A River Was Their Lifeblood. A Corporation Turned It Into a Dump.

One Company, One River, Decades of Poison

The Upper Columbia River runs roughly 150 miles through Washington State, from the Canadian border down to the Grand Coulee Dam. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, a federally recognized nation made up of twelve individual tribes, have lived on its banks since, in their own words, “time immemorial.” The river forms the eastern and southern boundary of the Colville Reservation itself.

Ten miles north of that border, on the Canadian side of the river in Trail, British Columbia, Teck Cominco Metals operates a lead-zinc smelter. The courts found that from 1930 to 1995, Teck discharged approximately 400 tons of slag every single day into the river. That is not a typo. Four hundred tons, daily, for sixty-five years. The total: an estimated 9.97 million tons.

That slag was laced with 7,300 tons of lead and 255,000 tons of zinc. Separately, Teck also discharged contaminated wastewater directly into the Columbia between 1923 and 2005, a stream of effluent carrying 108,000 tons of zinc, 22,000 tons of lead, 200 tons of mercury, 1,700 tons of cadmium, and 270 tons of arsenic. Every drop of that flowed downstream, into the reservation, into the ecosystem, into the fish.

Litigation That Has Been Running Since 2004

Two enrolled members of the Colville Tribes filed a federal lawsuit against Teck in 2004 under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as CERCLA. The State of Washington joined as a co-plaintiff. The Colville Tribes themselves joined after that. The case has been working through the courts for over two decades.

In the first phase of the trial, the district court found Teck liable as an “arranger” under CERCLA, meaning Teck arranged for the disposal of hazardous substances that ended up contaminating the site. That finding was upheld on appeal in 2018. In the second phase, the Tribes won a judgment of $3,394,194.43 (enough to buy a modest home in roughly 34 American cities) in investigative expenses, plus $4,859,482.22 (the equivalent of what most Americans earn over several lifetimes of work) in attorney’s fees, and $344,300 in prejudgment interest. Teck appealed every step of the way.

Phase three, the fight over actual damages to natural resources, is where Teck finally got a lower court to back it up, until September 3, 2025, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and ordered a trial.

What You Cannot Put a Price Tag On

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation are not one tribe. They are twelve. Twelve distinct peoples, each with their own history and traditions, who have lived along the Upper Columbia River since before any record was kept. The court documents say the Tribes’ members claim residence on the river’s banks since “time immemorial.” That phrase has legal weight, but it also carries something that does not translate easily into court filings: the idea that a people and a river are inseparable, that one cannot be understood without the other.

For generations, tribal members fished that river. Fishing in Colville culture is not the same as fishing for a person who drives to a lake on a Saturday afternoon. It is ceremony. It is sustenance. It is the act by which a person connects to their ancestors and transmits that connection to their children. The court record describes the Tribes’ lost use of the river for “cultural purposes” as a legally distinct category of harm, separate even from the reduction in fishing trips caused by mercury warnings. The lawyers call it “cultural dimension.” The Tribes call it their way of life.

The State of Washington issued mercury advisories warning people not to eat fish from the Upper Columbia River. For most people, an advisory means skipping a meal option. For a Colville tribal member, it means being told that the central act of their cultural and spiritual life is now dangerous. It means watching your child ask why you do not fish anymore, and knowing the answer is that a Canadian mining company dumped two centuries’ worth of toxic metal into the water upstream and nobody stopped them. The advisory did not just reduce the number of fishing trips. It severed a living cultural practice from the people who carry it.

The lower court dismissed all of this as “cultural resource” damages rather than “natural resource” damages, drawing a legal distinction that, in practice, told the Tribes their relationship with the river had no legally recoverable value under federal law. The Tribes pushed back and said explicitly: we are seeking damages for our lost use of injured natural resources, the fish and the water and the benthic organisms that were poisoned. The fact that our use of those resources carries cultural meaning does not transform the nature of the injury. The Ninth Circuit agreed. The lower court’s ruling was a legal error, full stop.

They Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

“What was once the lifeblood of the Tribes, now became a toxic dumping ground, impacting the relationship the Tribe had with the river.” — U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Opinion of the Court, September 3, 2025

“The district court found that between 1930 and 1995, Teck discharged about 400 tons of slag daily — an estimated 9.97 million tons in total — directly into the Columbia River. The slag discarded into the river contained 7,300 tons of lead and 255,000 tons of zinc. In addition to slag, Teck also discharged untold gallons of contaminated effluent directly into the Columbia River. The effluent discharged into the river between 1923 and 2005 contained about 132,000 tons of hazardous substances, including 108,000 tons of zinc, 22,000 tons of lead, 200 tons of mercury, 1,700 tons of cadmium, and 270 tons of arsenic.” — U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Factual Record, September 3, 2025

