title: Ep 3: The Court Battles
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2024-03-20T08:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/ep-3-the-court-battles/audio.mp3
word_count: 4463
Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community-funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join as a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. Right, behind that. Not this turn with the mixer. We're in the car driving along the Columbia River. Randy Settler is taking us to Lone Pine. The fishing village beside the river where he grew up. So does that cross? Yeah, you can go. I just go back on highway before... My reporting partner, Katie Campbell, is driving. I'm in the backseat, mostly staring out at the water. Thinking back on the day I just watched Randy have. He spent most of it trying to get his boat to work. He called in a mechanic from Portland and paid him mostly in fish. Fish he really needed to fulfill another order. He spent the rest of the day fishing and he'd stayed up most of the night before, reading a scientific report on fishing in the Columbia that a government council asked him to review. All of that made me wonder. Can I ask you a big picture question? Yeah. So you spent like... 40 years before you even had a season. You spent a lot of times in court. You... I mean, it's like constant something with your boat, with etc. I just wondered like, why do you do all that? Katie later told me that Randy was a little offended by this. Like I was implying he shouldn't do what he does. I wasn't. The work just seemed hard and unending. I wanted to know what drives him. My father... He was jailed. My mother was jailed. They fought cases... for it to establish the fishing rights here... on the Columbia River. We'd spent quite a few weeks with Randy at this point. And it was the first time he mentioned to us that his parents had been jailed for fishing. I knew vaguely that this kind of thing happened to tribal members in the Northwest. I didn't know how Randy's parents fit into the story. So I did a little reporting. I found his dad's name, Alvin Settler, on the front page of the Oregonian newspaper, on the April 26th, 1966 edition. The headline read, rifle-toting Indians go fishing. It was a story about a protest. State police weren't honoring the tribes' right to fish. So they armed themselves. Alvin told the paper it was, quote, the only way we can get justice. We found another clip in the Columbia newspaper from 1982. It declared Randy's mom, Mary Gowdy Settler, the Columbia River's most famous fish law violator. I had learned about the civil rights movement as a kid. But there was an entire tribal rights movement happening in parallel that I learned almost nothing about. It happened right here where I lived. And Randy's family was in the thick of it. Go ahead and drive in. So this is where I went to school from. I moved in here in 1959. This is where you grew up? Yeah. The reasons behind those fishing protests become clear when you see where Randy's family lived, beside the river in the shadow of the Dallas Dam that destroyed their livelihood. When we had fish, we could eat. When we didn't have fish, we pretty much starved. The law had taken away their way of life. So they became outlaws. This is Sam and Worse. I'm Tony Schick. At Loan Pine, Randy steps out of the car and into a village that looks remarkably similar to when he lived here 60 years ago. It's a shadeless stretch of scrub land with the highway on one side and the river on the other. There's no escape from the wind or the sun. There are stray dogs wandering around between mobile homes and deserted cars. If you look past them, you can see handmade wooden fishing platforms that look like they shouldn't be able to hang from the rocky cliffs. But somehow they do. No electricity, no running water. There was no bathroom facility. We had outhouses and a hand pump. Here at Loan Pine in the 60s, the settlers' daily lives were a form of protest. You remember from last episode, the federal government previously forced them away from the river to build its dams. The government set up fishing access sites for treaty tribes in lieu of the ancestral fishing grounds that destroyed, like Salilo. But the law at the time said they couldn't build permanent homes there in the place that had been their home. So when farming on the reservation didn't work out for them, Marion Alvin moved with their four children into a corrugated tin shed. It was not a shed meant for people to live in. It was built for hanging salmon out to dry. And the sun was out. When he roasted when it was cold, we froze. So this whole place was filled with people who didn't want to move back to the reservation. Randy estimates that when he was growing up in the late 50s and early 60s, there were about 60 or 70 tribal people living at Loan Pine. He remembers finding spearheads in beadwork, where he was playing in the dirt as a kid, and wondering how old they might be. I believe it was