According to Waldo, Billy played a crucial role at the WAC: “Billy has no need to hear himself talk. When he decides to say something, it’s for a purpose. Sometimes, he will make, in effect, a speech about the importance of salmon, or the tribes, or the history. Often, what he’s doing is articulating for other people that aren’t from that community, what’s on the mind of the tribal leaders in the room. Billy also has a keen sense of when to try and figure out a way to just say, in essence, we’ve done as much as we can do here today. That is a gift. It’s an art, not a science.”
“We can keep winning in court,” Billy had suggested that day, “but it won’t protect the life of that salmon. If we continue in the direction we’re going, there won’t be any fish there.” The corporations eventually agreed to back out of the Orrick appeal.
Bill Wilkerson, an enthusiastic, longtime government executive, sits in his home office in Olympia where two pictures hang on the wall. One is a portrait of Joe DeLaCruz; the other is an image of Billy. “He trusted me at a time when I had done nothing to earn his trust,” Wilkerson says. “He supported me during some real tough times, when it probably wasn’t in his interest to support me. Billy took a chance on trusting the state, and trusting me, when the history showed that we had done nothing to earn it. And it worked for him and for me.” When Wilkerson earned his 1982 promotion to the controversial and often thankless role as director of the Department of Fisheries—like Evans and Boldt, Wilkerson was burned in effigy— tension remained palpable between the state and tribes. Many public employees grew up with the fish wars and associated Native Americans entirely with that conflict. “Probably the leadership understood that none of this was easy and that they had to deal with the tribes,” Wilkerson says. “But you had a bureaucracy that not only didn’t understand it, but didn’t like it.”
Although most people focus on the fifty-fifty allocation of harvest prescribed under the Boldt Decision, Wilkerson sees the shift toward the environment as the decision’s true legacy. If the fish couldn’t survive the streams, Indian fishermen would never see their share. “They harvested in the streams,” Wilkerson explains. “Everybody understood that if you caught all the fish that you could catch to meet escapement levels, you would basically cork tribal fisheries. Or they would be severely limited. When the Boldt Decision came out, the tribes were catching about three percent of the total harvest and the court said they have to get 50 percent. That meant, you had to return more and more fish to the streams, where they were fishing.”
But oversight of the fish runs remained a glaring problem. “The bottom line was that the tribal biologists weren’t really managing the fishery,” Wilkerson observes, “nor was the department. The court was. That again made no sense whatsoever.”
In the winter of 1983, Governor John Spellman sat down with Wilkerson for his annual checkup. It was a Spellman ritual with agency department heads.
“Bill, how’s everything going? How’s it been?” Spellman asked.
“I’ve been to court seventy-eight times,” Wilkerson told Spellman of the onslaught of court cases involving the Department of Fisheries. “We won three of them. And they weren’t very important cases, those three. So, I personally think it’s kind of ridiculous, this process that we’ve been sucked into, or nailed ourselves into.”
Spellman, a lawyer himself, didn’t care for the performance much either, Wilkerson says, “and he sure didn’t like the political chaos around it.”
The conversation ended when Spellman gave his full support to Wilkerson. “If it doesn’t make sense to you, frankly, it doesn’t make much sense to me either,” the chief executive said.
“I think we need a real serious plan; the relationships are terrible,” Wilkerson said. “If you want me to, I’ll develop a plan for you to bring some folks together to at least have a discussion about where we ought to be focusing our attention.” Spellman agreed.
The communication was sorely needed. Strife on the water still held the attention of national media at times. Life magazine devoted a four-page spread to the story in 1983, with Willie Frank Sr. prominently pictured deep in thought, every bit the elder. “On the rivers of the Northwest it’s white man vs. Indian,” the magazine related. “Why does anyone go fishing with a gun?” one Indian woman asked in the story. In a showing of persistent stereotypes, a sportsman declared, “Take all these Indians out and scalp ‘em.”
A breakthrough occurred on a glorious March day at Port Ludlow in 1984. Inside tense courtrooms of the past, black-and-white battle lines were clear. At a peaceful resort on the shores of Ludlow Bay, the state and tribes would attempt to find the gray and leave the mediation up to Jim Waldo, whom both sides trusted.
Tribes were suspicious of the state. Billy brought Wilkerson to premeetings with Native leaders. “I basically told them that I had shown them, over the course of the time that I was both deputy and director, that I wanted to make some sense out of this thing. They knew that I was somewhat serious about trying to change things,” Wilkerson says.
