Northwest Fisheries: 50 years of Boldt!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday—and a fine game it was. Congrats to the Chiefs! Today is Abe Lincoln’s birthday, which we celebrated separately until we bundled him with Washington and made it Presidents’ Day.

Today is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision, made in Federal District Court, which upheld Northwest Indians’ treaty rights to fish off reservation in their “usual and accustomed places.” When Northwest salmon and steelhead were abundant, this was no big deal. But as dams came to the rivers, development destroyed spawning habitat, and the numbers of commercial and sport fishers grew, the states of Oregon and Washington declared that tribal members needed to follow the same rules as their white neighbors. Alvin Josephy chronicled it all in “The Great Northwest Fishing War,”a chapter in Now That the Buffalo’s Gone, (Marc Jaffe and I included it in our Josephy Reader, The Longest Trail.)

In the 1960s and 70s, borrowing tactics from the Civil Rights Movement, Tribal fishers rebelled at the states’ restrictions, casting their nets in usual and accustomed places outside of white authorities’ seasons. They were beaten, harassed, and arrested—Billy Frank, Jr. in Washington 50 times. Real wars broke out in Oregon and Washington waterways. The national press stepped in when actor Marlon Brando joined them in the boats to get arrested!

Josephy tells the long story, which begins with the Isaac Stevens treaties of the 1850s, and wends its way through treaties made and broken, reservation lands gobbled up, and Indians persistent attempts in state and federal courts to Judge George Boldt. Boldt asked his law clerks to check the dictionaries and usages of “in common with” in the 1850s, the Stevens treaty period. The treaties all said that tribal fishing and hunting rights were to be exercised “in common with the citizenry.” The clerks came back with “shared equally,” and Boldt awarded the Tribes half the catch!

The backlash was severe. There were effigy hangings, refusals to sell Indians supplies and gas for their boats. Individual Indians were harassed and spit on. It was a trying time as the case gradually made its way to the Supreme Court; in 1979 the Supreme Court upheld Boldt.

There’s another chapter to the story. If Indians were to get half the catch for their subsistence, there had to be fish! And as dams and habitat destruction reduced the runs of salmon and steelhead, the number of fish making annual migrations to spawning grounds and the number of smolts making it back to the ocean plummeted.

Today, primarily with money from the dams—through the Bonneville Power Association—Northwest Tribal fisheries are the most vigorous and skilled practitioners of freshwater ///fish biology and fisheries preservation. Even the sport and commercial fishers who once saw “half the catch” as doom now look to the Indians as their allies.

Some of you might have caught the recent The Seattle Times editorial. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Rare is the legal ruling so transformative to a state, a region, and its inhabitants. In affirming tribal fishing harvest rights, Boldt’s decision righted a long-term injustice against the state’s Indigenous people.

“The tribes would become natural resource co-managers, alongside the state, and afforded an equal share of the salmon sacred to them. They have wielded that influence to fight for the restoration of Puget Sound and wider Salish Sea, the inland marine waters of Washington and British Columbia, and the dwindling population of salmon species within it.”

Years from now, diehards will remember this Superbowl, and a few people will still mark February 12 as Abe Lincoln’s birthday. And if salmon and steelhead survive in Pacific Northwest Rivers and Streams, February 12, 1974 will be a letter day in that survival.

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Photo: Marlon Brando and Billy Frank, Jr. , HistoryLink

Elders

The Kiowa writer Scott Momaday passed this week. He was 89. I met him once, when he came to Wallowa County to make the presentation of a horse by the Wood family to the walʔwá ma, or Joseph Band Nez Perce. He’d come across the story of the horse that Chief Joseph told Erskine Wood he’d like when the 14-year-old boy stayed with him at Nespelem on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Erskine’s father, C.E.S. Wood, who had served under General Howard in the Nez Perce War and become a friend of and advocate for Joseph after the war, told the boy to ask the Chief what he might do for him in gratitude for hosting his son. Joseph said he’d like a good pony; the boy thought that his father was a powerful man, and that the Chief should have asked for something more glamorous than a horse, so did not pass the message on to his father. He told the story, and published a diary of his Days with Chief Joseph, years later.Read Rich’s Post →

