Fishing Rights and the Boldt Decision
The United States government attorneys talked with the Indians, and the Indians’ lawyers appeared in Judge Boldt’s court with the Indians in the lawsuit United States v. the State of Washington in 1973. The Indians’ case was made stronger with the government attorneys working with the Indians and their attorneys. Judge Boldt heard the case day after day for weeks and months. When the Indians and the white people had presented their statements, then Judge Boldt took them under advisement. He read the transcripts all over again. Now they are typed; the court reporter takes down every word. Judge Boldt studied the whole thing and then that is when he came up with what is called the Boldt Decision. He ruled that the Indians have a right to 50 percent of the total catch of the salmon in this state.
Well, that really broke up the white commercial fishermen and the Steelheader’s Association. On Channel 4 news, I saw sometimes eight or ten women who were going by airplane from Seattle to Washington, D.C., to see Senator Magnuson and Senator Jackson and the Washington State delegation. They talked about how hard it was to make a living—for their husbands to make a living. Their husbands had fishing boats and nets that they had to pay for. It was pitiful. We were sitting here, and I was saying to some of our cousins, “Look what you did to those poor white people.” They said, “Yeah, I know.”
Before the Boldt Decision in 1974, the Indian fishermen were taking 5 percent, and that isn’t exactly 100 percent of the total catch.2 Now, the other 95 percent was caught by somebody—by the white fishermen. In all of those years, the white fishermen caught over 90 percent of the catch.
In a program at Everett Community College, they had a panel for the students. It included a representative of Washington State Fisheries, and Indian fishermen from Lummi in Bellingham, and Tulalip and Nisqually. I went to other information meetings where people who were interested came. At those meetings, you always hear how steelhead are supposed to be for the sportsmen and the steelheaders.
At the local Fisheries meetings, no matter who the speaker was—an Indian speaker or the director of Fisheries—the same five or six men were always there, adding rough remarks. They were what you might call troublemakers. They took turns standing up and complaining about what the Indians had been doing to the salmon runs. They said the Indians were destroying the salmon runs because they were taking all of the salmon. So, at one of those places, I called the chairman. I said, “Do you know exactly how much the Indians have taken?” This was in 1976. By that time, the Indians were taking over 19 percent. A year later it was around 22 percent.
The Indians were able to get bigger boats because the fish buyers and the different canneries would loan money to the Indians. Before the Boldt Decision, the Indians didn’t have any money. They couldn’t buy boats. During all of the years that I was growing up, the Indians made their own fishing boats, and they were small, very poor looking. But that was the best they had. Now they have been able to go up to the San Juan Islands, which is a better fishing ground; better than anything around here. So some of them have been able to make a living.
Quite a lot of the senators in the Congress, I think, are going to wonder, what is the matter with these people who are shrieking about fishing? Why don’t they go out and fish? It goes on and on. If anybody should have complained about it, it should have been the Indians. For a hundred years, we were denied fishing for a living, even though Indians tried to change it through the courts.
Now Washington State has a federal buy-back program. They are going to buy back some of the fishing boats and gear of the fishermen here in Washington State because they said they can’t make anything if the Indians have to have 50 percent of the catch; there is no use going on with fishing. Quite a lot of them are selling their old fishing gear to the government. I have a clipping from the newspaper. It is a long write-up with pictures of some of the fishing boats the fishermen are selling. One young man from Seattle was very pleased with himself because he sold his fishing boat to the government. He had gone fishing the year before, and he figured that he could make money. He went to Alaska. He bought a fishing boat, a gillnetter, for $15,000, and it was big enough for Bristol Bay. Some of the gillnetters around here and in Puget Sound were not big enough for the far north. He didn’t say how he got it. But he fished up there for four or five months; then the fishing fleet came down here. He got a chance to sell his boat. He sold it to the government for $31,000. In less than one year, he earned more than the $15,000 he paid for the boat. A lot of canneries or fish buyers would let a man have a fishing boat and gear, and he would sell his fish to them until most of the balance was paid in. Quite a number of fishermen sold their old fishing boats for much more than they ever paid for them.
