![]() ![]() “They wanted us to become a part of the melting pot. The education system, Gordon relates, hoped to erase his community’s indigeneity. In his mother’s time and in his own, the New York state public education system aggressively pushed assimilation for Native children. It isn’t spoken here.” The Allegheny Front: “FaithKeepers: Reclaiming Traditional Seneca Culture” She would say to his mother, “You leave that English language at the road. According to Gordon, his great-grandmother, Hannah Abrams, championed the continued use of their language in the home. In Coldspring, he was surrounded by fluent speakers of the Seneca language. Stephen Gordon, a Seneca elder, grew up in a town called Coldspring, which was also within Kinzua Dam’s take area. The losses, both physical and intangible, reverberated across the Seneca Nation. Many of the markers of traditional Seneca life, like their houses, wood stoves and gardens, were consumed in such fires. According to Bowen, his childhood home is the first one shown succumbing to the flames in the 2017 documentary Lake of Betrayal. The Army Corps used the flowage easement to forcefully relocate the inhabitants of the take area, including those of Red House and other towns. Some of it is permanently inundated, construction or habitation is prohibited on the rest. ![]() All of that land became subject to a flowage easement, meaning it could experience flooding due to the operations of the reservoir. Red House lay in the Kinzua Dam’s “take area” - defined by the Army Corps of Engineers as any land behind the structure that fell below 1,365 feet of elevation. (Photo by Maria Diaz-Gonzalez/PublicSource) Living there, he was happy.įish near the base of Kinzua Dam. He remembers his town as self-sufficient its residents regularly canned vegetables, cut firewood, fished and hunted. Red House was a small town that spanned the Allegheny River connected by the eponymous Red House Bridge. Bowen grew up there, on the Allegany Territory. In the balance hung communities like Red House, New York. Much was at stake in the Kinzua Dam challenge: losing their land would eventually cost around 600 Seneca people their homes. The proposed structure would require the flooding or condemnation of 10,000 acres of the Allegany Territory. In October 1956, against the Seneca Nation’s wishes, the Army Corps of Engineers began surveying Allegany Territory land in preparation for the Kinzua Dam. And so why not steal Indian land and build a dam and make hydroelectric power?” There were a lot of white families that needed jobs, they needed industry, and those factories, those industries all across the country needed electric power. “Keep in mind,” he says, “that, by the early 1950s, this was after World War II and the Korean War. Dennis Bowen Sr., a Seneca survivor of Kinzua Dam, considers dam building an essential part of the federal government’s post-war strategy. Fervor for the project waned for many years as the United States became embroiled in military conflict.īy the mid-1950s, Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers were ready to move forward. Congress responded by passing the Flood Control Act of 1936, which paved the way for the eventual construction of the Kinzua Dam. The devastation caused by the flood lent urgency to long-standing calls for a flood control project on the Allegheny River. In Pittsburgh alone, water levels rose 21 feet above the usual flood level. Patrick’s Day Flood, the entire Ohio River Basin had experienced catastrophic flooding. Twenty years earlier, in the infamous St. In 1956, plans for the Kinzua Dam - which for the previous two decades had been vague and nebulous - began to move forward. Pressure from climate change, however, could threaten the protection gained from the Seneca Nation’s coerced sacrifice. They lost nine communities and 10,000 acres of their Allegany Territory to the dam. The formidable Kinzua Dam, which protects Pittsburgh from flooding and pollution, came at a steep price for the Seneca Nation of Indians. According to Rose Reilly, a biologist with the Pittsburgh District of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Kinzua Dam has two congressional purposes: flood control and water quality improvement for the Pittsburgh region. In 1936, Congress authorized the building of the dam as part of a system of reservoirs on the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. The Pittsburgh District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers completed construction of the Kinzua Dam in 1965 and manages it to this day. Behind it, the resulting Allegheny Reservoir stretches 27 miles long and 120 feet deep. Nestled securely between the rolling hills of Warren County, Pennsylvania, the dam holds the river back. Looking upstream, the Kinzua Dam seems to protrude brusquely from the Allegheny River.
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