For over a century, Seattle City Light has proudly called itself America’s first carbon-neutral utility — powered by three dams on the Skagit River, one of the West Coast’s mightiest waterways. The city built its reputation, and much of its prosperity, on what it marketed as clean, green hydropower.
But behind that reputation, a two-mile stretch of the upper Skagit simply ran dry. Intentionally dewatered to push every drop through a concrete tunnel to the turbines below, the riverbed became a waterless jumble of rock and gravel — and, for three small Pacific Northwest tribes, a century-long source of cultural trauma.
A century of carbon-free power — and what it cost
Seattle City Light’s three Skagit River dams became the engine of a city. Gorge Dam, the first of the three, was completed in 1926, and for much of the 20th century the Skagit was Seattle’s primary electricity source. Today it still supplies roughly a fifth of the city’s power, and City Light continues to promote its carbon-neutral status as a point of civic pride.
What the utility promoted less loudly was its long-standing position on salmon. For over a century, City Light quietly maintained that the upper Skagit had always been too swift and turbulent for migrating fish — that the dams, in effect, had blocked nothing. Biological evidence and Indigenous oral history told a different story. Investigative journalists had challenged the claim repeatedly. Still, the utility held its position.
Meanwhile, a two-mile stretch of riverbed sat dry. Engineers had routed the entire river through a concrete tunnel to maximize output at the Gorge Dam powerhouse downstream, leaving the surface channel a waterless jumble of rock and gravel. Warning signs now alert tourists to sudden flooding risk on the rare days when snowmelt forces water over the dam. For the tribes whose identity is bound to that river, it was something else entirely — what negotiator Scott Schuyler calls “a source of cultural trauma.”
Three tribes, a century of powerlessness
When City Light secured federal approval for its Skagit dams in 1917, the Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle, and Swinomish tribes had no voting rights, no federal recognition in two of the three cases, and no legal standing to object. An 1855 treaty had already stripped nearly all their traditional territory — 2,656 square miles of the Skagit River Basin. The Endangered Species Act wouldn’t exist for another half-century, and courts wouldn’t affirm treaty-reserved fishing rights until 1974.
The Swinomish held a small reservation on a Puget Sound island. The other two tribes were considerably more fragile. The Upper Skagit dwindled to roughly 300 people, with fractured leadership and no federal recognition until late in the 20th century. For most of the decades the dams ran, the tribes had no meaningful influence over the utility reshaping their world.
The absence was documented even in City Light’s own records. A consulting report the utility commissioned in 1988 to examine dam impacts on fish contained no Indigenous perspectives from the Skagit region. “They never talked to us,” Schuyler said. “We were in survival mode.”
The moment a word changed everything
Nine years ago, City Light convened a public meeting in Newhalem — a tidy company town the utility had built in the 1920s for the workers who constructed its dams, now fitted with EV charging stations and manicured ballfields. The occasion was the launch of the utility’s campaign to secure a third 50-year federal license. After lunch, an official praised the engineering of the dams and described the Skagit River as “a battery” powering Seattle’s prosperity.
Schuyler, seated in the audience, says he lost his composure.
“I got up and basically said this: That’s the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard. You do not call our namesake river a battery. This is not your battery. It’s part of our culture, part of our history.”
People in the room that day describe the moment as a turning point. Some in the audience looked confused or angry; others looked ashamed. Thomas O’Keefe of American Whitewater, who attended the meeting, said Schuyler’s words signaled “a different time” — one in which tribal standing in resource decisions could no longer be ignored. City Light managers say they’ve been careful never to refer to the Skagit as a battery since.
Casino money, legal firepower, and a decade of hard bargaining
Moral authority alone doesn’t move utilities. The tribes needed resources, and they found them somewhere unexpected: casino revenues. All three tribes now operate casinos, and the income provided seed capital for legal representation that would’ve been unimaginable a generation earlier.
The Upper Skagit hired Richard Roos-Collins, a Berkeley-based attorney and the primary strategist behind the recent removal of four dams on the Klamath River — the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. His involvement sharpened the tribes’ central piece of leverage: without a settlement, City Light couldn’t obtain its third 50-year license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Participants described the negotiations as bitter and prolonged. Schuyler suffered a heart attack in 2022, which he attributes to the stress of the process. A City Light negotiator acknowledged that Roos-Collins gave the tribes leverage they’d never previously possessed. What ultimately helped close the deal, according to Chris Townsend, City Light’s director of natural resources, was a shift in attitude within the utility itself. “We exported a lot of power and didn’t return value for that entire period,” Townsend said. “We do very much recognize the fact that our dams have harmed the tribes.”
What $1.35 billion looks like on the ground
Mayor Katie B. Wilson signed the settlement this month. City Light describes it as the largest payout in U.S. history from a utility to Indigenous tribes as part of a dam relicensing — a figure that will require significant electricity rate increases for the utility’s half-million ratepayers.
Nearly $1 billion will fund a fish passage system. Young salmon will be trucked around the dams on their way to the Pacific; returning adults will be trucked upstream to spawn. The remaining funds will support reservation projects, direct payments to tribal members, and habitat restoration in the Skagit River delta. City Light has also agreed, as part of the deal, to allow water to flow year-round through the long-dewatered two-mile stretch above Gorge Dam.
What the settlement doesn’t include is an apology. City Light still doesn’t formally concede that its dams block salmon migration — even as it commits hundreds of millions of dollars to truck fish around them. The agreement acknowledges financial and cultural harm, but the utility’s core position on salmon hasn’t officially changed. For Schuyler and others, that gap between action and acknowledgment remains a source of ongoing mistrust.
The settlement’s scale raises a broader question that extends well beyond the Skagit. Across the American West, hydroelectric dams have long been counted as clean energy — carbon-free, renewable, modern. That accounting has rarely included the rivers that ran dry, the fish that never returned, or the communities that absorbed a century of loss while a city congratulated itself on being green. The Skagit tribes didn’t just win a settlement. They forced a reckoning with what “clean” has always left out.
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