Columbia Basin Nation
Over the past 80 years, the Columbia River in Canada and the US has been subjected to a massive series of irrigation, hydropower, flood control and industrial interventions, transforming it from a free-flowing river to an « organic machine » (White 1995). The Columbia River Treaty between Canada and the United States, implemented in the late 1960s, is the most recent in a long series of massive development schemes dating back to the Grand Coulee Dam, constructed in the 1940s, and the Columbia Basin Project implemented in the 1950s. The Columbia River Treaty is now under review and the review process has revealed the multiple lines of tension that exist among government agencies, hydropower entities and the many alternative voices whose interests have not been well served by the treaty. Those voices include Indigenous People on both sides of the border, farming families whose lands and livelihoods were destroyed by dam projects, social justice advocates and environmentalists seeking to restore fisheries and riparian habitat throughout the Basin. Collectively, these alternative voices constitute an emergent, grassroots movement that in this paper we refer to as the « Columbia Basin Nation ». This movement, we argue, provides a viable model for understanding how social and environmental justice, Indigenous rights, ecosystem resilience and habitat restoration can be integrated into a future water governance system for the Columbia Basin.