The Effects of Dams on Tribal Lands, with Heather Randell

Notable quotes

• Dam nation: “By overlaying geospatial data on Tribal land with the location of dams and reservoirs, we found that about 1.13 million acres of Tribal land have been flooded under the reservoirs of 424 dams. To give you some perspective, this amounts to an area larger than Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park combined.” (10:58)
• Impacts of dams on Native nations: “Looking at Fort Berthold in particular, the dam displaced 80 percent of the reservation’s Tribal members. It destroyed almost 95 percent of their agricultural land. It flooded entire towns. It flooded their hospital and their Tribal headquarters, and people were relocated to dry, less fertile, upland areas. They were able to grow less food. Unemployment rose. It just had a really big toll on the Tribe.” (14:29)
• Benefits of removing dams: “Removing dams can serve as a form of landback for Native nations. Dam removal can be a way to restore Tribal sovereignty over their ancestral land and enable Tribes to really rehabilitate the land and water ecosystems that supported their livelihoods for thousands of years and were damaged by dam construction.” (26:42)

Top of the Stack

• “Dams and Tribal Land Loss in the United States” by Heather Randell and Andrew Curley
• Dammed Indians by Michael L. Lawson
• Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Heather Randell, an assistant professor of global policy in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Heather is the coauthor of a recent study that documents how dams built in the United States have affected Native American reservations across the country. We'll talk about some of the history behind this issue, the significant scale of reservation land that was flooded, and the effects on Indigenous communities. We'll also talk about recent efforts to remove dams and how those removals can benefit communities and ecosystems. Stay with us.

Heather Randell from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, welcome to Resources Radio.

Heather Randell: Thank you so much for having me.

Daniel Raimi: It's our pleasure. Heather, we're going to talk today about a fascinating new analysis that you recently published with Andrew Curley, who is a friend of the show and has been on the show before, but before we do that, we always ask our guests how they got interested in working on environmental issues. In particular for you, I'm curious how you ended up working on this topic of dams and the displacement of Native Americans, because I know you have worked on other types of topics in the past.

Heather Randell: Yeah, sure. Going far back, my dad is a veterinarian. So, I grew up in childhood wanting to follow in his footsteps and become a vet. I loved animals. Then, by my teenage years, I was like, "I don't really want to take care of sick animals. I think I want to save the earth. I want to be a conservation biologist." I went to college. I majored in biology, which I also discovered was mostly pre-med people, so I was like, "This is less of what I was imagining of saving the earth."

But the summer after my freshman year, I did this research program in the Peruvian Amazon, and my group was studying frogs. We would go out on boats and catch frogs and rub their backs with a little Q-tip to get skin secretions to analyze for their chemical properties. Then, we also visited some communities and talked to them.

After that experience, I was like, "I think I'm a little more interested in the talking-to-people part of the environment rather than the ecology/biology part." That set me on a different path, thinking about human-environment relations. I ended up going to Duke and getting a master's in environmental management, where I worked on issues of environment and malaria in East Africa.

I should rewind a little bit to college. During my senior year, I was in a class where the whole class together published this review paper. We spent the whole year doing research and collectively writing a paper. And the topic, which was picked by the professor, was environmental change and infectious diseases. My disease that I researched was schistosomiasis, which is transmitted in tropical rivers and lakes, and it is this parasite, but it requires this little snail that lives in the river. I found out that dam building can really exacerbate transmission of this disease, and so that put a seed in my mind about the social and health impacts of dams.

Fast-forward, I did my master's. I actually spent a little bit of time at Resources for the Future as a research assistant before I started my PhD in sociology, where I ended up focusing on the social impacts of dam building in the Brazilian Amazon. I worked, and I still work, on issues of displacement—populations who had a dam flood their farmland or flood their homes in cities. I look at how that impacted them. My other line of work is focused on climate change. I look at the health and well-being impacts of climate shocks, primarily in East Africa. Almost all of my work is international.

How did I end up doing this study on Tribal land in the United States? That brings me to 2016. I was a postdoc living in Washington, DC, and that's when the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were happening. That was really catching my attention. So much of the discussion was about water—“Water is life”—and Lake Oahe being this important source of water for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and potentially being polluted by the oil pipeline. Through that, I learned that Lake Oahe, to begin with, was created by a dam, so it used to be just part of the Missouri River. Decades prior, it had been dammed, and that created the lake that they were now depending on for clean water.

