For the state’s own protection, Neubrech said, wardens eventually carried guns. “From the time I started to work until the last five or six years, our agents were unarmed. Because of the necessity of self-protection, the decision was made that certain agents could bear firearms. Certain agents were authorized to carry night sticks in the case of mob gatherings and riots. . . .They have helmets and special tactical uniforms. The special tactical gear and defensive equipment have been issued to 15 wildlife agents. These picked men have received special training in how to handle mob and riot situations.”
On September 10, 1973, Billy became one of roughly a half-dozen Indians to take the witness stand in U.S. v. Washington. He told state attorneys Earl McGimpsey and Larry Coniff that any fish that returned to the Nisqually River was fair game for the tribe. “This is how I make my living, is off Mr. McGimpsey’s salmon and Mr. Coniff’s steelhead . . . so, I don’t want to break them down. Now, when I said I would like to take 100 percent of the salmon, I meant that them are the salmon that originated in the Nisqually River . . . and come back. . . . Now, I am not talking about the 8 million salmon that are caught out of the Nisqually River and the Puget Sound and other rivers.”
Billy told the court the state had confiscated his gear for years. Often, he found his nets shredded or dry rotting in gunnysacks. His boats were taken. His motors vanished. Further, he argued, enrollment records for treaty tribes were unreliable and the Bureau of Indian Affairs had ignored repeated requests to expand the Nisqually Indian rolls and affiliate new members. At the time, the rolls did not include Billy’s own children. “It looks like they want to terminate us,” Billy charged. “It has got to go through the tribe and then the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I think they say they are going to open up the rolls but just like this fishing right . . . I’m going to be six feet under by the time all that stuff comes up.”
Billy described changes in his lifetime and his father’s—tracing the impact of humans on fish runs: “There is so many different things on the river now, like the dams, the lowering of the water, the timber . . . . You would be thinking of 50 or 100 years from now. You don’t know the whole change of everything, what it would be in this fishery resource.”
“I watched his expression as Indians paraded before him up to the witness stand and spoke,” says Ziontz of the judge. “When Indians speak you listen. Because they speak gravely and from the heart and with very little folderol and curlicues. It’s very blunt. It’s very factual and Judge Boldt watched the Indian witnesses below him, listened and absorbed what they had to say.
“What they told him was a story of state oppression—oppression by our lovely state of Washington, the state I had fallen in love with and thought was so progressive and non-prejudicial. . . .The Indians had something. The whites wanted it. The whites took it,” Ziontz says of the culture clash.
In the courtroom, Boldt grew frustrated with Dr. Carroll Riley, the state’s anthropologist. “I don’t know why you hesitate in answering simple questions,” the judge said. “It disturbs me. If you persist in dodging the questions, it will bear heavily on my appraisal of your credibility and I might as well say so now.” Under cross examination, Riley admitted he had no evidence to disprove the testimony of the anthropologist testifying for the federal government.
Boldt laughed when another witness, an angler, compared catching a steelhead to making love. “If you’ve ever made love—that’s the nearest I can express it,” he said in court. After reading a long list of favorite fishing holes, Boldt retorted: “That doesn’t leave you much time for making love, does it?”
Judge Boldt “sat up there day after day after day listening to this laboriously delivered testimony sometimes from old Indians that couldn’t even speak the English language,” recalls Tom Keefe. “And if you sat and listened long enough you would get a sense for the historical injustice that was going on, and that’s what he came to.”
Billy remembers eighty-three-year-old Lena Hillaire on the stand with great fondness. She wore moccasins, traditional regalia, and a feather proudly fixed to her headpiece.
“Will you state your name, please?” the clerk requested.
“Oh, my name. It is Lena Cultee Hillaire, H-I-L-L-A-I-R-E.”
“And [the state] asked her a question,” Billy recalls. “I don’t remember what it was, but she didn’t understand what it was. And so she looked at Grandpa [Billy’s father] right there, and she started to talk in Indian to Grandpa from the stands.