west end of the dals. There was a dig. And they dated that dig at 9,000 years of age. And what a lot of the tribal people talked about in terms of the dig was salmon vertebrates. They found this necklace that had salmon vertebrates around it in that was 9,000 years ago. When you learn these things as you're going through life, you realize that tribal people inhabited this land for 100 generations or 1,000 generations. And yet, when Randy's generation was born, native families could barely survive at the river. Randy began operating his own fishing boat when he was 9 years old. I grew up in that first wave of people who had to figure out where they were going to fish. Because all the locations had changed. And the main fishing area was underwater. States had tightly constricted when and where tribes could fish. Meanwhile, non-tribal commercial fishermen were still catching tons of salmon in the ocean. That meant the fish were intercepted before they migrated back up river, where the tribes fished. It was around this time that native people in the northwest took notice of the civil rights movement. And the tribal people saw that the only way that they might be recognized for their movement for treaty rights is if they became active, much like the African-Americans. The civil rights movement made use of siddins. The tribal rights movement had fissions. Now there are some new laws about what kind of nets can be used in the Indians insisted on using illegal nets. So the police came. When I was just starting out as a reporter for OPB in 2014, a man named Billy Frank Jr. died. He was an 83 year old member of the Nisqually tribe up in Puget Sound. And his death was a big deal to my editor. I was too embarrassed to admit at the time that I didn't really know who he was. But if you want to understand the tribal fishing rights movement, you have to understand Billy Frank Jr. One of the oldest disputes between Indians and the government is over fishing rights, and that dispute has led to violence in the northwest. Frank Jr. got arrested for fishing more than 50 times in his life. In 1963, he led the first fish in protest on a stretch of the Nisqually River. That was the unofficial start of the era now commonly known as the Fish Wars. Paid a fisherman with set nets, the state considered illegal. Police and game wardens would try cracking down. The comical use attacked with fear dance grenades. The confrontations turned violent. Well, let's smack into the river 10 to 20 feet from the boat. Here's Frank Jr. Explaining to a news reporter in 1972, why they started breaking the law in protest. The state of Washington does not recognize an Indian fishery on this Nisqually River. But they recognize these non-Engine fishery with per sein boats, geonators, out in the sound from here on out, from the mouth of the river on out. Basically, the white fishermen were allowed to fish in a way the tribes were not. And we've been here since time began, and they don't allow us a thing. He could just as easily be describing the Columbia River, where a small band of tribal fishermen were fighting the same fight. You know, here along the Columbia River, we did the same thing in the 60s and my father and my mother, they were a part of that struggle. A part of the struggle is putting it mildly. His mom and dad believed in their right to fish in their usual areas in their usual ways without getting arrested or cited for fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time or with the wrong gear. They protested fishing regulations left and right, racking out violations and arrests. They pushed so hard on fishing rights that they ran a foul of their own tribe's government. Tribal council members feared the settlers' law-breaking would jeopardize the accumination's relationship with the state. The police would come in and handcuff my dad or my mom and drag him into a car and then arrest him. I'd seen him getting dragged off and I'd cry, you know, that's a natural reaction. Randy was about eight the first time that happened. He remembers police stopping by to see if he was in school because if he wasn't, they knew the settlers were out fishing that day. Alvin and his brother had no formal education, but they immersed themselves in tribal law, looking for ways they could challenge existing rules. Mary would lie on her bed for hours with illegal dictionary, trying to decipher case documents from their many arrests. She was a very intelligent woman. She was uneducated, but you can be uneducated and still be intelligent. Leadana Lopez Whitefoot is Randy's cousin. She was close with Mary, kind of a right-hand woman in the fishing business. When Mary was in her mid-30s, teenage Leadana helped her learn to read with a pile of cosmopolitan magazines. When I did tell her, if you're going to keep getting in trouble, you have to learn how to read. Leadana remembers one protest on the Willamette, the main river through Portland that flows into the Columbia. The first thing when we got