Marc Jaffe

I just got a brief and beautiful note from Vivienne Jaffe that her husband, Marc Jaffe, had passed on December 31 at the age of 102. Images of Marc, walking in from his morning horseback rides to breakfast at Fishtrap, addressing the Fishtrap audience to tell them about the special place and literature they were part of, driving me from Alvin Josephy’s house in Greenwich Ct to his place in Williamstown, Massachussettes in our last real visit, come flooding back.Read Rich’s Post →

Eurocentrism in America and Palestine

In the introduction to America In 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, a book of essays Alvin Josephy edited and published on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, he wrote that:

“Commencing with Columbus’s arrival among them, Spanish, French, and English invaders, colonizers, pirates, and imperial explorers all but exterminated them [indigenous people], slaughtering Caribs wholesale with fire, steel, European tortures, and savage dogs, working thousands of them to death as slaves, and wiping out their settlements with the pox, measles, dIphtheria, and other white men’s diseases to which the Indians had no resistance…Read Rich’s Post →

The Nez Perce and Condors–and Alvin

On Friday night, Angela Sodenaa, Precious Lands Coordinator for the Nez Perce Tribe, gave a stirring talk at Wallowology in Joseph, “The Nimiipuu and the qúˀnes: Condor Recovery in Hells Canyon.” She recapped condor demise and recovery across the West, and the Tribe’s work in establishing the feasibility of condor return to the Snake River and tributaries, and advocacy work on behalf of that return.Read Rich’s Post →

“Conversations with the Sioux”

One of the pleasures of working in this Josephy Library is coming across material that is relevant today, and that might have been hidden from view for years or decades. So, on and off since Alvin Josephy’s death—almost 20 years ago!—I have poked at a story he told me about a project he had undertaken that did not result in a book.

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Alvin Josephy, Custer, the Indian Story—and Vietnam

On Thursday night we watched a “rough cut” version of a documentary chronicling Alvin Josephy’s career as a historian of and advocate for Indians. Sean Cassidy, retired from Lewis-Clark State College, introduced the film, which he and fellow LC professor Patricia Keith put together in the early 2000s.Read Rich’s Post →

Senator Abourezk, Arabs, and American Indians

We just lost a good man who is probably now unknown to most Americans—although the nation’s news frequently talks about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which he was instrumental in steering into law in 1978. The New York Times announced his passing:

“James Abourezk, who was elected by South Dakotans as the first Arab American senator, and who used his prominence to support the causes of Palestinians and Native Americans while also pushing for friendlier relations with Cuba and Iran, died on Friday, his 92nd birthday, at his home in Sioux Falls, S.D.”Read Rich’s Post →

The Josephy Center—Tenth Anniversary

Yesterday the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture celebrated ten years of life as a non-profit, and a few months more of programming. Last year, at nine, we purchased the old log bank building that has been our home since the beginning. Anne Stephens, who first conceived of a new arts center in Joseph, was honored last night, as was Cheryl Coughlan, the Center director for over nine of our years. I too was thanked, and got to say a few words of thanks. And to report on a unique and wonderful gift from the Josephy family.Read Rich’s Post →

Biden and Haaland and Indigenous Languages

It’s something new—and mostly good—every day. Today, in Native News Online, we learn that:

“600 people attended the Tribal Language Summit at the Oklahoma City Convention Center to hear from leading educators and policymakers in Indian Country on how to protect, preserve and promote America’s Indigenous languages.Read Rich’s Post →

Historical Errors and Omissions

In the new Smithsonian Magazine: “South to the Promised Land,” the “other” Underground Railroad, the one that went overland and across the Rio Grande to Mexico.

