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

Dams and People

There was a story in the New York Times yesterday about the flooding of the village of Hasankeyf in Southeast Turkey.Some say the village is 12,000 years old, and certainly it and the surrounding area have stories of ancient civilizations that are part of a historical thread that goes back to the “Garden of Eden.” Hasankeyf is on the Tigris River, which, along with the Euphrates, framed the Fertile Crescent, land where we think the domestication of wheat and animals took place millennia ago, land the holy books and their followers say was home to Adam and Eve.Read Rich’s Post →

Coho return to the Lostine River!

I got this “FYI” from Jim Harbeck at Nez Perce Fisheries here in Joseph last night:

“The first Coho Salmon to return to the Lostine River in over 40 years came back home this morning…  I think we’ll see at least a few hundred Coho this fall at our weir on the Lostine. And more importantly, once again the Nez Perce Tribe is proving to be a good steward here in Wallowa County. This fish returned to a reach of river just below old Chief Joseph’s original burial site. I’m sure he’d be proud of his people for this significant accomplishment (and Ken Witty would be too).”

Ken Witty was a long-time fish biologist for the State of Oregon, and did some consulting with the tribe after his retirement.

It’s a long story. 1855 Treaty; Fish Wars of the 70s (which Alvin Josephy wrote about); Boldt Decision awarding half the salmon catch to the tribes; Nez Perce, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, and other tribal fishery programs ramping up; mitigation money from Bonneville Power—and events like this!

I could go on, but encourage you to do so on your own. For now, we celebrate the return of the Coho Salmon to the Lostine River.

First Lostine River Coho in over 40 years!

Civil Rights, Treaty Rights

Alvin Josephy told me once that liberals just didn’t get it with Indians.  In the sixties, after legislative victories on voting and discrimination issues, some liberals, according to Alvin, were ready to “move on to Indians.” But when they took their good intentions into Indian country, they were told that Indians weren’t so concerned with Civil Rights; Indians were interested in Treaty Rights.

I think the story tells us something about the confusing and sporadic nature of liberal support for Indian issues. We don’t really get this stuff about treaties. Look at Standing Rock, which was a great liberal rallying cry only months ago, but is now on the back burner again—do you remember seeing anything recently in the New York Times or other bastions of the liberal establishment press about the situation in the Dakotas? Indians are still there. The pipeline is under the river, and there are, I believe, cases pending. But a quick Google search of Standing Rock updates brings up stories from February and April. Standing Rock is about treaty rights and their long and continuing abrogation and dismissal by the establishment. Too confusing for liberals looking for simple wrongs to right.

Standing Rock is also, of course, about what we humans are doing to the environment. But Indians reminding us of environmental disasters is also confusing and sometimes uneasy. So once again liberals pick up on it for a while before moving on to “cap and trade” or plastics at McDonalds or another middle class crusade that hits us in the places we live, work, and send our kids to school or offers to save the planet.

Water and oil in South Dakota or the extraction of oil from Canadian tar pits—which the Nez Perce in Idaho protested by blocking the Lolo Highway when they tried to move huge equipment necessary for tar sands oil extraction to Canada—is not so close, and not as big a planet-wide deal as the Paris Accords or Al Gore. We liberals want to save the school our children go to or save the planet. And we’ll do it with a quick protest or a tax-deductible check.

Many liberals applaud Indians for salmon recovery and stands against dams—which seems to me a nice confluence of interests, rather than true listening to all that Indians have to say about fish, health, and the environment. Yes, white liberals, including actor Marlon Brando, appeared in the Northwest Fish Wars that led to the Boldt Decision, but how many of us know what that decision was or does now? And how many proponents of dam removal know about “first foods,” know about the complicated ecosystems around any moving body of water? Why are the Nez Perce interested now in lamprey recovery? Do we even know where that fits in the scheme of river health? Maybe not exactly, said a biologist I know, but the Nez Perce know it was part of what was once a huge river of life for millennia. The elders thought lamprey important, so we’ll bring them back—eventually.

