The gillnetters accused the officer of an “unwarranted shooting.” The injured skipper of the Alaskan Revenge, twenty-four-year-old William Carlson, had to be airlifted by helicopter to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. As reported in the Seattle Times, he suffered paralysis of the left arm and leg after the shooting, “brain damage, blunted mental and psychological processes, disfigurement, pain, amnesia and fatigue.” The scene was played in the media as though the injured Carlson were a martyr, seriously injured while trying to protect his livelihood. But Haw says Carlson was not a licensed gillnet fisherman.
The shooting led to a march in Olympia and a speech by Jim Johnson, an assistant attorney general and lead lawyer for the state, “to tumultuous cheers regarding the immorality of Judge Boldt’s ruling” and what Johnson characterized as “morally reprehensible” law. Candidates for governor weighed in: “I would have done a lot before this even happened [if I had been governor],” said Republican candidate John Spellman. “I would have gotten the fishermen and the [State] Department of Fisheries together for negotiations.”
The behavior of the state caught the attention of national media. “Washington State legal officials refused to enforce Boldt’s order,” noted the Washington Post. “They instead denounced the judge, and encouraged fishermen to believe his decision upholding treaty rights was capricious and unlikely to stand up on appeal.”
To make matters worse, the fisheries management system was out of control, says Haw, with an excess of commercial fishing licenses and a “lack of authority” on the part of the state “to control mixed stock fishing off its own coast.” Washington fish that originated in the state were being harvested in Canada.
The tribes remained determined to hold their ground, whatever the consequence. “I don’t think a fish is worth the life of anybody,” said Forest Kinley, a Lummi Indian at the time, “but if one of our people is drowned by those redneck gillnetters, there will be shooting.”
Billy says the anger was rooted in a network of white people that had had its way for a long time: “You go back and read the laws. They were put here against the Indians when they became a state. . . . all of this land . . . from here to the ColumBIA River to Canada was ceded to the non-Indian in a treaty. So they built Seattle, they built all these towns and cities, they built the highways, the I-5 corridor, they built everything, they built the banks. . . . So they forgot about us, they went about their business and they had their own land . . . until that Boldt Decision come along.”
Congress in 1976 enacted the Two Hundred Mile Fishery Conservation Zone. The act restricted foreign fleets from fishing within two hundred miles of the U.S. coast. Regional councils were established to recommend regulations to the Department of Commerce. As Billy recalls, “After the Boldt Decision there was the Magnuson Act. Now Senator Magnuson was one of our great senators in the state of Washington, along with Senator Jackson who he worked with. And so Magnuson put this act together, the 200 mile act we call it, the Magnuson Act. It’s now the Stevens-Magnuson Act.
“Our tribes made sure that we wrote in that act along with the senator, that we had language that we the tribes would be at the table whenever there was a decision made on our resource and our salmon.”
“The Pacific Regional Council has been resistant to full implementation of the treaty rights,” concluded a report by the NWIFC. Some Indian tribes fished at sea. Federal authority could result in fewer salmon returning to their home rivers and streams.
In 1976, as the nation celebrated its two hundredth birthday, racism took on a whole different meaning for Sugar, Billy’s son. A group of activists departed Frank’s Landing on a Trail of Self-Determination. The cross-country caravan to Washington, D.C., intended to show the U.S. government the trials facing Indian people.“We will be trying to bring about serious negotiation,” announced Native Sid Mills of plans for the peaceful demonstration on Indian affairs. “You can’t do that with violence.”
Billy, Sugar, Hank Adams, Curly Kid, and others recruited activists. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, they awoke to the sliding door of a van nearby and a gun sitting on top of a tripod. “Because the Cavalry was coming through,” Sugar explains, “and they thought we were there to cause trouble. They realized we were just kids, women and a few men and no weapons so they let us finish camping there.” At Fort Laramie, Wyoming, police gathered in riot gear because word spread of an “Indian scare.” In Ohio, where the caravan stopped to “hustle up money and gas,” the city kicked them out. “It was too much trouble with the Natives and the community, so we moved on,” Sugar remembers. In Pittsburgh, the Indians were greeted like a circus attraction. “All the people over there thought Natives were gone. They couldn’t believe there were Natives still living. They even actually come up and told us that: ‘We thought you guys were extinct!’”
Plains, Georgia, the small home town of Jimmy Carter, was the most shocking of all to Sugar, then just fifteen years old. The one-zipcode town was segregated and left a mighty impression on the teenager. “We stayed with the blacks in that town because it’s divided, the whites on one side and the blacks on [the other] side. I didn’t like the State of Georgia at all. They talk to you, but to have that separation with mankind . . . it was unreal. . . . It wasn’t like that here in Washington State. There is racism, but nothing too extreme to where they’re dividing the town.”
The group arrived in Washington, D.C., and camped in a soccer field. The end of the week marked the celebration of America’s Bicentennial and a parade that drew half a million people. Indians sat in front of the White House thumping drums.
head of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. For decades, he has represented
treaty tribes of Western Washington. Image-Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
A few days later, police arrested more than fifty Native Americans as they entered the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building and called for its abolition. “I went to jail, well juvenile hall,” says Sugar, “Trespassing, I guess, on the BIA Building. But they didn’t read us no rights, so the next day they just cut us all loose.
“I would never take it back. It was worth it. Without that war we wouldn’t have what we got today. We’d be extinct. . . . That’s the reason why we joined that Trail. We were trying to show the government what they were doing to the Indian people. It was self determination.”
The year 1977 was punctuated by a changing of the guard at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), a major power shift in the Nisqually Tribe, and a family tragedy.
At the time, NWIFC leadership included five commissioners, each of whom represented a particular treaty area and its respective tribes. In 1977, the commissioners’ terms were expiring, and Chairman Dutch Kinley was leaving the top post.
