The Columbia River has changed enormously since the man we now call Kennewick Man walked its banks.

The river that flows through Washington and Oregon today is not the river he knew.

Its flow is controlled by a series of massive dams — fourteen on the main stem of the Columbia, plus dozens more on its tributaries — that have transformed the river from a wild, seasonally variable system into a managed industrial waterway.

The dams generate enormous amounts of electricity.

They created reservoirs that submerged thousands of archaeological sites and hundreds of traditional Native American villages, burial grounds, and sacred places.

The salmon runs that sustained the Columbia Plateau peoples for thousands of years — that made the Columbia River one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world — have been devastated by the dams.

Salmon need to swim upstream to their spawning grounds, and the dams block them.

Fish ladders help some salmon get past some dams, but not all of them, and not enough of them.

The runs that once sent hundreds of millions of salmon up the Columbia have been reduced to a fraction of their historical abundance.

For the tribes of the Columbia Plateau, whose treaty rights guarantee them access to the fish that sustained their ancestors for thousands of years, the degradation of the salmon runs is not merely an environmental issue.