The stories describe a place of mythic power: A mighty river cuts through sharp rocks, the waters falling and tumbling, their constant roar filling the canyon. It was a place of peace, where people of many tribes traveled many days' journey to gather year after year, generation after generation. It was the place where, every year, the Creator sent the big fish, the salmon, to swim upstream, to jump the rapids, and to feed the people who dared out onto the rocks or fragile wooden platforms with long-handled nets to dip the struggling fish, as long as man's arm, out of the churning water.
    While these stories carry the power and drama of myth, they are historic fact. The place is -or was - Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, called "the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest."  For thousands of years, the native peoples gathered at Celilo, to fish and to feast, to trade and to celebrate, to give thanks to the Great Spirit for bringing the fish upriver each spring without fail.
   So important was Celilo to the native tribes, both economically and socially, that their treaty with the United States government gave the tribes the right to fish at Celilo in perpetuity. "As long as the sun shall rise in the east and set in the west," said the treaty, the native peoples would have the right to fish, unrestricted, at Celilo Falls.
   Some seventy years after the treaties were signed, the US Army Corps of Engineers built The Dalles Dam across the Columbia River, eight miles downstream from Celilo. As the waters behind the dam rose, Celilo Falls disappeared. An ancient way of life was buried beneath the waters of the reservoir. "Once again," a newsreel of the time proclaimed, "the Red Man bows before the White Man's march of progress."
     Although the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, Celilo Falls are gone.