Congress appropriated 5 million dollars to Washington State to buy back the fishing boats of the white fishermen. But there ought to be an investigation to find out which of these white fishermen are full-time fishermen. Some of them expect to make their entire living from fishing, but hundreds and thousands are teachers, professors, and businessmen. They go gillnetting at night. Some of them have vacations in the summer; they fish from purse-seine boats or are reef-netters. Great numbers of them are not that hard up. Fishing is just a sideline. Some of them make thousands of dollars. Some of them don’t do quite that well.
I remember we were talking to a group of men my husband used to work with in Everett. I was with him. We were just visiting. Five men had just come back from Alaska in the fall, but each one made $55,000. It was a good year. Sometimes they don’t make that much. It is a gamble. But there ought to be more equality and truth for men who are full-time fishermen. Then, I think, they should be helped if they have lost money. Men who make $25,000 to $30,000 a year in their jobs should not get another $50,000 for a boat they just bought. Now they are willing to sell them because that is fast money. Nobody ever stops to ask them. There was an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about them. Nearly all of them are part-time fishermen. There is no other job than fishing for many Indians.
Indian unemployment is high. Here at Tulalip, it is 43 percent, and some of that is part-time employment. In the Puget Sound area four or five years ago, the figure was 80 percent for Indians. You know when the unemployed general American public gets around 7 percent how much people worry. Five percent seemed workable for years; it will let the economy of the country improve more slowly.
I haven’t had any dried salmon for three or four years. We have a smokehouse across the road, where my father and mother lived. The highway goes by it, and the smokehouse turned out to be close to the road—about fifty or sixty feet. I had fourteen salmon hanging up. My husband or I went down at 11 P.M. to keep a small fire burning with green alder wood, so that it produced more smoke than fire. Then, by 5 A.M., I would get up and run down there and fix the fire again. It is out, and it is cold. Then one morning, I went down there and all fourteen salmon were gone. Wayne and his family live where my parents lived. Last year or the year before, they fixed some salmon to dry. I think they only had four or five, and they disappeared in a hurry too.
Nobody in my family goes fishing. My older boy was the business manager of the Tribes for almost twenty years, and he never went fishing for a living. My younger boy is thirty years old. I asked him if he would go fishing here, some years ago. He thought about it for a few minutes, and he said, “No. I’d rather not go fishing. I know we need fish. We have to buy it in town from the market. I have a regular job, and some of these guys don’t have any work at all. All they have is fishing.”
In the Seattle P-I the other day, there was an article: a fisherman’s wife was showing how to prepare devilfish.3 My mother and her relatives thought it was the grandest delicacy, and so did my mother-in-law, Wayne’s grandmother; she lived in Sequim. They slice devilfish legs and really relish it. I remember eating it, but it didn’t make any impression on me; it seemed kind of bland. I remember my mother cooking it. You know, I don’t know how to cook it. I th
ought she boiled it first and then sliced it and fried it, or she breaded it. I remember my father and us eating it. That must have been the first time I really had it. I barely remember. But I remember getting to the table, and my father eating it. He said, “You aren’t supposed to make any remarks about food—just eat it.” I don’t think I noticed what it was. I just gobbled it down because I was hungry. They ate devilfish from here, but not that often. Wayne ate some at a dinner at Lummi, where I was invited to sing my song. Well, we all ate it. It was put on the table along with everything, but I didn’t see it; it was way past Wayne. Sam Cagey brought it and handed it to me. Oh, my, I had not seen that for sixty years or more.
I was talking to one of the Indians from Montana or Dakota, and he wondered what fish heads tasted like. What could you get out of it? Of course, our Indians say, “How could you eat raw buffalo liver or drink the warm blood of the buffalo?” He said he had buffalo liver when he was small; they slice it very thin and it is good. “You feel about raw liver like I do about fish heads.” Just put the fish head in the oven. A fish head looks like one solid thing, but it isn’t. It has all kinds of bones in it, and you can chew the bones because they are kind of spongy; they have their own flavor.
