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

The Upper Columbia River has been the home to the Confederated Tribes of the Coville Reservation since “time immemorial”, according to a recent lawsuit filed against Teck Resources Limited. The river was their grocery store, their sanctuary, their religious church…. in their own words, the river was the very lifeblood of their community.

Then, it became a dumping ground.

The How and the Why: A River of Waste

Just ten miles north of the Canadian border, on the very same river that nourishes the Colville Reservation, sits a lead-zinc smelter. For 65 years, its owner, a Canadian corporation called Teck, treated the mighty Columbia like a personal trash can.

The numbers are difficult to comprehend. From 1930 to 1995, the company discharged roughly 400 tons of industrial slag into the river. Every. Single. Day. The grand total is an estimated 9.97 million tons of the stuff. Buried in that metallic sludge were 7,300 tons of lead and a staggering 255,000 tons of zinc.

But that’s not all! Teck also piped “untold gallons of contaminated effluent” straight into the water. This toxic soup contained a cocktail of hazardous substances, including mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. A river that had once sustained a whole tribe of people for centuries was being systematically poisoned for profit.

The Ripple Effect

The consequences flowed downstream, right to the Colville people. The fish, a cornerstone of their diet and culture, became laced with mercury. State health advisories went up, warning people not to eat what they caught. The simple, profound act of going to the river to fish became a risk.

So what? The “so what” is everything here. It’s the tribal fishing trips that were canceled. It’s the ancient knowledge about where and when to fish that could no longer be safely practiced. It’s the loss of an uncontaminated river, not just as a source of food, but as the centerpiece of their cultural identity.

The Tribes’ connection to the river was deeply wounded. The poison didn’t just injure the fish and the microscopic organisms living in the sediment. It did a complete severing of a relationship between a people and a place. It stole a piece of their inheritance.

The Bigger Picture: Is Culture a “Resource”?

This- at its core- is a story about our current economic system that struggles to see the real value of a river.

This is where things got, frankly, absurd. The lower court initially threw out the Tribes’ claims, arguing they were seeking damages for injured “cultural resources,” not “natural resources”.

Think about that for a hot minute.

The law recognizes a fish as a “natural resource” you can put a price on. But the cultural practices surrounding that fish? The generations of tradition, the community bonding, the spiritual connection? Sorry, that doesn’t count! Money is all that matters.

This is the blind spot in our system. It knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. It can calculate the cost of replacing dead fish, but it is stumped by the concept of a broken cultural heart. Teck’s decades of pollution created a harm that our legal language was barely equipped to describe, let alone remedy.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the public court document: Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation v. Teck Cominco Metals Ltd., No. 24-5565, filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on September 3, 2025.