Flooding Fort Berthold: The History of Three Native American Tribes and One Dam, with Angela Parker

Notable Quotes

• Rivers are central to the cultural and practical lives of some Indigenous communities: “In Mandan beliefs, there’s a cultural imperative to continue to migrate north along the river … but there’s also the practicalities of water being life in any landscape, and not just because human beings need water to live, but because all beings need water to live. These river valleys are the center of species diversity. Everybody knows that all species gather near these places of water. So, you’ll find a richness of resources in our river valleys that are not replicated in the prairie lands or places that don’t have that same relationship to a waterway. When we change those riverine environments, we’re not just changing the river itself, we’re changing the entire landscape that’s tied to it.” (11:48)
• The Garrison Dam displaced local Native communities: “When you realize that about 90 percent of the population had to relocate to higher ground in order to not be living amidst a reservoir, that tells another story. You start to see the huge impact that this had on the communities at Fort Berthold.” (22:09)
• US Army Corps of Engineers erected dams along the Missouri River in Native communities: “Knowing that the Army Corps of Engineers chose these locations to ensure that that pain and chaos would be experienced largely by Native communities is part of my persistence in pushing forward with the writing of this [book].” (23:29)

Top of the Stack

• Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold by Angela K. Parker
• Image of George Gillette signing a contract for the sale of Fort Berthold land
• “The Effects of Dams on Tribal Lands, with Heather Randell” episode of the Resources Radio podcast
• The Pitt television show
• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

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 University of Denver Assistant Professor Angela Parker, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Cree Tribes. Angela recently published an amazing book called Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold. The book is a wonderfully rich history of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Tribes (the Three Affiliated Tribes) who came to live together on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.

Near the middle of the twentieth century, the US government built the Garrison Dam, which inundated much of the reservation and forced roughly 90 percent of the reservation's population to move. In today's episode, I'll ask Angela to tell us about that history, what the dam has meant for Tribal members, and the bravery that people showed in the face of this immense adversity. Stay with us.

Angela Parker from the University of Denver, welcome back to Resources Radio, and congratulations on your new book.

Angela Parker: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it.

Daniel Raimi: I was just saying to you, Angela, before we started, that I absolutely loved this book, so I really want to encourage our listeners to check it out. As I mentioned in the intro, it's called Damming the Reservation. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. It's such a rich history, and the writing is just beautiful. I loved every page, so I'm thrilled that we get to talk about it today.

Angela, you've been on the show before, so I'm not going to ask our usual question about how you got interested in energy or environmental issues. Instead, I want to ask you about the place that we'll be talking about today, which is the Fort Berthold Reservation. Can you tell us a little bit about your connection with that place?

Angela Parker: Sure. I'm enrolled there. My mom is from there, and during the time when I was being born and my sisters were being born, it was actually a Tribal requirement that you had to be born on or near the reservation to be enrolled. So, my parents moved back to North Dakota and had me. I was born in Stanley, North Dakota, right off the reservation, and I ended up growing up out in the country on my grandma's husband's allotment. I think it's about 20 miles west of New Town, North Dakota. It's kind of on the edge of the reservation, though.

So, I had this idyllic young childhood there, growing up with a bunch of rez dogs and cats and my whole extended family near us and out in the country. I think that's also why I love Fort Berthold so much, because it very much connects with those early memories of being safe, cared for, and in the mix of a bigger family.

Daniel Raimi: That's fascinating. So, your parents were living somewhere else, and they moved back specifically to have you born there. Did they move away after that? What's the story there?

Angela Parker: Yes, they met in college. They went to Macalester College. My dad went after he got out of the military—he was in the US Navy in Vietnam. My mom went there after having graduated from this elite boarding school on the East Coast. She was connected with the work of my Auntie Tillie, who would take Native kids that were doing really well academically and try to place them in elite boarding schools on the East Coast. I talk about that a lot in the epilogue of my book.

