The Spokane River ed. by Paul Lindholdt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Spokane River ed. by Paul Lindholdt Larry Cebula THE SPOKANE RIVER edited by Paul Lindholdt Washington University Press, Seattle, 2018. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $24.95 paper. Who can tell the story of a river? Such a tale requires more than one voice. Geologists have their stories, as do Native peoples who live along its banks. Biologists see a river of interconnected life, while urban planners see a barrier to transportation and an urban amenity. Historians, environmentalists, and even lawyers have things to share. It is an interdisciplinary effort. It is to the credit of editor Paul Lindholdt that the anthology The Spokane River includes all of these voices and more. The twenty-eight chapters of the book include historical essays, policy reviews, poems, and personal experiences. The Spokane River begins as the outlet of Lake Couer D'Alene in Idaho. Over the course of its 111 miles, it rolls through the fertile Spokane Valley, plunges over a series of basalt cliffs in downtown Spokane, and snakes across ancient landscapes, gaining tributaries and volume until unites with the Columbia River beneath the waters of Lake Roosevelt. Its spectacular waterfalls are both the City of Spokane's most impressive sight and the reason for the town's existence. Yet, the river is not what it was. Dams turn long sections into slack-water lakes, some covered with algae blooms and dead fish in late summer. Houses crowd the banks in some places, and even where the river runs cool and clear, it carries heavy metals from long-ago mining operations and PCBs from paper plants. Signs warn anglers to limit their consumption of fish taken from the deceptively clear waters. Native voices in the book are strong. In the chapter titled "The River Gives Us Our Way of Life," Margo Hill of the Spokane Tribe recounts how her grandmother told her "the salmon hung from the horn of the saddle and stretched toward the ground" (p. 85). Her great grandmother Sadie Boyd made fish head soup, and when Hill would check to see what was cooking on her stove, she recounted: "Quite often I saw salmon eyes staring back at me" (p. 94). Fellow Spokane tribal member Barry Moses writes of the Spokane dialect of Interior Salish and how traditional names remind us of the Native uses and perceptions of the river. Lindholdt offers his own chapter, a biography of Lokout, brother of Qualchan and son of the Yakama chief Owhi. Born in the 1830s, Lokout's long life included stints as a linguist, a guide, a warrior, and finally a subject for photographer Edward Curtis in 1910. Other sections of the book focus on river history, efforts at environmental protection, The Expo '74 (Spokane's world's fair that reclaimed the banks of the river as a public park), personal essays, poems, and analyses of future threats to the Spokane River, including a loss of water and industrial contamination. The Spokane River is not only a superb book, it is a model for the kind of interdisciplinary collection that can be created around a common feature such as a river. The chapters are short, readable, and uniformly interesting. The book would work well in a college classroom. [End Page 216] Larry Cebula Eastern Washington University Washington State Archives Copyright © 2022 Oregon Historical Society