This Land Is Your Land

When I was in elementary school, we learned about Washington State history. We learned the lyrics to Woody Guthrie's songs that protested class inequality in the United States. He wrote "This Land Is Your Land." Guthrie was also commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write a song about the Grand Coulee Dam. "Roll along Columbia. You can ramble to the sea, But river while you're ramblin' you can do some work for me."

What Guthrie failed to represent in his powerhouse sponsored "protest" lyrics, was the voices of those being drowned by the dam. The Colville Nation lived off the lands of Central Washington before President Roosevelt ordered to cement their sacred place and flood and destroy fishing grounds. Perhaps while teaching local history, we can leave the "protest" lyrics to those who are still suffering the effects a Manifest Destiny motivated muscle flex by a narrow minded President. The Grand Coulee dam represents the irrational desire of white settlers to massively irrigate the plains. The Grand Coulee dam represents historical trauma for the Colville Nation.

Displacing native peoples in order to exploit the land for environmentally destructive energy is still happening all over the world. Rather than become violent or give up, many indigenous peoples are using ritual to communicate to the government and the media that the land is sacred and is home. The Winnemem Wintu natives from California have protested the proposed expansion of the Shasta Dam with traditional war dances. Over 1000 Indigenous Brazilians from the Xingu river also carried out pre-war ritual to challenge the government's desire to displace over 15,000 natives in order to construct a dam. Although these communities have not physically pursued warfare, these war rituals represents the determination to peacefully fight against state-sponsored efforts to dam sacred land.


Picture at top features the Colville chief with government engineers in 1941 during opening of the dam (credit: http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1504/Harden/Harden.html)

See also... http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930829&slug=1718180