So, my parents met while they were at Macalester College, and my mom was part of this first wave of equal opportunity, of seeking out students of color to diversify campuses. Then, my dad sort of paid for school and got in through GI Bill benefits. So, that’s how they met. They fell in love, and they're still together today. They will likely listen to this interview.

Right before they graduated, my mom got pregnant with my older sister, Myra, and that's when they decided to move back to North Dakota. They quickly finished their college work and moved back, and we lived there as a family for the next 10 years, I believe.

My parents initially moved away, because they wanted to get master's degrees at the University of Minnesota. My mom got her master's in social work at University of Minnesota, my dad got his master's in public policy there, and then they were going to move back. That was the initial plan. But we got to the Twin Cities and, again, I think my parents really wanted my sisters and I to access the educational opportunities that came with living in a bigger city. So, we ended up staying out there longer. But they did move back, and now they live in Bismarck, which is maybe about two hours away from Fort Berthold.

Daniel Raimi: That’s super interesting. Well, on this topic of Fort Berthold, in the book you provide this really rich history of how the shape and size of the reservation changed over time. We don't have time to go into all the ins and outs, but can you give us a thumbnail sketch of how the reservation came to be, where it is, and the size and shape it is today?

Angela Parker: Absolutely. One of the things I really wanted to emphasize in the first chapter, where I lay that history out, is the fact that most reservations and most Tribal communities are the result of a series of contestations and organic forces that work to situate them in a specific geographic location. With the Three Affiliated Tribes, I believe I started the process of talking about them with the smallpox epidemic of 1837, which was very virulent and had a huge mortality rate. I mean, it must have seemed like the world was ending. It hit village Tribes really hard, because unlike nomadic Tribes or Tribes that moved around a lot more, we didn't necessarily scatter once the disease hit, which increased transmission rates. The people who survived that smallpox epidemic came together to establish a unified community called Like-a-Fishhook. That became the center of Tribal life for the Mandan and Hidatsa. Then, later on, the Arikara would also move into Like-a-Fishhook.

At the time that Like-a-Fishhook was established, there wasn't any understanding of territoriality on the plains in the United States. That was one of the main goals of the US government during the Indian Removal era—to be able to define Tribal territories via treaty. And so, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara participated in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which defined a huge swath of what's now North Dakota, parts of South Dakota, but really, maybe, more into Montana.

From that point on, the territory was whittled down, first to actually create the reservation in 1870 via executive order. Next, there were two major cessions of land for railroad rights-of-way—one in 1880 and one in 1910. The reaction to the 1910 cession, one of the Tribal leaders said, was, “They have got us now to our homes.” So, people had a definite understanding that their land base and their territories were whittled down to the bare minimum.

Daniel Raimi: There's a really nice illustration of that in the book in the first chapter, identifying the shrinking boundaries of the territory and what became known as Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

One of the central elements of the book, probably the central element of the book, is the Missouri River, which in, I think, the Mandan language is Oyate, which I'm sure I've mispronounced. Can you help us understand the importance of that river to the ways of life of the Three Affiliated Tribes?

Angela Parker: It's actually in Hidatsa that it's Oyate. You did really well. I'm learning Hidatsa right now. That was one of the unintentional outcomes as a result of this huge displacement that happened as a result of the Garrison Dam—there was a massive loss of language. So, my community is working really hard right now to preserve our language. I'm a learner, and I think it's really important to claim that status of being a learner to try to preserve Indigenous languages.

This is a really important question, and it's so essential to understanding the history of all of the Tribes, but specifically the Mandan and Hidatsa. The only way I can talk about the river is that it was the center, the referent, our guide to the landscape.

I'm Mandan, Hidatsa, and part Arikara on my mom's dad's side, though I don't really know that much about Arikara history or culture. My grandma was named Myra Baker Snow, and she was three-quarters Mandan and one-quarter Hidatsa. So, she grew up in a Mandan cultural household, essentially. She used to talk about how there were stories about how the Mandan people had migrated up a big river—we think it's likely the Mississippi River—and that when they came about the meeting point of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers, they kept migrating up the Missouri. I talk about it in the book, because people were talking about it during the fight against the Garrison Dam, about how in Mandan beliefs, there's a cultural imperative to continue to migrate north along the river.

