The planning for the Celilo Village’s Celilo Commemoration is now in its final two weeks. The schedule is filling up fast with tribal, state, and government officials, including the area’s chiefs, chairmen and chairwomen from the area’s tribes, Oregon’s Governor Ted Kulongoski, and US Army Corps of Engineers General Strock.

 

The Multnomah County Library is presenting a special exhibit in the John Wilson Special Collections from now until March 13, 2007.

 

Titled "Celilo Falls :  the 50th anniversary of the flooding of Wy-am,” this exhibit gleaned from its Oregon and Pacific Northwest collections consists of rare photographs, documents, maps and other materials, that show the importance to Native Americans and to the broader American society of Celilo Falls and other fishing sites on the Columbia River.

 

Materials include a 1948 issue of Saturday Evening Post with cover art of Celilo Falls by John Atherton; and an original 19th-century photograph by Arthur B. McAlpin and Charles Y. Lamb of an Indian fisher near Celilo from the late 19th century.

 

Other materials include William Clark's map from the rare first published account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the 1814 "Biddle" edition; a small pamphlet that defends David Sohappy Sr. and others caught in the "Salmon Scam" in the 1980s; Stewart Holbrook's The Columbia (1956); and a one-of-kind court document of Native testimony about fishing rights on the Columbia near the Dalles from 1916.

 

The exhibition is on view when the John Wilson Special Collections is open: Tuesday 2:30-5:30; Wednesday 3:30-7:00; Friday 10:00-2:00; Saturday 2:30-6:00

 

 

 

Four new photos have just been added to the growing Celilo Falls gallery. If you have any information about them, please add a comment so we can add it to our archive.

The Portland Chamber Orchestra is performing “The Great River of the West” as part of their “All American” concert on January 27, 2007. The percussion concerto celebrates the Columbia River, and the second movement, titled “Blood Red Chinook,” celebrates Celilo Falls.

 

Here is a description of the concerto by the composer, Walla Walla-native Forrest Pierce:

 

As a recent Portlander, I can understand Oregonians' image of the river as the highway of the mountains, the great knife that splits the Cascades and runs to the sea. But for me, growing up in sight of the Idaho Rockies, the Columbia was the river that drained the desert, a blue dialectic of wet and dry, the cold water of the Rockies under a fierce desert sun.

 

We knew as kids that the creek behind our house, brown with Palouse topsoil, would end up in Astoria. We just didn't have a good concept of how much water would be joining it. So this is the conceit of the piece: a drop of water falls high in the Idaho bitterroots, along the divide, and gathers speed as it moves toward Astoria. It passes the great ponderosa groves along the clearwater, where the Nez Perce made giant canoes for navigating the waterways. We hear the scraping and chopping of the timber, and the spash of a hundred-foot canoe entering the water. Cadenzas move us downstream to Celilo, where the Chinook are throwing themselves at the falls, their red bodies clanging like angry metal in the sunlight. Lastly, we meet the ocean, where great whale songs meet the cold freshwater in the deep shelves off the coast. Imagine what Rocky Mountain water must taste like to a passing orca pod: pines, little far-off trout, brown Palouse loess, a billion acres of basalt and dust and sun. This was the contrast I was after in the piece, since the percussionist, Mark Goodenberger, is an Astorian. He takes the trip for us, from sky to rock, to tree, to sea.