Slade Gorton, the new senator who took Magnuson’s place, and the Washington delegation are putting together a bill to present in Congress to change the status of steelhead salmon and make it into a game fish.4 A game fish can’t be caught by any Indian fisherman. It isn’t to sell; you catch it for your own use. Catching steelhead and then not selling it isn’t going to help a hungry Indian family that much. It will help the white sportsman—the Steelheaders Association—who want the steelhead for themselves. They don’t want the Indians catching it in a net and selling it. It’s going to be an interesting issue for the Washington State delegation. Oregon and Idaho might join in. Commercial fishermen, sportsmen, and steelheaders have a lot of power; they have money, and they can put the pressure on the Washington State delegations.
I’ve been wondering, how will those senators and representatives in Congress from other places like Illinois, Alabama, or Maine who don’t have steelhead—all of those states and millions of people—how would they feel about making a salmon, like steelhead, into a game fish by an act of Congress? I can’t think of anybody more selfish than steelheaders and other sports fishermen. I can see why they love to go out fishing, whether it is along the streams or rivers or out in the ocean, but I don’t think, even if I were situated like they are, I would have the “scavvy” nerve to say, “I want it. It’s mine. I don’t want anybody to have this steelhead salmon but me. It’s going to be caught only with hook and line, not net.” There are hungry Indians. Well, there are hungry white people. But they want that only for their pleasure.
Of course, Slade Gorton and members of the Washington delegation are talking very strongly about their bill. They are going to present it in Congress and want it passed. There are over five hundred men and women in the House of Representatives. How many of them are going to feel that this issue is important when it affects only so many people in Washington, maybe Oregon and Idaho, and maybe part of California? It seems so selfish and petty to me. But maybe the congressmen will think that is the greatest thing—better pass it. Judge Boldt’s decision does not exclude the steelhead. Wayne, my son, and I were talking about this, and I said, “Don’t tell me we would have another long-drawn, drag-out court fight again like the one that resulted in the Boldt Decision.”
Indications from the few fishing boats that have gone out are that there are very few salmon. They don’t seem to be coming back in numbers like they always have. The runs might start a little later. It always intrigues me that all along this Pacific Coast, from Alaska all the way south to South America, the Russian fishing fleet is out there: Yugoslavia, Poland—you name it—all of the world’s fishing fleets are out there. They used to be just twelve miles from this coast. Magnuson introduced a bill, and they changed the limit to two hundred miles by international law. The Russians were pretty upset. They thought we were the rottenest people there were. Here all of these years, they have actually been fishing inside. Indians at Neah Bay said if you go out there fishing six, seven miles like they do, you will see Russian fishing fleets—the biggest fishing fleets in the world.
Russians have nets that are made with steel cables. American fishermen nets are weighted with lead sinkers every so many feet. Russians have cannery ships that process the catches. The nets have a small mesh: only an inch or an inch and a half. It goes down a mile or more into the sea, and when the machinery on the ships haul it in, it brings in everything: immature and mature salmon. The fish out there will be moving into the Sound in a couple of months, and by that time, they will be bigger. Immature salmon are picked up as well as herring and pilchards. They are canned and sent to Russia. It seems to me that sometime in the future there is going to be a big war, because people are starving.
Washington State Fisheries said there aren’t many fish out there—not much salmon. There are sportsmen out there at Port Angeles and out at Neah Bay. They can pick up two or three big salmon. I read two weeks ago there are not many salmon coming in; there ought to be more. I know exactly what the steelheaders and the commercial fishermen all along here are going to say: the Indians cleaned up, you know, they took it all last year, so now there aren’t any coming back. No spawn. We’ve killed it off. We took it all. Actually, Washington State licensed too many fishermen, even before the Boldt Decision. They issued something like five hundred licenses for gillnetting, which is done at night. Already there are over two thousand, and more than that were licensed over the years. If they were all in one place, that is practically wall-to-wall fishing. How are the salmon ever going to get through all those nets and get up to the rivers to spawn?
