I recently finished the excellent book Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation, by Paul VanDevelder. [Note: Paul is a friend and resident of Corvallis.]
So what does such a book have to do with water?
It tells an all-too-familiar tale of how the U.S. government, led by Congress, bamboozled the Hidatsa, Arikara, and Mandan tribes, seizing their best land for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam and reservoir on the Upper Missouri River. The effect of Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea, named for the young Indian woman who aided Lewis and Clark, was devastating. Alcoholism, diaspora, and despair all took hold.
Oddly enough, without the help of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes during the winter of 1804, Lewis and Clark would not have finished their epic journey. Now, the white man was 'repaying' the favor.
I first learned of the book when I ran across the film Waterbuster by Hidatsa-Mandan filmmaker J. Carlos Peinado, in which he tells the story of the disruption of native peoples caused by the Garrison Dam. I posted on this film quite a while ago. If I'm not mistaken, it was Paul who told me of the film, which I then showed at a conference during fall 2007 in Washington State, with Paul serving as the guide/host. The film made quite an impact, as it also did when I showed it at the AWRA meeting in Albuquerque in November 2007.
At the latter showing, unbeknownst to me until the film ended, was a former governor and attorney general of North Dakota, Allen I. Olson (R), who corroborated what Peinado told cinematically ("All true," he said). He also mentioned that the white farmers, promised irrigation water from the Garrison project, were shafted and never got what they were due. In his words, the upper basin states of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota "were screwed".
So who got what? Well, the dam generated hydroelectricity and the reservoir provided water to float barges. And there was flood protection.
Here is the tribes' perspective on Garrison Dam.
But whereas Peinado's film tells the story of a young man returning to the roots he never knew on the windswept Dakota plains, VanDevelder's book relates a much broader story, that of the three tribes getting robbed by the Federal government after putting up an epic fight, and then obtaining some measure of justice by using the white man's own laws. The new generation of Indian leaders, armed with law, science, and other degrees from some of the USA's most prestigious universities, are the 'coyote warriors' as hundreds of years of transgressions are being righted.
VanDevelder's book also tells the story of Martin Cross, who died alone on the prairies after fighting the government for forty years. His son Raymond, shown here with Paul (photo from Paul's WWW site), armed with degrees from Stanford and Yale Law School, vindicated his father's memory by taking the fight to the nine blackrobes in Washington, DC, where he won.
The quickest and most merciful way to exterminate the three tribes is by mass execution, like they did to the Jews in Germany. We find it strange that the treaty you made between the aggressor nations of Japan and Germany are more sacred than the treaty you made with the three tribes. Everything will be lost if Garrison is built. We will lose our homes, our communities, our economy, our resources. We to0k in the Lewis and Clark expedition in the winter of 1804. We took those men and watched them like hawks to keep them from freezing and starving to death. If you are determined to remove us from our land, you might as well take a gun and put a bullet through us. The principles we fought for in this last war [World War II], right beside you, was for the very homes, lands, and resources that you are trying to take from us today. -- pp. 128-129.
An exceptional, important book, well-written, and well-documented. Reminded me of Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert - nonfiction, but it read like a novel. I'm a lot richer, and a lot sadder, for having read it. You will be, too.
"Where did you find all those articulate Indians?" -- question asked of Paul VanDevelder, after a showing of Waterbuster
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