More than anything, how many of us non-Indians understand that it is treaty rights that American Indians lean on in environmental battles over fish and water and land? Treaty rights that are old and sacred, passed down from generation to generation of American Indians; treaty rights that also are written in Euro-American law books, and on occasion come to the attention of a judicial system that is obligated to pay them some attention.

From President Jackson forward, treaties have been ignored or abrogated as often as not—but they, like the Indians, are still with us.

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Resilience

The election and the first days of a new and controversial Presidency have captured the news and national attention. For the most part, Standing Rock has slipped to back pages and Indian media websites, even as President Trump tweets and signs executive orders demanding a speedy resumption of pipeline building. The sheer number of tweets and executive orders helps obscure this news.

Life–1973

Water problems on one reservation and a lawsuit over education on another creep into the news, but, for the most part, Indians and tribal concerns are background noise once again, caught occasionally by a local press, or by an environmental media newly awakened to Indian allies, covered regularly only in Native news outlets.

But, I would argue, now is exactly the time we should be looking at and to tribes for guidance in dealing with current social, environmental, and political issues: Indians have the kind of history and standing that might instruct us now—while reminding us of past errors in their regards; it is becoming increasingly obvious that Indian environmental and legal concerns are concerns for all Americans; and, more than anything, Indians can remind us of and teach us about resilience.

Indians were here first, here to meet the boats from Spain, England, Holland, Portugal, Italy… Indians were then decimated by European diseases to which they had little resistance, enslaved, killed in wars over land, “removed” by Andrew Jackson, restricted to reservations, coaxed into assimilation by the Dawes Allotment Act, boarding schools, the Termination Act, and an urban relocation program.

But they have survived and, incredibly, retained tribal cultures and values.

And, they have survived from coast to coast and border to boarder, even made hay of their mistreatment in boarding schools by meeting one another, learning from one another, and emerging now, in 2016 and 2017 to stand together at Standing Rock.

After decades of Indian concerns over water, fish, and other natural resources, often in the face of majority opposition (see the “great fish wars” in the Northwest prior to the Boldt Decision), the environmental community is acknowledging Indians and the Indian stance in the natural world rather than over the rest of it. After water contamination in Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon and dozens of other places, we—majority culture environmentalists—see that clean water is precious and fundamental in North Dakota and everywhere.

And, as Standing Rock illustrates, Indians can teach us to bridge the rural-urban divide. In the 1950s, in the Eisenhower era, a last gasp at assimilation called termination policy aimed to erase the reservation system, Trust responsibilities, and the whole doctrine of Tribal Sovereignty. As an accompaniment—Indians were to join the main stream in America—thousands of young Indians were loaded on buses and moved to urban outposts across the country.  As a result, the Federal government and State and corporate interests terminated the Klamath and scores of Oregon tribes, and built the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River, coal fire plants in the Southwest, and the Kinzua Dam on Seneca land.

However, by standing their ground and established legal doctrine, Indians beat back termination—President Nixon famously said that “there will be no further termination of Indian tribes, but self-determination for Indians.”

Even then, Indians learned from their misfortune, met people from other tribes, studied at universities, learned to have a foot in two worlds. And now they are still in urban areas, at colleges and universities on reservations and off, and have trained their own as lawyers and battled in courts over land, water, and sovereignty. They have also retained family and tribal links, and move back and forth between city work and rural tribal work. They are trained in fisheries and wildlife management, business and gaming, and move from government to non-profit to tribal to private fluidly.

They run huge gaming and entertainment enterprises, and assist tribal programs and local non-tribal educational, cultural, and government programs with their winnings. (The Wildhorse Foundation on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation has given millions across northeast Oregon.)

Indians are everywhere, and more often than not they are on the side of the angels. As my old mentor, Alvin Josephy often said, “Indians are still capable of ‘group think,’ of thinking beyond the self and immediate family for the good of all.”

So now, in these troubled times, it is up to us, the majority white culture and African-American and Latino and Asian-American groups, to find them, support them, and learn from them. They know these roads. They know resilience.