Through looking into that, I found this PhD dissertation by a woman named Harriett Skye, and I started reading the dissertation and learning about her. She was a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She was a pioneering Native journalist. She hosted this TV show in the '70s and '80s called Indian Country Today. Then, after this really successful career, she went back to college at age 55—she had never gotten a college degree—and ended up getting a PhD from University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was on the history of the Oahe Dam and the Standing Rock people.

I was reading this and hearing about the trauma and thinking about, This is many generations later and another environmental injustice that the Tribe is experiencing. That put the thought in the back of my mind, wondering, How widespread is this? How many reservations have lost land due to the flooding under dams?

Eventually, I connected with my coauthor, Andrew Curley, who I know has been on the show before. He's Navajo and is an expert on infrastructure development, particularly water infrastructure and natural resources development on reservations. We teamed up and wrote this paper.

Daniel Raimi: Fantastic. That's so fascinating. And of course we'll have a link to the paper in the show notes. The title of the paper is "Dams and Tribal Land Loss in the United States."

To start off our substantive conversation, it'd be great if you could give us a big picture sense of the scale of this issue. For example, how many of these dams are out there that affected reservation lands? How much land are we talking about?

Heather Randell: Sure. I'll first step back and talk about dams in the United States more broadly, because there are a lot of them. Generally, before I focus on Tribal land, there's about 92,000 dams currently existing in the United States, according to the National Inventory of Dams, which is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. And that does not even count the smallest dams; like, one is under six feet tall. So, many of these 92,000 dams are pretty small. Most of them are privately owned. Only 2 percent of them are actually over 100 feet in height. Of these dams, we had small dams built from the colonial era through the 1800s. You can think about dams that were creating small reservoirs or powering water mills for milling and other industries.

Then, you enter the twentieth century, and that's when really large dams start to be constructed. We call them “mega-dams.” And that era really peaked in the 1930s to 1960s. A lot of these were federally owned, really big dams, like the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam. Nowadays, the United States has basically stopped building new dams and is currently trying to figure out what to do with all of these aging and potentially hazardous dams.

For our study, we wanted to know how much Tribal land has been flooded under the reservoirs of dams. Despite treaties signed between Native nations and the US government that guaranteed that land would remain theirs in perpetuity, the government has time and again violated these treaties, dispossessing Tribes of their land. We wanted to see how much dam building has contributed to Native land dispossession.

To do this, we needed data both on the location of the dam and also the spatial extent of its reservoir. How big was the reservoir, and where is it? So, there's two sources of data we use—two databases, of dams and their reservoirs, and those encompassed about 7,900 dams in the United States. That's a small minority of the 92,000 dams, but the dams that we had access to are large- and medium-sized dams, so these are going to be the ones that cause the most flooding.

We focused on federal reservations. Many of these were established through treaties in the 1800s, as well as Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Areas. These were established during the early and mid-1800s, during the period of forced removal. This is when dozens of Tribes from elsewhere in the country were essentially relocated to what was called "Indian territory." That eventually became the state of Oklahoma, and most of that land was subsequently removed from Tribal control, whether it be through allotment policies. Then, when Oklahoma was established as a state, it essentially illegally extended jurisdiction over all the land in the state and informally dissolved what were reservations. So, we look separately at current federal reservations and then Tribal land in Oklahoma.

By overlaying geospatial data on Tribal land with the location of dams and reservoirs, we found that about 1.13 million acres of Tribal land have been flooded under the reservoirs of 424 dams. To give you some perspective, this amounts to an area larger than Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park combined. We found that 54 federal reservations and 19 Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Areas have had land flooded by dams.

In terms of where they are, most of the affected reservations are west of the Mississippi, primarily because that's where most reservation land is. But dams in our analysis have flooded land all the way from Maine down to San Diego. It really is a widespread occurrence.

Daniel Raimi: There's some really fantastic maps, as one might expect, in the paper. Especially on page five of the paper, there's this great national map, and then you zoom in to some specific reservations and dams, and it's a really fun read.

Heather Randell: Oh, thanks. I really like making maps. I should have been a geographer, I think.