Last month I saw on the news and in the newspapers that commercial fishermen all around Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia are very worried. They don’t see how they are going to make a living because the Indians get half of the whole thing. After the Boldt Decision there was so much trouble. There were lots of write-ups about white fishermen, how they are starving, they have lost their houses and their lots, and one man on television said, “I’ve lost my wife.” He said, “She left me. I lost my house and my lot on account of this; I can’t fish. Everything is going to the Indians.” I remember I was telling Wayne, and some of them, such as Stan Jones, “Do you see what you folks have done? Indian fishermen, you folks, have ruined the white man’s lives. That man’s wife has left him.” Of course, some of them said, “What man? What wife? Let me see her.” Well, the Indians haven’t been able to catch half of anything. All of those years, if people took the time to look at the years from 1890 or 1900 to the 1950s, 1960s, just before the Boldt Decision, they would find Indians took 5 percent of the catch or less.
Every year the Washington State director of Fisheries makes a report to the governor and to the people of the state. He tells how many salmon were caught, because every fisherman is supposed to tell when he sells his fish to the fish buyers. If he sold one thousand pounds, the fish buyer writes it down because he is going to pay him. I am just making that up, obviously. The figure is more like five thousand pounds. He gets paid for that amount. The fish buyer brings the catches to the cannery. He is going to get more pay from the cannery for bringing in five thousand pounds. The cannery and the fish buyer and the fisherman—they all make money from the catch.
The Washington State report tells run by run what the numbers of fish are: the spring run is silvers and Chinooks or king salmon; late summer runs are silvers and chum salmon. Every two years “humpies” come in late summer or fall. Washington State has a pretty good count of all of the catches by gillnetters, who fish at night, from the Straits, from Puget Sound, from Point Roberts, and on the ocean coast. The nets on the purse seiners, the largest of the fishing boats, are ninety feet or more. Their nets have a smaller mesh, so they catch everything, and, of course, they have good machin
ery that pulls it in. The mesh on a gill net is six or seven inches across. You can go gillnetting at night and have only a fifteen-foot boat. You can haul in your net by hand, because that is what the Indians do. By midnight your hands are freezing up. By the time you get home in the morning, the young Indian girls’ and wives’ and their young husbands’ hands are swollen. They are working in cold saltwater and hauling in a wet net.
I was talking with one of the young Indian men here. His hands and arms were aching because he had been fishing. He just happened to mention it. He said he couldn’t close his fingers because they were swollen, which happens when your hands are in water for hours, especially saltwater. Now I think most of them have enough money so they can buy rubber gloves.
Before the Boldt Decision, not many Indians had fishing boats or the gear. They were too poor to have good fishing nets. But after the Boldt Decision, there were some companies that would allow an Indian fisherman to have a net and maybe a boat on credit, and then just pay through the years from his catch. In 1974 and 1975, after the decision, the official records from the Washington State Department of Fisheries show the Indians’ catch did go up. They caught, as I said before, 19 percent of the salmon; that is, 19 percent of the entire year’s catch.5 They didn’t catch many kings or Chinooks because there aren’t that many anymore.
But the white fishermen were screaming. They still scream about how the Indians are taking all of the salmon, all of the fish. Even the largest share of 19 percent is a long way from being 50 percent. The white fishermen never look at statistics or records. They just know one thing (it comes from God himself): the Indians are taking all of the salmon. It seems to go on and on. The trouble with fishing in this state didn’t end with the Boldt Decision. The Indians have said that the Boldt Decision just opened another big trouble. The white people, the white commercial fishermen, and, especially, the white sportsmen are crying to high heaven: they can’t catch any salmon, no fish.
Tulalip, From My Heart Page 34