The story of people and the lower Columbia River has always centered around canoes. Varying shapes and styles were built to navigate the river’s varying shapes and elements. There were canoes for shallow water and deep water, canoes to cut through currents and travel upstream, canoes for clamming, fishing and whale hunting.
Chinookan canoe construction reflected the diversity of the region’s people and the lower Columbia, comprising a vast 146-mile estuary from the river’s mouth to the western Columbia River Gorge. The most famous and largest canoes measured up to 60 feet long, designed to navigate powerful wind and waves near the river’s mouth and big enough for three tons of people and cargo. Among the smallest were 10- to 14-foot canoes made for gathering wapato, a wetland plant with emerald, arrowhead-shaped leaves and edible potato-like tubers. The boats were sleek, light enough to carry under one arm and ideal for the slow-moving shallow waters around present-day Portland, where wapato thrived.
Canoes decorated the river’s sandy shorelines. Villages lined its banks. Before the 1800s, no levees separated the waterway from the floodplain. No dams blocked salmon. Cold water roared over rapids and sighed through the estuary. Braided channels thick with insects and songbirds curved through marshy bottomlands. Minnows, suckers and sturgeon filled the clear backwater tidal sloughs. These extensive channels snaked through the broad estuary like veins from the region’s heart, the Columbia, known as wimaɬ to upper Chinookan peoples and iyagaytɬ imaɬ to the lower Chinookans at the river’s mouth. The habitat supported one of the world’s largest salmon runs, when 10 to 16 million salmon and steelhead returned from the ocean to spawn in their ancestral rivers. Dredging the Columbia River at the expense of tribal and aquatic communities