Mexico won its independence in 1821. And, fatefully, soon opened its doors to Anglo-American settlers in the northern frontier state of Texas. Some mixed American families—Whites who had freed and sometimes married their slaves—came to the remote lands to ranch, and became stops on that railroad. But most of the new settlers brought slaves, which resulted in confrontations with the Mexican government. In 1824, Mexico banned the importation of slaves. Anglo settlers called for a revolution, and in 1836 won independence from Mexico and wrote slavery into its constitution. The Alamo wasn’t all about freedom, especially for slaves and former slaves.Read Rich’s Post →

Help from the Natives

It’s a heavy job to give to Indians—and I use “Indians” here in deference to older tribal people who still use that term comfortably—but I don’t know who else we turn to. Young white men are killing African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Young Blacks are killing each other on the streets, and I don’t know about today but know that in the past Latino and Asian gangs also killed their own.Read Rich’s Post →

Alvin Josephy and the “new” science on Native American origins

Several friends quickly sent me the NYTimes review of a new book on the old subject of human origins in the Americas. The book is ORIGIN: A Genetic History of the Americas, and the author is Jennifer Raff. According to the reviewer, Raff consulted the sciences of “archaeology, genetics, and linguistics” in her book—which I have not read, but have ordered!Read Rich’s Post →

Fictions

I remember a long time ago, maybe 40 years ago, when I had the bookstore in Enterprise and waited each summer for the Josephys to arrive from the East. Betty would drop Alvin off at the bookstore and go visiting. Alvin would begin browsing the “local” section, and ask me about all the new titles. He loved the small family stories, the diaries, and the amateurs who wrote about the railroads, the post offices, a piece of land or a family tree.

He often derided the academic historians and the writers of textbook and popular histories of the West, who, when they wrote about Indians at all, passed on old tropes and omitted most things that made the Indians intelligent beings intent on making the most out of desperate situations.

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“Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World”

“Rumble” is a 2017 Canadian documentary film that I’d missed until it hit public television. I watched it twice, taking notes the second time, wanting to get in my mind the names of Rock n’ Roll, jazz, and blues musicians I’d listened to—and many I had not heard or heard of before.

I’d have to slow it down and stop action to get all the names and dates, but I know enough now to know that once again the roles of American Indians in the American story have been hidden or muted, and that there is again the story of resilience. Joy Harjo, our current national poet laureate and a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, says, as the credits roll, that “We’re still here; we’re still alive; we’re still singing.Read Rich’s Post →

The Catholic Fur-Trading North

When I had the bookstore all those years ago, I kept a big supply of Bison Books from the University of Nebraska that told the tales of the fur traders and mountain men. It was not my thing; American history was not my thing. I read fiction and short stories, mysteries and books from and about the Ottoman Empire and the wars on the Eastern Front.Read Rich’s Post →

October 5; On this day…

October 5, 1877 is the day on which the wal’wá·ma band of the Nez Perce and members of other non-treaty bands lost their freedom. They’d intended to go quietly from the Wallowa to the reduced Idaho reservation, leaving and losing their homeland but continuing to live in nearby country among relatives from other bands. They crossed the Snake River into Idaho in spring runoff, and there the grief-stricken actions of some young Nez Perce in killing Idaho settlers—settlers known for their mistreatment of Indians—set off a fighting retreat of more than 1200 miles. It ended on this day 144 yeasr ago at the Bears Paw mountains in Montana, just 40 miles short of safety in Canada.Read Rich’s Post →

More Good News—and old news about President Nixon!

Chuck Sams, Jaime Pinkham, and Deb Haaland Federal Government appointments were my good news last week. It turns out I stopped short in my research into what is going on in the Biden Administration, and made an error regarding government agencies at the same time. Thanks first to my friend Geoff, who advises that:

“The Army Corps of Engineers is within the Department of Defense, not Interior. Mike Connor, who will be the Asst. Secretary of the Army for Civil Works after confirmation… is Native too, Taos Pueblo. Jaime [Pinkham] Acting in his position, will be one rung below him, so both Native. Bob Anderson, also Native, is the Solicitor to Secretary of Interior, a critically important position, was Senate confirmed.”

And friend Elnora caught another of my misses—Brian Newland. Read Rich’s Post →