. Before the Snake River
dams were built, Duncan stood on a sandbar in the Columbia River and watched
the water so full of salmon it looked as if it were boiling.
   But in the mid-1980s, he caught a wild salmon in a coastal stream only to
discover later it was one of seven breeding pairs left in the river.
   "I was practicing genocide," he says.
   Now he is obsessed with saving the salmon. So much so, he says, his
publisher is worried about when he'll write his next novel.
   Alexie has never caught a salmon, nor has he even tried. But salmon are
still central to his life.
"It's not just because I'm an Indian," he says. "We're all responsible for
salmon. They don't just belong to Indians, and their preservation doesn't
just belong to Indians."
   While opponents of the proposal don't have the support of famous writers,
they have their own celebrities - politicians, including Sen. Slade Gorton,
Gov. Gary Locke and Idaho Sen. Larry Craig.
   "The celebrities we rely on are the key decision makers," says Bruce
Lovelin of the pro-dam Columbia River Alliance. "They get results."

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