[Patty-Lynne Herlevi is a Seattle film-festival reviewer. She spoke with Robert Lundahl, who produced and directed Unconquering the Last Frontier.]
When I was a child my family would head over the mountains every summer where we would marvel at the powerful Skagit River and the Diablo Dam. Back in the 1970s, fish were still plentiful in the region's lakes and the Skagit coursed with confidence through the formidable Cascades.
Like other trailer-blazing American families, we escaped to the national parks during the hot months where we would meet up with friendly park rangers who would invariably bring to our attention the benefits of the area's many dams. Beholding the beautiful reservoirs gathered behind the dams, we felt proud to live in such a majestic country, and were happy to receive our electricity from a so-called natural source. Enjoying the many creature comforts afforded to us through dams, we were convinced they were more environment-friendly than nuclear power plants that in the end would kill us. We of course managed not to hear the protests of the indigenous people and the activists that supported their cause. Ignorance was bliss and electricity inexpensive. Little did we know of the future disasters that awaited us.
In his documentary film, Unconquering the Last Frontier, San Francisco-based filmmaker Robert Lundahl trains his lens on the negative impact of dams on the Elwha River in Washington State. He begins with an examination of dam building as one of the rites of progress, the prerogative of the white settlers who first came to the Olympic Peninsula, and the lasting effects of these conceits on the indigenous populations. The connective tissue is supplied by the sordid politics of dam removal. It's a variation of the same story that played itself out across the American frontier with the arrival of our European descendents. And it's a story most don't want to hear: that America's spectacular ascendancy is a direct result of its systemic disregard for native peoples and the Great Spirit that once sustained them, the rivers and lakes that have been poisoned or dried out of existence and the forests that have fallen ill or been shrunk. Only now do we suspect that the loss of salmon runs and jobs in the timber industry is a result of our looking the other way while corporations and government agencies mismanaged our land.
Robert Lundahl follows a group of Klallam Tribe elders performing a sacred salmon ceremony on a beach: they are offering thanks to the fish for sustaining their families. While this unfolds, scientists, environmentalists and Klallam nation people are fighting for the removal of dams on the Elwha River. After winning a protracted political battle, the government indefinitely withholds the monies promised to them; so the dams remain and the battle to remove them continues.
From an article entitled The Battle of the Dams (Smithonian, 11/98) by Patrick Joseph, he reports: "the dams on the Elwha continue to generate less than half the electricity needed to run a single Port Angeles pulp and paper mill, and the fate of the river's salmon hangs in the balance." And yet dam-proponents continue to argue against dam removal despite the damning effects on the environment and the self evident fact that the residents in that region are receiving their power from another source. In Lundahl's documentary, the Klallam people speak for indigenous people everywhere whose sacred lands beg to be healed of the effects of progress.
Unconquering the Last Frontier provides fresh insights into an immediate problem that needs to be addressed, but it fails to provide solutions other than dam removal.
If it's in everyone's interest to work out a win-win result, government agencies, politicians, environmentalists, tribal people will have to look beyond their narrow self interest to realize a more inclusive and renewable future - and sooner than later. It won't be easy. The salmon are disappearing, time is of the essence. From the wise words of Dr. Suess' famous animation: "Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back." Treat the Elwha River with care and perhaps the salmon might also return.
THE END