down there, there was a hog line they called it. All the boats, they spaced themselves clear across that river, boat to boat, all facing the same direction. When they got to the river to stage a protest, they found non-native fishermen had essentially formed a blockade. So we're all going up there and my former fishing friend, he says, look at that hog line. What are we going to do? They're not going to let us do. When you listen to this next part, don't picture Leadana as a little old woman who's had two strokes, sitting in a wheelchair and a house full of family. Picture her cruising down the river, wind in her hair, staring down a blockade, absolutely fearless. When I looked at it, when I said, put the throttle all the way down and when the wheelchair tail comes up off our motor, they're going to move. Now picture her in front of that rooster tail. A fountain of water blasted sky high in the wake of the speeding boat. Anyway, when they had it, and he did that, everybody looked at me like I was crazy. But he put the throttle down and the boat opened wide. And we went through. It was one watching them parts of peacefully. Then we went on in and we had our lumber and things and the other boats that were following with us came through. And we spent the day building scaffolds in the Vellama Falls because we were going to take our fish because we needed it to eat, to live. During most protests, though, the family assigned Leadana to stay behind and fish from the few places tribes were allowed. They couldn't risk everyone getting arrested, not with kids to feed and a business to run. You see, the settlers didn't just catch fish. Mary started buying and selling salmon from other tribal fishermen up and down the river. They made enough money to buy a property along the Washington side of the Columbia, about 60 miles east of Portland. They built a house and a building for processing fish. And they put a lot of family and friends to work. She was trying to make sure that as many people could live, as she could make it possible. Eventually, Mary became one of the biggest fish dealers on the river. She was a Betsy woman. She had courage. She was gambler. And she would play high stakes. Not just in a casino, but I'm talking about in the game of life. State and federal policies toward tribal fishing had turned it into an illicit business. Thieves stole from nets because there were two few fishing sites. Dealers like Mary had to find a market for illegally caught salmon, which, Leadana will tell you, meant selling to some less than upstanding citizens. The people that bought the fish, I suppose if she told on them, she'd probably been rubbed out before she ever got the court with that story. The family would send middle school kids, like Sam George to camp by the river, laid into the night to watch their nets for thieves. She had crews just for cleaning, crews just for packaging. She had a couple ladies, crews cooking. Some people call themselves like fish hogs. She was a true fish hog. Like she wanted it. You remember, Sam. Last episode, we spent a lot of time with him and his daughter, Iana. They talk about Mary often when they're at camp. Fishing the river sites that she claimed. And Sam passes on the lessons Iana will need to be a fisherwoman like her grandma Mary. That's what Iana asked me. I was like, what's your name? My guy Mary. It's like I learned just to go get it. You want it? She would. I thought you said your uncle Mike taught you. Yeah, he taught me how to fish, but she taught me how to want bigger things. State police didn't exactly share in the admiration for grandma Mary. They just wanted to arrest her. Throughout the 70s, Mary was buying and selling fish caught outside the commercial season. She said state limits made that the only way tribal fishermen could catch enough to survive. She knew it was illegal. It was another kind of protest. We explained in episode two that the ceremonial season each spring is when the tribe authorizes fishing only for longhouses. Mary sold those fish, which was controversial, even within her tribe. I should pause here and note that this aggressive approach to commercial fishing. This is also part of the settlers legacy. Randy talks with a lot of pride about giving fish away for ceremonies. Still, he's also known as someone who has really emphasized commercial fishing. And that rubs some tribal members the wrong way. OK, back to Mary. The police didn't really care about why she did what she did. They were zeroed in on catching tribal fishermen, breaking the law. This was crucial to the conservation of the fish, they said. Apparently ignoring these several thousand years that native people managed to keep salmon abundant, even without the presence of white police officers. So undercover agents from the Oregon State Police posed as buyers to catch Mary. In the summer of 1978, they charged her with 15 felony counts related to selling salmon caught outside the commercial season. Mary told newspapers at the time