“These were tense moments,” recalls Suzan Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee woman appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1978 as congressional liaison of Indian Affairs. Harjo sees the six acres at Frank’s Landing as a real world classroom. “[The] community got it early on that the way you develop a lot of support was to give people tasks. It’s the oldest way of delegation in the world. You give a knight a quest. They were giving famous people a task, calling attention to the people who were trying to uphold their treaties, not just citizen vigilantes. They had a big story to tell. . . . These treaties aren’t just for the Indians. These treaties are for everyone.”
“Right up through the Boldt Decision, we had two or three hundred people living here,” Alison Gottfriedson recalled years later. “To protect the nets, they stayed in tents. During the winter, it would snow. But they stayed in the tents even though it was cold.”
Meantime, tribal fishermen took their case to the public—unfiltered. Cameras rolled for the making of As Long As the Rivers Run, an inside look at the struggle for treaty rights shot between 1968 and 1970. Carol Burns, a non-Indian filmmaker, characterizes herself as a “hippie who rejected the white man’s dog-eat-dog world.” The Indians were “roughed up and stomped on,” Burns says. The documentary shows the impact of the fishing struggle on families at the Landing. When male fishermen were in jail, the women put on hip boots and fished. Footage shows officers dragging Billy’s wife, Norma, and his sister, Maiselle, up the riverbank and across rocky terrain. “A lot of people have asked us how long have I been involved in this, or my family and I go back to when my little girl was two and a half years old, my youngest girl, and she’ll be nineteen next month,” Maiselle says in the documentary. “When she was two and a half years old was the very first time her dad was arrested and did thirty days in jail. This was her first experience in going into a judge’s courtroom. If you call a J.P. a courtroom.”
As Long As the Rivers Run captured the fallout from the fishing feud as it unfolded at Frank’s Landing and at the Capitol in Olympia. On one occasion, in the fall of 1968, crowds lined the Fifth Avenue Bridge. Indians and their supporters stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Adams, running for Congress at the time as a Republican, revved up the crowd behind a bullhorn. Billy is shown sitting on a rock when police appear.
“They packed me up the bank and threw me in the sheriff’s car,” Billy recalls, before breaking into a grin. “Adams, the Fearless Fos, comes flying into the police car,” he adds. Billy calls Adams “Fearless Fos” often and everywhere. The nickname stuck years ago, taken from a character in the immortal Dick Tracy cartoons. He’s “pure, underpaid and purposeful” the creator said of his character.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Billy asked Adams that day in the police car. Adams was the organizer in charge of the demonstration.
“We’re going to jail.”
Billy tells how officers then tossed “some white kid” into the police car for asking them too many questions about Indians. “What the hell are you doing here?” Billy quipped.