So, there's this cultural imperative, but there's also the practicalities of water being life in any landscape, and not just because human beings need water to live, but because all beings need water to live. These river valleys are the center of species diversity. Everybody knows that all species gather near these places of water. So, you'll find a richness of resources in our river valleys that are not replicated in the prairie lands or places that don't have that same relationship to a waterway. When we change those riverine environments, we're not just changing the river itself, we're changing the entire landscape that's tied to it.

Daniel Raimi: And of course, changing that landscape is exactly what happened at Fort Berthold. I'm going to ask you about that, specifically, in just a couple of minutes. But first, chapter four of your book focuses on a photo from 1948. For people who are interested in Native reservations and the dams that have been put on or near those reservations, this is a famous photo. It's the moment when the US Secretary of the Interior is signing a contract with the then-Tribal chairman, whose name was George Gillette, who was also chair of the Three Affiliated Tribes. I'm not going to try to describe it. Can you describe what's going on in that picture and its significance?

Angela Parker: Yes. In the photo, there's the Secretary of Interior, Julius A. Krug, and everyone is gathered around him. It's a pretty somber photo, compositionally. Everybody's looking down at him and maybe at his hand going across the page as he signs this so-called “agreement.” And you can tell that the Secretary of Interior is non-Native and that the people who are surrounding him and watching him sign this document are either mostly Native, or maybe a mixture of Native and non-Native folks. But in the foreground, standing and directly confronting the Secretary of Interior signing this document, is George Gillette. He is crying and trying to hold back the tears physically with his hands, but you can tell that his mouth is contorted. It just evokes this sense of pain, this deep emotional and even physical pain of trying to hold back these tears in that setting.

This photo has been used a lot in textbooks or in larger works about hydroelectric projects in the United States—maybe even worldwide. It's usually used as this exhibit that attempts to humanize and bring attention to the personal, individual, and community-level pain that happens when hydroelectric projects are implemented. It's not that I have a need to contest that usage, but I wanted to humanize it a little bit more and go beyond this use that says, “See, here’s how it hurts people.” Because there's definitely this trope of the crying Indian or the end-of-the-trail representation of Native people that’s really common in the twentieth century, and maybe in the late nineteenth century, as well.

I was really lucky, because I got to interview three of George Gillette’s daughters and ask them just what he was like. I wanted to know what he was like as a person and to understand more about his background before he was “Exhibit A,” right? That interview, in addition to the archival work that I did in the National Anthropological Archives, where there had been this cadre of anthropologists who were embedded at Fort Berthold as a lot of this activism was happening against the Garrison Dam, made me realize how important it was to tell his story as much as I could without using him as an exhibit. Part of what makes it the most effective piece of evidence is knowing his humanity and how deeply he cared for and tried to do the best he could for our communities.

I think that's the problem with all tropes, right? They try to oversimplify, and in that oversimplification, they lose the truth and the humanity of the representation. With Gillette, I really took a lot of care in bringing out the fact that he was a really caring, loving, and fun father and community leader, and that he was caught in this time and place and location that made him this photograph rather than a whole person.

One of the things that really impacted me in the interviews that I did with his daughters was learning that, years later, the Gillettes would get knocks on their door, after everyone had moved up to the toplands, and George would open it, and there'd be a community member outside, and they would cuss him out and be so angry at him, just reading him out. And he took it. It was really affecting, to me, because it is such an important history of the strength of the people who fought against this. They fought as hard as they could, and then they took and tried to carry the pain and the anger in the community, the sadness of our community, for years to come afterwards. That's how much they loved our communities and our people. So, I hope some aspect of that comes across when you read about that photograph, and I try to tell more about him.