she had a hard time finding a lawyer who would take her case. There's a shortage of attorneys who are well versed in tribal law. The state offered her a deal, but only if she agreed to name the Indian fishermen who sold to her. And she asked me, what would you do? And I said, go lay down in prison for a while. It's time to lay down. What 10 Indians do you hate so much that you would cause something to go to prison? Mary decided to plead guilty. She already knew what she was going to do. And I already knew what she was going to do. She was sentenced to 10 months in an Oregon prison. Mary and Alvin divorced during her imprisonment, even though the tribally registered fishing sites are usually held by men, Mary managed to keep her family's fishing sites in the divorce. Alvin got the furniture. Police continued to target tribal fishing throughout the 70s and 80s. They blamed tribal members for the lack of fish in the river. In one infamous case, they arrested 75 Native fishermen and blamed them for 40,000 missing salmon from the Columbia. They fingered one of Randy's close friends. David's so happy as the ringleader. He got five years in prison. Except it turned out the fish weren't actually missing. They just sought better habitat, elsewhere in the river, away from an aluminum smelter. In the same vein, undercover police busted Mary again in 1982. Randy and his brother were with her. This time tribal leaders were outraged on Mary's behalf. Unlike those early years in the Fish Wars, today, Mary and Alvin are anything but disavowed by their tribe. In episode one, you heard the reverence people now hold for Mary. What Mary did was fight for salmon and fishing the new souls. When Alvin died in 2013, tribal council members described him as a river warrior, instrumental in maintaining tribal rights. The newfound appreciation for the settlers wasn't so much about what they did at the river. It was about what they did in the courtroom. We have some of the landmark cases when they're standing to this day. Coming up after a break. The Indian claim is always essentially the same. That the federal government is giving the Indians more lip service than support. That by not honoring or enforcing its treaties with the Indians, the federal government, its jeopardizing Indian culture and threatening the Indian's economic survival. The Fish Wars never really ended. The battlefield's just changed. Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join as a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. A militant American Indian group plans a legal attack on the US government. A militant American Indian group planning and attack. That's how national newscasts at the time described tribal people, founding lawsuits to protect their treaty rights. While native people were clashing with police at the river, they were also fighting in court. A major court decision came in 1969 on a lawsuit over fishing regulation from Yakima Fisherman, namely the so happy family, who liked their friends the settlers were always clashing with police. US district judge Robert Bologna ruled that Oregon had violated treaty rights by failing to ensure tribes got, quote, a fair share of fish from the Columbia River. That ruling kicked off decades-long negotiations over just how much the states could actually regulate treaty fishing. Five years after that momentous ruling in 1974, the ninth circuit court of appeals ruled in another landmark case. Settler versus Numeria. Settler as in Randy's parents, Alvin and Mary. The case arose out of their arrests for fishing without permits and with illegal gear. The courts technically ruled against the settlers. But that was an outcome Alvin and Mary actually wanted. My aunt and uncle, Mary and Alvin, they knew that they were gonna lose. But when they lose, they were going to win what they needed to set in place. That's because the ruling said treaty fishing is a tribal right and that tribes had reserved the authority to regulate tribal fishing on and off the reservations. A loss for the settlers was a win for tribal sovereignty. The states are coming against the Indians, regularly taking them into the state courts, you know, into the counties putting them in the jail along the river and there. There are some injuristic and overest while Settler versus Numeria made them come to the reality that maybe legally they didn't have jurisdiction. That same year, there was another legal victory. Perhaps the most famous in the Fish Wars. It's known as the Bolt decision after Judge George Bol, who presided over the case in Washington state. His ruling said that fishing rights originated with the tribes and that they had granted these rights to white settlers by signing the Treaty of 1855. Perhaps most importantly, the ruling set of precedent that tribes throughout the Northwest had the right to half of all harvestable fish. I called it the big lie because no one ever had any intention of enforcing the ruling in favor of the Indians. We'll unpack that