Monopoly’s winners and losers: Elwha River Dam construction as social closure

Abstract

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT) sits at mouth of mouth of the Elwha River, a river that has experienced the largest dam removal project in US history. According to tribal members, the dam structures violated treaty rights that protect tribal fishing and disrupted Klallam’s social and cultural life. Using Weberian social closure as lens, this paper investigates how the customs that organized access to the Elwha River and its resources were replaced by rigid, settler colonial legal structures that served and protected individual wealth and property accumulation while demarcating the separateness of Klallam identity from American identity. Enabled by these structures, a small group of entrepreneurs and financiers were able to monopolize and transform the Elwha River. The damming of the Elwha preempted Klallam resistance by limiting their participation in everyday resistances through the spatial, physical, and social reorganization of the river. In this way, settler colonial structures working through individuals transformed the work of the river, in service of the settler state. The analysis suggests that in the absence of decolonization efforts, contemporary dam removal and ecological restoration may have limited ability to upend the social hierarchies and settler colonial structures at the root of environmental injustice in Indigenous communities. The unprecedented scale of the Elwha River ecosystem restoration signals an opportunity for future research to explore the connections between ecosystem restoration, cultural revitalization, sustainable self-determination, and decolonization.