Daniel Raimi: It absolutely does. And again, we can't do full justice to it in the limited time we have, but that complexity and that strength really comes through in lots of different parts of the book, and certainly in that chapter.

I want to ask you about the ways in which people fought in a moment. But first, can you help us understand the physical reality of how the construction of the Garrison Dam inundated parts of the reservation, how much of the reservation was inundated, what the significance of those places was, and what some of the most important impacts that unfolded over decades, and in many ways persist through today, were?

Angela Parker: Sure. That's a very big question, but what I want to say about what drove me to write this and why this feels like such an urgent project for someone whose relatives lived through this, and whose family and relatives continue to live through the aftershocks of this situation, is that it is a very classic example of environmental racism. These main stem dams were built along the Upper Missouri River at the places that they were because they were all at the edge of Indian reservations in the Upper Missouri River states. The Army Corps of Engineers was picking locations not necessarily based on how sound they were for engineering purposes. They were choosing these locations for dams based on who had the least political power and the least political sway. This didn’t just happen to Fort Berthold. This happened all up and down the Missouri River. Basically, any time that the Missouri River crosses through an Indian reservation, you will see an Army Corps of Engineers dam.

To this day, people continue to be really misinformed and heartless about the impact of these hydroelectric projects. When you quantify it, about 150,000 acres were taken to be covered by the Garrison Reservoir. That's around one-quarter, or maybe one-fifth of the reservation. I'd have to go back and look at the original land base. That's one way of quantifying it. For people who don't know or maybe don't care to know that much about Fort Berthold, that’s a random number, especially if you don’t work the land and think in acres. But when you start to realize that this flooded out all the major communities on the reservation, that tells us a different story. When you realize that about 90 percent of the population had to relocate to higher ground in order to not be living amidst a reservoir, that tells another story. You start to see the huge impact that this had on the communities at Fort Berthold. It was really devastating.

It impacted all of the major infrastructure, the hospitals, the schools. I mean, at some points, there weren't even roads to move the houses up to the toplands, and people were trying to survive and raise families amidst all of this intense social chaos. Knowing that the Army Corps of Engineers chose these locations to ensure that that pain and chaos would be experienced largely by Native communities is part of my persistence in pushing forward with the writing of this.

Daniel Raimi: There are some really good histories written on this broader trend, and one small piece of it is a paper that we highlighted on the show a couple years ago. It was a paper coauthored by Heather Randell and our mutual friend and colleague Andrew Curley. They did a paper that looked across the United States at the dams that were built and quantified the effects that it had across a large number of reservations in historical tribal lands. We'll refer people to that episode in case they're curious to get a quick debrief of the broader trends that you're mentioning here.

This is my last question, Angela, before we get to our last segment, and it’s about the fight that local people took up in resistance to the building of this dam. There are numerous stories in the book that highlight the actions that different people took. Can you give us one example that you think is particularly interesting or important?

Angela Parker: Yeah. I think one of the most affecting moments for me was the fact that this wasn't just about the implementation of the dam. This was about this ongoing community pain and conflict over how or if the community would be compensated for the land that was taken.

Leading up to the dam, there were really widely respected community leaders. There was an elder named Daniel Wolf who had been a Tribal judge for a long time and was really respected in the community. He had this moment to be able to confront General Lewis A. Pick, because the Army Corps of Engineers made this facade of hearing from the community.

Daniel Raimi: Just in case people don't know the importance of General Pick, the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program was the plan that laid out and envisioned the construction of all of these dams across the Missouri River.

Angela Parker: Absolutely, yes. There was this big community meeting and General Pick was there, and a lot of these Tribal elders, who were the most respected leaders in the community, were speaking to him. He wasn't even looking up from his sheets of paper in front of him. They knew they were being ignored. So, they did what they could in the moment, which was to raise their voices, and [Pick] ended up just storming out of the meeting, because he knew he could ignore them. For me, that was a really concrete example of the abusive power dynamics that were at play. The people who we respected the most and trusted the most in our community were just dismissed as irrelevant by the Army Corps of Engineers. They started building the Garrison Dam before an agreement had even been signed for the bottomlands.