Daniel Raimi: One particularly important period of history with regard to dam building affecting reservations all centers around something called the Pick-Sloan Plan. Some folks in our audience might have heard of it, but my guess is that most have not. Can you tell us what the Pick-Sloan Plan was and how it affected Native American reservations, particularly along the Missouri River?

Heather Randell: Sure. This plan arises in the wake of a big flood of the Missouri River in 1943, which inundated millions of acres of farmland. That prompted Congress to pass a Flood Control Act the next year, which established the Pick-Sloan Plan. It was a really extensive infrastructure project in the Missouri River basin that included over 100 dams, over 1,000 miles of levees, and millions of acres of irrigation systems. The primary purpose of this plan was flood control to prevent massive floods from happening again, but it was also used for improved navigation, hydropower, irrigation, and things like that. The plan included a set of five large dams on the Missouri River that were built in the '50s and '60s. These dams flooded land on seven reservations in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, and that includes the Oahe Dam that I mentioned that affected Standing Rock.

In total, over 350,000 acres of reservation land were flooded by these dams. One of them, the Garrison Dam, flooded land on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, which is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. This is the most-flooded reservation in the United States: 152,000 acres were flooded under the reservoir of this dam. Dams, in general, tend to flood river bottomland. This land is often the most valuable, fertile, and also densely settled.

The social and cultural and economic impacts of dams on Tribes tend to be quite severe. Looking at Fort Berthold in particular, the dam displaced 80 percent of the reservation's Tribal members. It destroyed almost 95 percent of their agricultural land. It flooded entire towns. It flooded their hospital and their Tribal headquarters, and people were relocated to dry, less fertile, upland areas. They were able to grow less food, unemployment rose—it just had a really big toll on the Tribe. Similar things happened on the other reservations—on Standing Rock on the Cheyenne River, and on the other reservations, as well. It was really devastating for the Tribes in that region.

Daniel Raimi: Having spent some time and read a little bit about the story on Fort Berthold in particular, it's really tragic, when you start to understand the details of how this affected people's lives—flooding out cemeteries and homelands and traditional food-gathering grounds. If you go to the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, the capital is called “New Town,” because it's the new town they had to build when the flood came. Just really profound consequences. That example on Fort Berthold is really striking. I wonder if you can maybe give us another example that comes to mind.

Heather Randell: There's so many, but this is an interesting one: The case of the Coolidge Dam, which was built on the Gila River in Arizona. The context of this is that, by the late 1800s, there were an increasing number of white settlers farming in Arizona, and they needed irrigation water. They diverted water from the Gila River to their farms to irrigate their crops. This depleted the water supply for the Gila River Indian Community, which is located nearby. To improve water availability for the Gila River community in the late 1900s, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to construct a dam on the Gila River, upstream. But this dam was actually on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. About half the irrigation water from this dam was allotted to the Gila River Indian Community, and half was allotted to non-Native farmers—not really intended to benefit the Tribe whose land it was constructed on. Beyond irrigation water, hydropower from the dam provided energy for mining developments in the area.

The San Carlos Tribe fought against the dam's construction and, eventually, reluctantly agreed after the government made some concessions. They had to relocate farms and homes. They provided $150,000 in compensation to the Tribe, and the reservoir also flooded a Tribal burial ground. The Tribe was opposed to disinterring and moving their ancestors, so the government actually placed a concrete slab over the graves to cover them.

Before the dam, the Tribe had bred cattle and farmed corn and wheat; they had a fairly successful agricultural economy. But the dam flooded most of the farmland—again, more fertile river-valley areas, which really destroyed that agricultural economy.

Beyond that, it's another interesting case. The engineers who had determined how much capacity the reservoir would have based on river-flow calculations didn't do a very good job with their calculations, and that era was a period of drought. So, the reservoir didn't really fill up very much and was far below capacity of what it was proposed to be able to irrigate. At the dam's dedication, the comedian Will Rogers, who was actually Cherokee, said, "If this was my lake, I'd mow it," because there was no water; it was just grass. That is the story of the Coolidge Dam.

Daniel Raimi: That is quite the story. You alluded to this earlier, Heather, but I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about what types of consultation, if any, occurred between the federal government and Tribes in the construction of dams when they were built by the federal government? I'm curious as to whether the consultation that occurred in those cases was similar or somehow different from consultation that may have occurred when the federal government wanted to build a dam that did not affect Tribal lands.

