Adams slammed his hand down on a partition with such force it caused a thundering jolt. The partition crashed to the ground with a startling thud. Adams jumped. “It almost frightened me because I didn’t realize that it was going to sound like an explosion. I went and tore all the rest down and said, ‘You’re going to have to start over!’”
Adds Billy with a laugh, “And they started over.”
Guy McMinds, a Quinault, rose in support of Adams. “Maybe he’s right,” he told the room. “Maybe we’ve gone about this the wrong way.” After what Adams calls the “gong” of the partition, a charter committee was appointed and put together a plan the tribes endorsed.
During the chaos, longtime friendships formed in surprising places. Few moments can top the day Mike Grayum met Billy. His boss, the respected biologist Jim Heckman, sent him to the Nisqually River to “figure out what they’re catching.”
It was nine o’clock in the morning, a couple of days before Christmas. An Indian fisherman stood on a gravel bar in the middle of the Nisqually River as the chum run returned to spawn. With his hip boots on, Grayum navigated his way down the riverbank. He waded out to the bar and tapped the stranger on the shoulder. “And it was Billy,” Grayum says. “He had a half-gallon of whiskey in his hand and hands it over.”
As a young man learning the ropes, Grayum decided he’d better accept the gesture. “I don’t know how long we were down there, but I was passing the bottle back and forth. I was getting my first real lesson, after I left school, on the fisheries. And he was telling me what I needed to know, and I’ve been working with him ever since.”
Grayum had first become involved with implementing the Boldt Decision while working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He describes his assignment of tracking who was fishing and where, after hours: “I was going to use this night scope and write down boat numbers—how many, who they were, where they were fishing. I get out there and there was so much ambient light from all these boats that blinded me with the night scope, so I had to put that away. . . . There were so many boats and so many nets in the water, and it was dark. You ran the risk of colliding with something. It was a city out there. And they were all illegally fishing. And 90 percent of them or more were non-Indian fishermen.”
It wasn’t just the tribes feuding with government; government was feuding within itself. Instead of freely exchanging information, the state and federal governments duplicated efforts. As Grayum flew over the Nisqually River scouting for fish nests once, he nearly met disaster. “I’m flying up the river in a chartered airplane and I’m counting reds. And we meet a state plane coming downstream doing the same thing I was doing. We damn near collided in mid-air. It was really a close call. I thought this is nuts, on the same day, we’re doing the same thing, and we’re duplicating the costs. It’s crazy.”
In another instance revealing the complex dynamic the Boldt Decision created within government, Grayum recalls traveling to Portland to meet with his regional director at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. By this time, he had devoted years to U.S. v. Washington. With the major legal questions answered, he wondered about his own future.
“My god, we’ve got to appeal!” the director told him.
“Wait a minute, you can’t appeal. You won!” Grayum retorted. “They [U.S.] are so closely aligned with the state they were chagrined that they won a case,” Grayum says today. “It wasn’t just the state. There was a big faction of the federal government that was trying to find a way around this decision.”
“Stay out of trouble,” his boss told him that day. “Don’t anger the state and you’ll be just fine.”
“But I’m supposed to be assisting tribes. By that very act, I’m not going to be making a lot of friends in the state.”
“Well, just don’t do that.”
“Well, then I can’t do my job.”
Grayum made the decision then and there to leave U.S. Fish and Wildlife and take Heckman up on an earlier offer to join him at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. Thirty-five years later, in 2012, he’s still there.
In a letter to the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1975, Survival of the American Indian Association leveled serious accusations against the Department of Game. Allegedly, some fifteen patrolmen “brandishing clubs and handguns and using chemical mace attacked Frank’s Landing—without any apparent reason, apart from their total lack of legal authority and jurisdiction. . . . The delicate state of health of the elderly Indian grandparents [and owners] of Franks Landing places their lives in jeopardy, even though weapons might not actually be used. Generally, at least a score of Indian children are present at Franks Landing—where an independent Indian school is operating and was in session Monday during the state raid.” Survival argued that the Landing sits on reservation land and is therefore outside the state’s jurisdiction.