What came next is this question of how much money the Tribe was going to be compensated for for the taking of the bottomlands. They just pushed through a really bare-bones number, which was not adequate compensation by any scope of the imagination. That was decided, again, very quickly, almost without any opportunity for the community to contest it. We also have to also remember the larger context here. This is post–World War II, when there was this right turn in federal Indian policy. John Collier is out, or being pushed out at this point. There's all of this fear of communism, and people think that if Native people are doing anything in communal spaces, it's like communism. The National Congress of American Indians is a newly founded organization and doesn't really have a playbook yet. So, the entities that Native America thinks about today as available to act as their advocates were in nascent stages.

Meanwhile, folks at home were trying to navigate this political situation with almost no allies or advocates. Towards the end of this journey, the question then became, How is this egregiously insignificant compensation for lands taken going to be disseminated? Is it going to be disseminated per capita, based on each individual enrolled member of the Tribe, or is it going to be given in part to the Tribe and in part to specific landowners who lost land as a result of the dam?

There was a group of folks at Fort Berthold who just wanted it disseminated per capita, for it to be handed out individually. They thought, “Let's be done with it. We don't trust the Tribal government to be able to act in our best interests.” And there was another group of Tribal leaders who said, “No, this is our shared inheritance and our shared set of resources. We need to continue to have a shared stake in it to think about the future of our community. Instead of thinking individually, we need to continue to survive as a nation, as a people, as Mandan and Hidatsa and the Arikara people.” So, Carl Whitman, who was one of the Tribal Council chairs, kept battling back and forth between him and a guy named Martin Cross. He was going to these hour-long community meetings, late into the night, to explain the difference between this per capita disbursement versus the Tribe getting a lump sum and individual landowners getting their payments. There continues to be this economic rationale for future generations of the Tribe.

So, he's going into these spaces where not everyone speaks English. Sometimes the meetings had to be translated from English to Mandan, that type of thing. And he was just going out there doing the work of being a leader, having these really long meetings with people in a different language. He'd have to find translators explaining these complicated political concepts in Tribal languages that didn't have words for some of these things. He made a huge difference by doing this really engaging work. That, again, to me, was an echo of what I took from the George Gillette photo, which is that this was a group of people who cared so deeply about our community, and they sacrificed themselves, their nights, their time, their efforts, their energy. Everything went into trying to help our community navigate this terrible choice that was forced upon us.

Daniel Raimi: That's so interesting. You're right, it's a thread that runs through the book, the strength and bravery in the face of adversity that people were able to exhibit. It's really amazing.

Well, Angela, I'm sure, as our listeners can guess, there's so much more that we could talk about here. We're totally scratching the surface on all sorts of rich topics. So, again, I'll encourage people to check out the book and experience some of that for themselves through the book.

I'd love to ask you, now, the last question we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that you think is great. It can be related to this topic or not. It's pretty much up to you. Angela, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Angela Parker: I'm really excited to answer this question, and these are totally frivolous answers.

I'm obsessed with The Pitt. It's a show on HBO or Max or whatever it's called now. It has Noah Wyle in it, and it follows these emergency room doctors during one shift. It's a little bit preachy, but it was super engaging. I loved it. I came close to bingeing it. I couldn't, of course, because nobody has that much time, but I watched it as quickly as I could.

The other one is less frivolous. If you do anything in the next two weeks, get your hands on this book, whether it's an audiobook or a physical book. It’s Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. It talks about her time at Facebook and details the personalities behind the corporate entity known as Meta now. I think it's a really important piece that helps us understand US politics in the last 20 years, and I think everyone should read it.

Daniel Raimi: Fascinating. I had not heard about this, but it does look really interesting and important. Great.

Angela Parker, from the University of Denver, congratulations on the book. It's really wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on to the show and sharing it with our listeners.

Angela Parker: Thanks so much. I appreciate you.

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