Heather Randell: That's a good question. I can only speak to some anecdotes that I've read about, because there's just so many cases, and for many of them, there's not a ton of information. But from what I gather, there's often no consultation to limited consultation. If there is consultation, it's frequently in name only. It's through much activism and pushback that Tribes can improve the compensation that they receive. An example is from Harriett Skye's dissertation on Standing Rock and the Oahe Dam. She says, "When the bureaucrats came to talk with the Indians in 1950, construction was already underway." That's the level of consultation they had.

I know there were non-Tribal towns flooded by these dams. My husband's grandfather was actually from a town in rural North Dakota that was flooded by the Oahe Dam, as well. But in general—and not surprisingly—the dams tended to be located and designed to flood the least amount of white land possible. It was just less relevant, because they were avoiding cities like Bismarck, North Dakota, for example. It was not going to flood that; it was going to flood the reservations.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. It would be so fascinating to look at the Tennessee Valley Authority, or something like that, in Tennessee. I don't know if there are any reservations in that area. There probably are, but it would be interesting to look and see the socioeconomic impacts of those types of dams, as well. Maybe people have done that study, and I'm just not aware of it, but it sounds like an interesting question.

So, Heather, can you say a little bit more about the types of compensation, if any, that people were offered when these dams came into play? You mentioned a couple examples already, but I'm curious if any more come to mind.

Heather Randell: It varied depending on what was lost due to construction of the dam. Compensation often included monetary compensation to the Tribe for damages, rebuilding homes and community infrastructure, relocating cemeteries, and things like that.

An example from Fort Berthold: The Tribe was initially forced to accept a settlement of about $5 million, which was $33 per acre of land flooded, which was really undervalued. With that, they were supposed to relocate their towns and reconstruct everything. The Tribe actually had a private appraisal done, which valued their losses at about $22 million. They petitioned Congress to be compensated that amount. They ended up being awarded almost $13 million, but the settlement denied them the right to actually use the shoreline of the new lake for grazing or fishing or hunting.

Interestingly, 50 years later, the US government essentially acknowledged that the Tribes that were affected by the Pick-Sloan Plan were not fairly compensated for their losses at the time, and they gave a pretty large-scale, additional compensation to make up for this. In 1992, the Tribes of Fort Berthold were awarded almost $150 million from the federal government to essentially atone for the undercompensation they received at the time.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. I'm just thinking back to that initial undercompensation. There's actually a somewhat famous picture that folks could look up. It's of the then-chairman of the three affiliated Tribes, George Gillette, who is pictured in the background during the signing ceremony, as the US Secretary of the Department of the Interior signs the agreement that authorized the flooding that was to take place. He's literally crying, the chairman of the Tribe in the background, as the secretary signs the agreement. It's just really, again, a very striking, poignant moment.

Heather, one more question before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is about something you mentioned earlier, and that is the fact that some dams in the United States are unsafe. Some of them, maybe many of them, have environmental consequences that are significant. There's growing momentum now in the United States to help restore ecosystems and protect communities by removing dams that may be unsafe or that have major impacts. Can you talk a little bit about where and when that dam removal is occurring or it might occur in the future? Then, why you and Andrew in your paper make the argument that removing dams that affect Native Americans should be prioritized?

Heather Randell: Like you mentioned, a lot of dams are aging. They're in unsafe conditions. There's expensive repairs that would be needed on them to bring them up to code and to safety standards. About 2,000 dams have been removed thus far in the United States. The vast majority were really tiny; privately owned; and, basically, it was more cost-effective for the owner to remove the dam rather than repair it.

But there've actually been a few really large-scale dam removals, mostly in the Pacific Northwest. These have come primarily after decades of activism from local Tribes and allies. These big dam removals have primarily been focused on salmon—restoring salmon migratory habitat and the Indigenous livelihoods that depend on salmon. There was a pair of dams about 10 years ago removed on the Elwha River in Washington State, and it's been amazing to see the ecosystem and the river recover after the removal.

Currently, we're in the midst of the largest dam removal in history. There are four dams that are being removed on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California. Once they're all removed, it's going to reopen about 400 miles of the river to salmon and other migratory fish. The first was removed last year. The second dam removal actually started last week, and that was very much a result of Tribal activism.