in a later episode. There's a reason Leidana and other tribal members feel that way, but it's not unanimous. Many consider it the best outcome tribes could get from the courts. Meanwhile, non-native, sport and commercial fishermen were livid over the Bolt decision. Even national news like this ABC broadcast painted it as some kind of charity case for the tribes. In the end, fishermen in the state of Washington have less money, fewer boats, and less manpower than others to catch salmon. Because of this, a federal judge has ruled that 50% of the state's annual catch must be reserved for the Indians, even though the Indians account for only 1% of Washington's commercial fishermen. The Bolt decision actually was not about a judge taking pity on Indians for being bad at catching salmon. A few weeks later, the network had to run a correction, saying the ruling was actually an affirmation of treaty rights. People hung an effigy of the judge outside of the courthouse into coma, Washington. Attorneys for the state tried to weaken his decision. Again, here's what you would have heard watching network news at the time. Indian leaders say all of this has helped their tribal economy, although it has been done at the expense of the white man who now says he is the one who is disadvantaged. I'm hoping this podcast ages better than that. The Bolt decision went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1979, and the tribes won. And then in the 1980s, states and tribes powered out the first agreement under the big case in Oregon, the one about tribes getting a fair share of the catch. These were remarkable victories for tribes. Their lands had been stolen, their rights had been trampled, but on these fishing issues at least, the white people in power couldn't stop them. Tribes were no longer at the mercy of state and federal salmon policy. They had a voice in shaping that policy. They could operate their own fish hatcheries, set their own fishing seasons, enforce their own rules. But that wasn't the end game. Because as soon as tribes won back their access to the fish, salmon hit the endangered species list. Randy's parents won major battles in the fish wars. Randy and his generation inherited a very different fight, not just catching salmon, but saving them. And I know what was asked of me in it was substantial. But before there was me, there was another Yakima tribal member. And before them, there was another one, and another one, and another one. Native people today may only account for about 1% of the Northwest population, but they're responsible for some of its biggest salmon recovery efforts. Northwest tribes have used the treaties to win more money for habitat restoration, to shut down coal and oil projects on the Columbia, to spark conversations about dam removal, and to force the state of Washington into spending $2 billion to repair hundreds of broken pipes that channel streams and salmon under our roads. They've used the tools their ancestors gave them, to claw back what they could of the life our government stole. They took our land and predicated it on a lot. So then it's up wrong to try to survive. If you knew all the things that went back to how many times, how many ways the government tried to starve and kill the Indian people, to knew you might bite back to, it did frame, not to cry. But when you speak about different sides, how can you not cry? Because when the Columbia River area was settled by non-Indians, they killed the Indians out well, and then left their bodies laying all along the banks of the river so that the other Indians could see them and be afraid to come to the water. Leodana's people endured. Nothing could keep them from the river. Leodana inherited the fight, so did Randy. But the fight had changed. We can't have a river with no fish. That's next on Salmon Wars. Salmon Wars is brought to you by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Thanks to all the members who make podcasts possible at OPB. I'm your host, Tony Schick. I produce this podcast along with Julie Sabatier, Katie Campbell at ProPublica contributed to the reporting. Our editor for this project is Anna Griffin. Our sound engineers are Nelline Silva and Stephen Craig. Original music for Salmon Wars was created by Keeley Goodwin and Sean O'Wilvy. Additional music comes from Audio Network. Thanks to Charles Hudson for reviewing our episodes prior to publication with an eye toward cultural context. And thanks to Sarah Blustain, Lilian Carebake, and Sage Van Weng for their input. Archival news sound came from ABC and NBC broadcasts. It was accessed via the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Visit our website, OPB.org, for more in depth reporting on Salmon, Dams, and Pacific Northwest tribes. If you like this podcast, please follow us on your favorite podcast app. There will be more seasons about controversial environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest for you to listen to in the future. Thanks for your support.