In 1954, the long and deadly hand of the Cold War touched the Spokane Reservation. Uranium was found in the remote mountains. To exploit this fuel and bomb-making material the Midnite Mine opened run by the Dawn Mining Company. The radioactive ore was used to build nuclear reactors and weapons, and the tribe was left with a toxic legacy that continues to this day.

At its height the Midnite Mine employed approximately five hundred people from the Spokane reservation. In fact the people who found the site were a pair of brothers from the Spokane Tribe, Jim and John Lebret. The jobs the mine provided were much appreciated by many on the reservation. However, the dangers of the green speckled stones were not understood. Some employees would come home with pieces of radioactive ore sprinkled on their clothes, exposing their families to the radiation.

Today the legacy of the Midnite Mine is a superfund site (US federal government program for cleaning toxic waste sites). High levels of radiation contaminated huge swaths of the Spokane reservation, not just the mine itself but also the Blue Creek drainage system in which the treated radioactive water is currently dumped. There are advisories to not eat the animals, and plants collected in the Blue Creek system. Blue Creek carries its radioactive legacy into the Spokane River, which flows into the Columbia.

Clean up of the highly toxic site begins in 2015. The new plan must meet the strict standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency, and water quality standards set by the Spokane Tribe. The new plans will cap the open pits, and transport the treated water directly to the Spokane River.

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After hundreds of years of American oppression, American Indians gained the right to vote in the land they called home since time immemorial with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Native Americans, new to the political scene worked to organize political coalitions. In 1925 and 1926 white business owners of Spokane leveraged this new position of local Native Americans to their advantage. They organized an "Indian Congress" to market Spokane.

The pageantry, and the over top manner in which the Native Americans were photographed and displayed in the middle of the city were ploys to spark attention from the media. Regional newspapers did not disappoint. They wrote stories, detailing the "Halloween parade" that included Natives in full regalia on horseback, and the display of "Indian curios" at local businesses.

Approximately, 3000 Natives came to Spokane for the event in 1925. They camped all over the city in large lodges or teepees; the most iconic pictures of the event being a row of Blackfeet lodges on the median of Riverside Avenue. Glover Field was filled with over seventy lodges. Beauty contests, parades, stick games, and teepee building contests were held all over the city.

After two consecutive meetings of the Indian Congress, it ended because Natives saw no point in continuing in a meeting organized as a marketing ploy that did nothing to further Indian rights. The Spokane Indian Congress has no connection to the National Congress of American Indians formed in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. NCAI.

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Every spring, many of the meadows of the eastern Washington and northern Idaho are dotted with the blue flowers of the camas plant, cammasia quamash. To the Native peoples of the Columbia Plateau these flowers indicated food, marking the nutritious root bulbs that were the staff of life.

For thousands of years camas and other roots made up approximately 50% of the Native diet. Indians in this area did not practice agriculture in the European style; the fish and roots that nature provided were food enough.

Camas digging and cooking were the honored work for Native women. Women would gather root with digging sticks made of fire hardened wood, or deer antler. Sticks were long, and a perpendicular handle allowed the women to dig out the roots more easily. Up to 50 pounds of camas could easily be harvested in this manner in a day.

Harvesting camas required perfect timing. Camas root reaches its biggest size when the flowers have just withered in mid-June. To maximize it as a food source the women had to be in the fields to harvest at this time. Plant knowledge was required, because another type of camas, called death camas, which is far less nutritious was often growing along side the healthier version.

Regular digging of camas actually improved camas patches. The women would only keep the larger roots, returning the smaller roots back to the soil to ensure next year's harvest. Fire, in the shape of spring or fall "cool burns," was also used to ensure that that the open meadows required for camas growth stayed that way.

Camas bulbs need to be cooked to make the carbohydrates more digestible. Cooking was usually done in a pit oven. For long-term storage camas in baked again and made into loaves, a staple item of trade on the Plateau.

Camas harvests decreased with the arrival of the white farmers. Hungry pigs rooted up camas patches that had been nurtured for generations, while others were destroyed by the plow. As Natives were forced onto reservations they had to adopt much of the diet of the invaders, many native foodstuffs were replaced by the "white devils" of flour, sugar, and salt. The harvest of camas never completely stopped however, and today a revival of native food ways is causing an increase in camas in the diet of many native families.

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For thousands of years, American Indians gathered here at the base of Spokane Falls to fish for salmon. In June of each year, giant 60 to 80 pound Chinook would make it to the Spokane River. Though the falls were in Spokane Indian Territory, this was a shared bounty, and tribes from all over the Columbia Plateau would make their way to Spokane. In fact, when Lewis and Clark came through Nez Perce country, hundreds miles south of Spokane in 1805, they asked about where all the Nez Perce were? They were told that most of the Nez Perce were on the Spokane River fishing.

The Natives in the region used many methods to take the salmon. One method used by the Natives at the Spokane Falls was fishing from platforms above the falls. There they would stand and spear these giants. Another fishing method used by Natives on the Spokane was fish traps. A barrier made out of wood and other natural materials would be strung across tributaries of the Spokane. The barriers would trap the fish. Then they would be speared. Thousands of fish would be captured in this way.

The massive gathering of people required elaborate social organization. Chiefs were chosen from among those gathered. One of the most important was the Salmon Chief, often coming from the local Spokane Tribe. He was in charge of fishing and distributing the salmon fairly to all the people there.

The men did the fishing, and the women had the vital task of processing the salmon for the year. Processing was labor intensive, and required great skill, especially in the drying and smoking process. They had to ensure the salmon did not rot, and lasted through the hard winter months otherwise people would starve.

When Europeans had formed the town of Spokane; the early settlers relied heavily on the chinook for food and business. Spokane even became a tourist destination due to these giant Chinook. When Spokane's lumber industry expanded with the resulting wood chips and other pollutants were dumped into the river the by lumber mills people complained, wanting them to stop because they were killing the salmon.

The behemoth Chinooks stopped coming up the river to the Spokane Falls with the building of the dam on Long Lake in 1915. Below the dam salmon still came, but that stopped completely in 1939 with the building of one of the largest dams in the world, Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River.

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This spot, called "hazy area," was for generations one of the prime salmon fishing spots on the upper Columbia.

Npil'x refers to the area on the west side of the mouth of the Sanpoil River and extends north approximately three-quarters of a mile upriver. The site was extensively used as a winter village as recently as the 1920s. It was the home of the snpilxex, or more commonly known as the Sanpoil.

This site was one of the most desirable in the whole territory for salmon fishing. Each year a huge fish trap was built across the Sanpoil River to catch the returning salmon. Bob Covington estimated that as many as 400 people gathered here at the height of the salmon season. This village was made up of several smaller camps centered on the flats surround the mouth of the Sanpoil River. The village extended upriver for a half mile or more. Each camp had its own name, and more or less distinct from the others.

In the early reservation period era, Indian people resided here year round. Among the last to live here were Mary Martin, and her son, Narcisse, (Tex) Martin.

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