Brando lends support to Northwest Indians in 1964.
“One of the things that Marlon did was bring the news
media, and I mean, boy, big time . . .” Billy says. Image-Hank Adams Personal Collection
Luck did not end there. Marlon Brando, the actor, brought Kent Mackenzie, a filmmaker, to Utah for the same meeting. Mackenzie had recently finished the 1961 film The Exiles, a project that chronicled life for Native Americans at Bunker Hill, a forgotten corner of Los Angeles. Best known for his legendary acting ability and broodingly handsome looks, Brando possessed a deep passion for civil rights. He characterized white society’s treatment of blacks as “rage” and bowed out of a movie production to devote more time to the struggle for racial equality. Of the country’s relations with the Indians, Brando once seethed: “Christ Almighty, look at what we did in the name of democracy to the American Indian. We just excised him from the human race. We had 400 treaties with the Indians and we broke every one of them.”
When the conversation at the niyc meeting turned to civil rights, Brando urged the group to get involved in the movement “and break through the pervasive larger indifference of the American people by getting their attention. The greater force against you was indifference rather than the people who were hitting you all the time. Then if you could break that indifference you could get the mass of non-Indian people on your side.”
Months later, after Brando marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the group reconvened in Denver and decided Brando would go to Washington State, where tribes were already actively resisting the crackdown on treaty fishing rights. “Ever since I helped raise funds for Israel as a young man and learned about the Holocaust,” writes Brando in his memoirs, Songs My Mother Taught Me, “I developed an interest in how societies treat one another; it is one of the enduring interests of my life.
“In the early 1960s, several members of the Indian Youth Council from the Pacific Northwest told me that they had decided to challenge government limits on salmon fishing by Indians in western Washington and along the Columbia River. Century-old treaties guaranteed their tribes the right to fish at their accustomed places in perpetuity—‘as long as the mountains stand, the grass grows and the sun shines.’”
Word spread that Brando might fly to Washington. “If they [Indian fishermen] feel there is an encroachment on their rights, Indians should confer with proper authorities. If this fails, they should turn to litigation,” Sebastian Williams, a Tulalip Indian, told a crowd gathered in Seattle.
The public started to weigh in. One citizen called the Indians’ fight for treaty rights shaky because it reflected a lifestyle long gone: “He [an Indian fisherman], probably is going to drive to the fishing spot, use some store bought materials in his gear, land a hatchery fish and take it home to a refrigerator.”
At 2:00 a.m. on March 2, Adams roused reporters to catch Brando fishing the Puyallup River in one of the biggest local news stories of the year.
“Marlon Brando is coming and we’re going to have a fish-in, just like the black people had sit-ins,” Bruce Wilkie, a Makah Indian, told his attorney, Al Ziontz. “Meet us at the Puyallup River bridge where Highway 99 crosses the river, just outside Tacoma, Monday morning at eight o’clock.”
Brando’s presence drew big-name journalists and stirred emotions across the country. The fishing struggle bumped from the sports page to the front page, and into the American living room. Throngs of journalists showed up toting the large television cameras of that era. Charles Kuralt, a cbs anchor, met Hank Adams for scrambled eggs and bacon.
“One of the things that Marlon did was bring the news media, and I mean, boy, big time. . . ,” Billy recalls. “And that was part of our tools of telling the story. Oh, he was great, Marlon Brando was a great person, and he took a lot of Indian causes.”
