Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River (Culture and Environment in the Pacific West)

Empty Nets is a disturbing history of broken promises and justice delayed. It chronicles a native peoples' fight to maintain their livelihood and culture in the face of an indifferent federal bureaucracy and hostile state governments.

In 1939, the U.S. government promised to provide Columbia River Indians with replacements for traditional fishing sites flooded in the backwater of the Bonneville Dam. Roberta Ulrich recounts the Indians' sixty-year struggle, in the courts and on the river, to persuade the government to keep its promise.