Chapter Ten of “Where the Salmon Run” written by Trova Heffernan and sponsored by Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed.
Chapter Ten | Storm
The backlash to the Boldt Decision reached far and wide, pitting fisherman against fisherman and judge against judge. Sportsmen and commercial fishermen were enraged. Within weeks of the opinion, they chartered buses from as far away as Wenatchee. Seven hundred strong, they marched in front of the U.S. Courthouse in Tacoma. They parked trailered boats there, hung an effigy of the judge from a tree, and flashed bumper stickers that read: “Sportsmen’s rights torn to a shred, screwed by a Boldt without any head.”
“Does anyone here agree with this decision?” a protester barked from behind a bullhorn.
“No!” the crowd shouted.
“Are you going to pay for the fish for someone else to catch?”
“No!” fishermen roared.
As written, Boldt’s ruling called for dramatic changes in a large and lucrative industry. Fishing was a multi-million-dollar business in Washington. The courts found that existing regulations allowed the majority of fish to be intercepted by non-Indians, long before the salmon reached tribal fishers stationed at the end of their migration path.
Non-Indian fishing organizations filed lawsuits in response. Commercial fishermen called themselves “the forgotten majority” and complained of reverse discrimination, drowning in debt, and having to sell off their boats. “I’ve never heard of such a thing— that one judge could rule against an entire industry,” griped Robert Christensen, then president of the Puget Sound Gillnetters Association. “They would have shot Judge Boldt,” Billy says without a trace of exaggeration. “They would have killed him they were so angry. . . . They were killing each other. They went crazy because Slade Gorton was telling them: I’m going to overturn this when it gets to the United States Supreme Court. . . . The non-Indian community didn’t want to have nothing to do with Boldt anymore. They did everything to destroy this career of this judge.”
Over the years, the judge himself described the attacks: “I was burned in effigy and they still do that. The fishermen have a champion and he maligns me continually and steadily, and he’s spurred on by the attorney general here. He’s got to be with the fishermen, don’t you see? You just can’t be honest in this state and get anywhere because of the enormous amount of condemnation heaped on me since I wrote that decision.
“Sometimes I get bales and bales of mail. Loathsome material. Sometimes they say, and put it in the paper, that my wife is an Indian. Well, she wouldn’t mind that at all, but she happens to be a Scotch Presbyterian.” Asked if the backlash gets to him, the judge replied, “I took an oath of office. It’s right up there on the wall, and I look at it every day, have for twenty-five years.”
An impetuous spirit filled the water. Boats rammed other boats in retaliation. At marinas, Indians were denied ice and gas.
Non-Indians were not unlike their Indian counterparts when fishing rights were on the table. Both groups publicly lashed out at their target. Both groups were labeled renegades. Both groups were cautioned that a few illegal catches could destroy future runs. While the Indians claimed Washington State was converting Puget Sound into a “Sportsman’s Paradise,” non-Indian gillnetters saw a fish farm “under the guise of conservation and special rights for the Indians.”
“Prior to the Boldt Decision, the non-Indians were dependent on the state authorities and state policemen, game wardens and fisheries enforcement officers . . . to go after the Indians,” Hank Adams says. “After the Boldt Decision, it was a call to the citizens to come out and oppose the non-Indian fishermen, the non-Indian canneries. . . . You had non-Indian commercial businesses and canners and so forth deny ice to the Lummis and the Tulalips. No one would sell them ice so they couldn’t maintain their fish after harvesting them.”
“It was complete anarchy and chaos,” says Mike Grayum, executive director of the NWIFC. “Nobody was abiding by the rules of the court. The state Fish and Game agencies were not. The attorney general’s office was not. They were being encouraged to break the law, if you will, and to fish as much as they want, wherever they want.” Despite the Interim Plan approved shortly after the decision to see through its implementation, unrest remained.
“The trouble was that usually the tribal fishermen were at the end of the line,” says Dan Evans. “The salmon runs would come in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Then they’d come in closer, toward the Puget Sound commercial guys, and then finally the Indian. And then they’d gripe about the Indians. They’d say, ‘They’re putting their nets clear across the river so no salmon are getting up to spawn.’ So that’s when we really had to get into it. A legal decision is one thing. They sit up there in those robes and they say a profound solution. But carrying it out is quite something else again.”
In the summer that followed the Boldt Decision, the state of Washington slashed the bag limit for sports anglers from three salmon to two, and prohibited fishing within three miles of the Pacific Coast. Further, it restricted fishing within Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca for commercial anglers and sportsmen. The fishermen sought injunctions in state court against the new fishing regulations and got them. Boldt, however, overruled the state court judge and declared six days per week the maximum number of commercial fishing days.
For Indians, the landmark decision ended a hundred-year wait for treaty rights and ushered in a new day. Indian fishermen invested in new boats and gear. They started catching more fish. As the end of 1974 approached, state authorities estimated that Indian fishermen would take some 160,000 salmon, non-Indian 110,000, and the hook-and-line anglers 90,000.
“It was kind of a shock to realize we were going to have to share this with somebody else,” admits Jon Westerhome, a lifelong gillnetter on the ColumBIA River who, at the industry’s prime, brought in two or three tons of fish per season. Even with so much at stake, Westerhome says eventually many fishermen came around and accepted the split. “The Native Americans were deserving,” Westerhome says. “They were here first.”
The Boldt Decision leveled the playing field between tribes and government. Boldt held that existing law was unconstitutional when applied to treaty fishermen. The decision gave the tribes authority to manage their own fishery and to hold jurisdiction over Indians fishing away from reservations, in ancestral fishing grounds. “Judge Boldt made a decision that we are going to protect ourselves,” Billy says. “There’s laws written and there’s a lot of principles come out of that decision. We’re self-regulators. Now, we have to manage to get our salmon back. We are part of the system.”
As a part of the system, the tribes established a new organization to represent all Western Washington treaty tribes. With no comparable organization in existence, Billy and Hank Adams arrived in Portland on May 1, 1974, where a think tank was underway to form the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which would be charged with protecting treaty rights, managing resources, and educating the public. Charts and blueprints were scattered about. “I went up there and I spoke that day,” says Adams, “and looked at their charts . . . and the only interest I heard discussed and the only interest I see up on these charts was who is going to arrest the Indian fishermen now. And I said, ‘I’m tired of the Indian fishermen, of your tribes being treated as a criminal class! This isn’t good enough! You’re going to have to start over!’”
