The Ceremony at the Crying Tree depicts the life of a typical Sinixt Indian family living along the upper Columbia River during the last half and the first half of the 19th/20th centuries. This family traveled from Revelstoke, B.C., Canada, each summer in their sturgeon nosed canoes, to Kettle Falls on the Columbia to fish for salmon. Their way of life was ended when the U.S. government built the Grand Coulee Dam and the backwater covered the falls. The salmon could no longer swim from the ocean up the river to spawn. That affected fourteen tribes whose high protein diet of salmon was effectively ended.