“Reading in new limitations to CERCLA’s natural resource damages provisions, such as by holding that CERCLA does not authorize damages for the lost use of injured natural resources where the lost use has a cultural component, would fall short of ‘Congress’s intent to [permit] recover[y] for the full damages resulting from a release.'” — U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Legal Analysis, September 3, 2025

“It is clear beyond doubt that Congress aimed at providing full recovery of any damages to those persons harmed by the loss of natural resources. To do that, damages occasioned by lost human activities must be considered.” — U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, September 3, 2025

“The fact issues not yet determined require a trial, not a summary judgment. It was error for the district court to dismiss the Tribes’ claims as a matter of law by characterizing the claims as unauthorized under CERCLA.” — U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, Conclusion, September 3, 2025

The Full Cost to People and the Planet

Environmental Degradation: A River Turned Into a Landfill

The Upper Columbia River did not develop a pollution problem. Teck created one, systematically, across eight decades. The scale is almost incomprehensible: 9.97 million tons of slag deposited directly into the channel at a rate of 400 tons per day. To put that in physical terms, a ton of gravel fills roughly one cubic yard. Teck deposited the equivalent of roughly 10 million cubic yards of toxic material into a living river. That is enough material to fill thousands of Olympic swimming pools.

Slag is not inert. The court record confirms the slag in the Columbia contained lead and zinc in quantities that injured benthic organisms, the insects, worms, and invertebrates that live in and on river sediment. Benthic organisms form the base of the freshwater food chain. When you poison them, you poison everything above them: the fish that eat them, the birds and mammals that eat those fish, and the people who depend on those fish for food. Teck did not just make the river dirty. Teck dismantled the river’s ecology from the bottom up.

Mercury accumulated in the fish tissue at levels high enough that the State of Washington issued public health advisories. Mercury does not flush out of an ecosystem when the dumping stops. It bio-accumulates, concentrating as it moves up the food chain, so that fish at the top carry levels of mercury that can be toxic to human beings who eat them. The contamination Teck created in the 20th century is still present in the fish the Colville Tribes depend on in the 21st century.

Public Health: Poisoned Food, Poisoned People

Mercury poisoning is not abstract. It attacks the nervous system. At high enough exposures it causes tremors, memory loss, cognitive impairment, and in severe cases, death. The fish consumption advisories issued by the State of Washington represent an official government acknowledgment that Teck’s contamination reached the point where eating the river’s fish posed a measurable health risk to human beings. That advisory applied to the general public. For Colville Tribal members who consume fish at far higher rates than the general population due to cultural and subsistence practices, the health exposure was correspondingly greater.

The Tribes’ legal claims specifically cite “reduced tribal fishing trips due to state-issued advisories concerning unsafe mercury levels in fish” as a quantifiable category of harm. The implication is direct: tribal members ate less fish, or no fish, because Teck’s contamination made it dangerous to do otherwise. The people most harmed by Teck’s dumping were precisely the people who had the deepest relationship with the resource Teck destroyed: indigenous subsistence fishers with centuries of dietary and cultural reliance on the Columbia River fishery.

Beyond mercury, the effluent stream included cadmium and arsenic. Cadmium is a known human carcinogen and causes kidney damage. Arsenic is a carcinogen linked to bladder, lung, and skin cancers. The court record does not make specific findings about individual health outcomes in the Tribal community, but the chemical profile of what Teck dumped into the river represents a decades-long, large-scale introduction of carcinogens and neurotoxins into a subsistence food source.

Economic Inequality: A Canadian Corporation, an Indigenous Community, and Who Pays

Teck Cominco Metals is a Canadian corporation. It operates a smelter in Canada. The slag and effluent it dumped flowed south across the border into the United States, into a sovereign Indigenous nation’s territory, and poisoned a river that Tribal members depend on for food, culture, and community identity. The corporation profited from its smelting operations for decades. The Colville Tribes bore the cost of those profits in the form of a poisoned river.

The legal battle that followed is itself an illustration of economic power disparity. The Tribes filed their first lawsuit in 2004. The case is now entering its third decade. Teck hired multiple major international law firms, including Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a firm with offices in Palo Alto, Houston, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. The Tribes hired attorneys too, but the capacity to sustain twenty-plus years of complex federal litigation is not equally distributed between a Canadian mining corporation and a tribal nation. Every year that Teck can extend the litigation is a year it avoids paying damages while the contamination it created persists in the river.

The lower court’s ruling, which dismissed the Tribes’ claims as merely “cultural” and therefore legally unrecoverable, would have let Teck walk away from accountability entirely for the harm it caused to Tribal members’ way of life. The ruling effectively told the Tribes that their losses, because they are rooted in Indigenous culture rather than mainstream American market activity, are legally invisible. The Ninth Circuit’s reversal is a rebuke of that reasoning, but the trial has not yet occurred. Teck still has not paid a single dollar in natural resource damages.