The National Congress of American Indians met at the Sheraton-Spokane HoteI in May 1981, attracting some of the most influential leaders of the day.
It had been ten years since Joe DeLaCruz, longtime chairman of the coastal Quinault Indian Nation, famously demonstrated against the logging of tribal land by blocking access to the Chow Chow Bridge, a main route to tribal timberlands. He supported the boycott and called Billy to the podium.“I encouraged the NWIFC and Billy to come to NCAI to make a presentation and a motion to boycott these corporations. Billy made the motion; I seconded. It passed unanimously,” DeLaCruz said.
“We’re going to boycott!” Billy bellowed from the podium.
The Colvilles had already agreed to pull fourteen million dollars out of Seafirst Bank, and branded the company’s involvement a disservice to every tribe. “We don’t want them [Seafirst] using our money to fight other Indians. We’re all brothers,” vowed Mel Tonasket.
“Then something wonderful happened,” Billy said at the time. “All the kids over at Washington State said that they were willing to boycott the bank, too. This sort of thing tends to spread and it did, to other campuses.”
Billy describes what happened next. At the NCAI meeting in Spokane, someone suggested the NWIFC chairman fly to Anchorage and meet with Cook Inlet Corporation, a Native-owned company and landholder that started in 1970. During Billy’s presentation in Alaska, someone in the back stood and said, “I move we pull $80 million from Seafirst Bank.” It was seconded and passed unanimously.
The plane had yet to touch down in the Northwest when the phone rang. Mike Berry, president of Seafirst Bank, was desperate. “Before I jump out of the seventeenth floor of the Seafirst Bank in Seattle, I’ve got to sit down and talk with you,” he told Billy when they connected. They agreed to meet at the bank headquarters on 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle. Billy sat on one side of the table “with all the Indians.” The “good old boys’ club” sat on the other in white shirts and ties.
“I want you guys to roll up all of your shirtsleeves,” Billy said. “I want your sleeves up because I don’t want any hidden cards. You have to start moving forward with recognition of the tribes and the treaty in the Northwest, and lay out an agenda we can follow. Recognize this treaty is here to stay, and get away from trying to abrogate it. Be an advocate for us.” The talk opened the discussion to co-management. The bankers agreed to testify against bills proposed by Slade Gorton and Don Bonker to abrogate treaties.
Berry would later compare filing the amicus brief to kicking over a hornets’ nest. “Mike Berry was a really decent man,” says Keefe, “who realized they were heading down the wrong road. Jack Larsen from Weyerhauser took the lead in changing course. He turned out to be a thoughtful and reasonable guy, with no previous anti-treaty baggage.
Things started to improve once Billy got a seat at the table, and Jim Waldo found his niche as the go-to guy for keeping folks talking instead of litigating. My feeling was, better late than never.”
The end of 1981 brought hope. Two days before Americans would sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, corporate heavyweights and two dozen tribal leaders sat down for lunch at the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle. Nerves were frayed, recalls Waldo, especially among the tribes. “What’s the harm in a meeting?” Billy had asked. “What’s wrong with talking with these folks?”
“At that time in tribal country, negotiating with the folks on the outside, meant that they had something valuable that someone else was about to take away from them,” Waldo says. “There were political risks for tribal leaders, even in sitting down and negotiating. You wouldn’t think of that if you came from a different culture. But if you think about theirs, and how poorly any treaty agreement that they’d ever made had worked out, it actually made a lot of sense. They were willing to meet; but they were very nervous. We could not call it a negotiation.”
Astute facilitators recognize how seating arrangements impact group dynamics. At the Washington Athletic Club, Waldo and Billy sat tribal leaders next to business heads. “Well, what happened, of course, is that they started talking,” Waldo recalls. “All of these people hadn’t made it as far as they had as tribal leaders or business leaders by being inept. So they start out, ‘Tell me about your tribe or your business? What’s your family situation?’ Then they started talking about their kids and playing ball and whatever else. It was quite animated. Of course, the tribal people, Billy being one of them, were quite eloquent. You could see they were having quite an impact on the business folks. They were talking about how important salmon have been and are to them, and why. The business leaders were responding to that and saying we have no need to harm your interest, but we just want to be able to go on about our work.”
Slowly, executives and Native leaders peeled off from the room to break afternoon engagements. “It was an excellent meeting,” concluded Joe DeLaCruz. “In a nutshell, we spent four hours getting to know one another. Now, I think, there’s good reason for dialogue.”
