Accompanied by Bob Satiacum, a Puyallup Indian arrested for fishing violations in the 1950s, and the Reverend Canon John Yaryan of San Francisco, Brando took a very public stand in support of treaty rights but never caught a single fish. The catch came from Johnny’s Seafood Company. “I got in a boat with a Native American and a . . . priest. Someone gave us a big salmon we were supposed to have taken out of the river illegally and, sure enough, a game warden soon arrived and arrested us.”
“We knew the game wardens would make arrests,” confirmed Mel Thom. The niyc wanted to catch the state hassling Indians on tape, and further its campaign.
The scene played out in local newspapers.
“Your purpose is to openly defy the state law?” charged a Game officer as they landed.
“My purpose is to help these Indians,” smarted Brando, wearing a lumber jacket and surrounded by a reported five hundred Indians. The movie star told the crowd, “We made treaties as a young, weak nation when the Iroquois Confederation could have wiped us out. When we got stronger, we broke them. . . . The government has been trying to divide and conquer the Indians. Their rights must be protected.”
The officer put a quick end to the hostile banter and the show for the crowd: “I won’t argue with you. You should have your day in court. I think that’s what you’re looking for.”
Brando tossed his fish to an Indian in response as a woman yelled: “You can’t do this to us. We have a treaty!”
“What are you going to do with the fish, give them to some white man?” snapped another with a baby strapped to her back.
“This is all they have left,” Brando said. “Everything has been taken from them. They intend to hang on to these fishing rights.”
The state said it had no intention of making arrests, but Norm Mattson pulled Brando into custody for catching a couple of eight pound steelhead. Reputedly, Suzan Satiacum, Bob Satiacum’s wife, scratched Mattson and even spat in his face.
A prosecutor from Pierce County, John McCutcheon, called the whole affair window dressing. “Brando’s no fisherman!” he grumbled. Eight days later, the court dismissed the case against Bob Satiacum; charges against Brando and the Reverend Yaryan were never filed.
Promising a violence-free protest, tribes from across the country converged on the Capitol the next day. Indians from other areas, such as the Seminoles of Florida and the Nez Perce of Coeur d’Alene, took part in the “largest intertribal demonstration” ever held there, organized by Hank Adams. Many were the great-great-great-great grandchildren of the treaty signers. Tribal leaders danced. They delivered impassioned speeches. Accompanied by Brando, they roamed the halls of the legislative building in full regalia. “We were ending the government’s divide-and-rule system among Indians,” announced Thom.
The tribes issued a Proclamation of Protest, calling for the creation of a Native advisory committee and scientific research of tribes and commercial fishing, as well as an end to fishing arrests in “usual and accustomed places.” Adams and other organizers issued a public statement: “The past and present history of treaties between the federal government and their captive Indian nations exemplify a treaty as a ‘convenient way of license to steal’ for the government . . . the seeds you sow are the crops you reap.” Despite a four-hour meeting, most Indians left dissatisfied.
“Until the laws of the state or court decisions of the state indicate otherwise, I must ask all citizens to abide by the conservation regulations established by the state,” Governor Rosellini announced. “Without regulation, the Pacific Salmon would be as rare as the Dodo Bird.”
Nonetheless, a giddy Wilkie walked on air. “This has been the greatest Indian victory of the modern day.”
Indian activists and Brando had more to do. After a late-night skull session at an Olympia hotel, the group targeted La Push, near the tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Brando spent the night in a drafty cabin, a far cry from his accustomed Hollywood lifestyle, awaiting a fishing trip the next morning. The wind howled as it tore through thin walls and chilled Brando to the bone. He arose with a high fever, weary and coughing. Brando feared he was suffering from pneumonia or, at best, the “chest cold of all chest colds.”
“But the Indians looked at me expectantly, and I knew I had to go,” he writes in his autobiography:
I wrapped myself in a blanket and got in the boat while icy waves whipped up by the wind sprayed everyone, and as we left shore I thought, “I’m not going to leave this boat alive.” I suspected that I had pneumonia, that I was going to die and that my body would be dumped into the river. Hunched over, I told one of my Indian friends, Hank Adams, how awful I felt, and he said, “You know what my grandmother used to say?”
And I thought, “My God. Finally some words of wisdom . . .”
“If you smile, you’ll feel better.”
I just looked at him and thought, “What in this poor, pissed-on world are you talking about? I’m dying, and you’re asking me to smile?”
We traveled up and down the river for an hour waiting to be arrested, but no game wardens showed up. “I don’t mind dying,” I thought, but to die so senselessly on a freezing river without being arrested seems absurd. Only later did we learn that we’d been on the wrong river. Patrol boats were looking for us somewhere else; I’d faced death—or so my melodrama let me convince myself—for nothing. One of the Indians’ lawyers got me to an airport, and I flew home and entered the hospital with pneumonia, where I swore that someday I would repay Hank Adams. . . .
One reason I liked being with the Indians was that they didn’t give anyone movie-star treatment. They didn’t give a damn about my movies. Everyone’s the same; everyone shares and shares alike. Indians are usually depicted as grumpy people with monochrome moods, but I learned that they have a sardonic sense of humor and love to tease. They laugh at everything, especially themselves.
Nine years later, the actor refused an Oscar for his role in The Godfather, citing the movie industry’s treatment of Indian people.