The US government, in Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed a few years ago, allocated money to dam removal, as well as dam repairs. So, there is federal funding for this. Going back to our paper, beyond salmon, which is where a lot of the focus on dams’ effects on Tribes has been, Andrew and I argue that removing dams can serve as a form of landback for Native nations. Dam removal can be a way to restore Tribal sovereignty over their ancestral land and enable Tribes to really rehabilitate the land and water ecosystems that supported their livelihoods for thousands of years and were damaged by dam construction.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. For listeners who might not be familiar with that term, “landback,” just pop it into a search engine, and you'll learn about that movement that is certainly growing, as well.

I think we have time for one more quick question, Heather, which is—just to make it clear that this is a complex story, as many environmental stories often are, and as many stories about Native American people often are—your paper also discusses some instances where Tribes don't want dams removed, but instead, they want them repaired and maintained and to ensure their safety, because there are benefits that the dam now provides to the community. Can you give an example of that and help us understand why in some cases the preference is to keep the dam?

Heather Randell: Sure. There were actually some dams built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on reservations that were ostensibly built for the benefit of Tribes. They were called the Indian Irrigation Projects, to provide water to Tribes. I'll note that despite that, there have been studies that found that even these dams tended to benefit nearby white farmers more so than the Tribes. But some of these Bureau of Indian Affairs dams have been in need of repairs for decades to restore their functionality and safety. One of these is the Four Horns Dam on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. It was built in the early 1900s for irrigation and drinking water. But some of its equipment had never been updated since the early 1900s. The Tribe actually negotiated for almost 40 years. Finally, in 2016, they won a settlement with the federal government to provide funds to rebuild the dam.

The dam was rebuilt a few years ago, and it now allows the reservoir to store more water for the Tribe. The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I mentioned, actually provides funds to repair seven Bureau of Indian Affairs dams on reservations that are currently in unsafe condition. Beyond repairs, there have been a few cases where Tribes have actually taken ownership of dams. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Reservation in Montana purchased a hydropower dam that was on their reservation, and now they own it. They receive financial benefits from it, and they can manage it the way they want.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. So many of these stories are just unique, and as you said, it's hard to draw simple narratives around them. I really appreciate you sharing all of this richness and complexity.

I'd love for us now to go to our last question of the show that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack that you think is really great that you think our listeners might enjoy.

I'll start us off with a book that I read on this very subject a couple of years ago that I stumbled across in a library, and it's called Dammed Indians. It's about this exact topic that we're talking about today. It's by Michael Lawson. The book is fairly old. It's from 1994, and it shows its age in some ways, but if you want to learn about some basic history, particularly of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River dams, then this book provides tons and tons of rich detail on the processes of building the dam, the negotiations or lack thereof, and lots of other details. I think that's a pretty good one if you want go deeper on this topic. How about you, Heather? What's at the top of your stack?

Heather Randell: The book you suggested is excellent. I’m actually in the middle of a book. It was released a few years ago, but I have two little kids, so I'm very behind on my recreational reading, but it is really wonderful. It's called Yellow Bird. It's by Sierra Crane Murdoch, who's a journalist, and it was actually a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This is nonfiction, and it's set on Fort Berthold Reservation, and it's actually a murder mystery, and it's a true one.

A Tribal member is trying to figure out what happened to a missing person. It is set in the context of a history of the Tribe being affected by the Garrison Dam, and it's set in the context of the fracking boom. The book takes place in the early 2010s. Fort Berthold was very heavily involved in fracking at that time. So, if you're interested, through this weaving tale of this woman's search for a missing person, you learn a lot about federal policy toward Tribes, the history of the dam, and what the fracking boom has done to places in general and to Fort Berthold in particular. It's a really fascinating book.

Daniel Raimi: I totally second that endorsement. In fact, I recommended that book on this show a year and a half ago, because I was reading it and was loving it, and I actually got the chance to talk to the author, as well. Anyway, just totally second that great recommendation. It's a wonderful book.

Well, one more time, Heather Randell from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing this fascinating work with us, and helping us understand all of its complexity. We really appreciate it.

Heather Randell: Thanks for having me.

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