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Listening to Indians

I’ve been voting for 50 years—Johnson was my first Presidential pick in 1964. And yes, I’ve learned much about that strong-arming, deal-making, womanizing, self-agrandizing, Vietnam-failing President over the years. He had all of those negative qualities and more, and he wasn’t the first or last president to use questionable tactics or to cash in on the exalted position for personal satisfaction.

But Lyndon Johnson used strength and guile, twisted arms, shamed, compromised, made deals with the NAACP and other Civil Rights leaders, House members and Senators from both parties, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He did so knowing that Democrats would lose the South for the foreseeable future, hoping that it would mark his legacy for sure, but knowing also that it was the right thing to do (his own gut thoughts about civil rights went back to pre-political school-teaching days):
“On June 19, exactly one year after President Kennedy’s proposal, the compromise bill passed the Senate by a vote of 73 to 27. House approval followed, and on July 2 President Johnson signed the bill into law. The law’s eleven sections prohibited discrimination in the workplace, public accommodations, public facilities, and agencies receiving federal funds, and strengthened prohibitions on school segregation and discrimination in voter registration.” (Library of Congress)
That was “progress,” The notion that there is some glorious past to return to, that somehow “conserving” the words and ideas of the Founding Fathers as they were said and meant in that time is, I believe, absurd. Few current American citizens would embrace a country where only property owning men of European decent could vote. Although women were not explicitly prohibited from holding office, they didn’t. African American were not citizens; they were property. I’ll leave it at that!
The genius of the country—and its founding documents—is that they have always been aspirational. Citizenship has been gradually extended; immigration, necessary from the beginning to fuel the new nation, has gradually if reluctantly made us home for Jews, the Irish, East Europeans, Southern Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Laws have been made—not always followed, and often amended to accommodate new understandings.
The history of the nation’s relationships with Indians, the people who were here when Europeans arrived, the people who were misnamed, enslaved, and killed by accidental disease and intentional action, (and at the same time sent back to Europe to be celebrated as “noble savages” and painted as kings and princes), reflects a troubled, murky, ambiguous journey. Indian-government relations have had their own historical, often troubled and sometimes downright horrible journey.
No one, I imagine, wants to return to a time of slaughter. Some Indians might want to return to the terms of treaties, sometimes although not always negotiated in good faith, which promised particular tribes ancestral lands and the freedom to continue their traditional lives. And Indians too were practiced in adaptation and aspiration before European arrival. They had created great cities, developed agriculture, and come to a close relationship with the horse before they met a European, and their current journey began. (clarification: Plateau and Plains tribes met horses before white Europeans; people in Middle America and what is now the American Southwest met the horse earlier, along with their often fatal meetings with the Europeans.)
Indians today are everywhere. Some are participating fully in mainstream society; others are negotiating lives that straddle worlds and cultures, tribal and American national educational, health, and economic systems that often exist side by side. Many are regular Euro-American and African American citizens who claim some small piece of Indian they’ve discovered through family history or DNA analysis.
Legally, Indians enrolled with tribes participate in a form of “limited sovereignty” defined by Chief Justice Marshall in the 1830s (and ignored immediately by President Jackson and his Indian removal policy). Some of those treaties and that sovereignty apply to lands outside of reservations, called “usual and accustomed places.”
Which brings us to salmon in the Columbia River and the water itself in the great Missouri. Indians today are reminding us that we are part of a bigger world that we must attend to.
In this season of political turmoil, my hope is in Indian eyes, the Indian eyes that shine with the new Longhouse in Wallowa, the drummers’ and dancers’ eyes at powwows that now are held openly, adorned by regalia once confiscated, words in languages once outlawed. The eyes that greet returning salmon and expect the lamprey. Listening to ancient tribal lessons, and with the help of laws and interpretations of laws—Justice Marshall’s interpretation, the Boldt Decision—Indians are often the leading and sanest voices as we plunge into a future where temperatures rise, land is gobbled for development, and water is scarce.
The whole continent was once a “usual and accustomed place” for Indians. Listening to Indians now might make it a better place for all.

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