title: Bonus Episode: LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2024-03-27T08:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/bonus-episode-liadonna-l-322712/audio.mp3
word_count: 1921
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. When I looked at it, when I said, put the throttle all the way down and when the risk of tail comes up off our motor, they're gonna move. Everybody looked at me, but I was crazy. But he put the throttle down and the boat opened wide. And we went through, we were gonna take our fish because we needed it to eat, to live. That's Randy Settler's cousin, Liyadana Lopez Whitefoot. You heard from her in a recent episode of Sam and Wars. And there's no question that she's a total badass. She worked closely with Randy's mom in the family fishing business. We wanted to hear more of her memories from that time and of Randy's mom Mary in particular. These days, Liyadana lives on the Yakima Indian Reservation in South Central Washington. So last summer, OPB podcast producer Julie Sapantier went up there to interview her. I'm Tony Schick and this is a bonus episode of Sam and Wars. The first word that comes to mind when I think about the Yakima reservation is remote. It's vast and spread out over a rural area, near the small town of Topanish. It's about an hour and a half north of the Columbia River, off of Route 97. To get to Liyadana's house, I drove about 25 minutes from Topanish through Hopfields and other farmland. When I pulled up to the house, I was greeted by two dogs who seemed very friendly. Liyadana's granddaughter answered the door and showed me into the living room. I could hear some little squeaking sounds coming from the next room and Liyadana told me one of her dogs had just had puppies. I got the sense that there's always kind of a lot going on at her place. At one point in the interview, I heard a sound I couldn't quite identify. Oh, there's a baby back there. Oh, okay. They flew here from Alaska yesterday. She even has a tongue-in-cheek name for her home. This is Omak-Donald's last resort. Normally, if I'm interviewing someone at their home, I'd turn on my recorder before even getting out of the car. To record the sounds like dogs in the yard and the granddaughter opening the door. But this time, I hesitated. I had been listening to Liyadana's voice for months while working on this podcast. And I felt a distinct reverence for her. We'd also never met, and I kept asking myself why she'd open up to me about her family history. As I was setting up the recorder and microphone in her living room, I told her I felt like I was talking to a celebrity. She looked at me like I was nuts, and we both laughed a little nervously. I started the interview by asking her about her relationship with Randy's mom, Mary Gowdy settler. Mary was my mother's youngest sister. My mother was the oldest sister. One you would say was the disciplinary and the other one was the discipline. Which one was which? More of a free spirit. My aunt was more of a free spirit. Then your mom. Yeah. Liyadana wasn't totally comfortable with the microphone in her face, and I can't really blame her. She kept adjusting it, so you'll hear a little of that noise throughout the interview. She takes her time telling stories, and she reminded me that she's had two strokes that can sometimes affect her memory. But her recollections of Mary seemed very clear. So settle in. She has some very interesting and important things to say. Well, I worked with her every day. We got up at daylight. First of all, she'd make me drink tea before I went to bed, so she could be sure she wouldn't have to wrestle me to get up, bursting in the morning, so that was daylight. And she was accused of stomaching a great deal more fish than I ever helped her with. But it sounds like she had a pretty big fish operation, even setting that aside. How big was it who were her clients who was buying fish from her, like how did it work? I guess I could tell in a way like this. When it was time to go to prison, she had a choice. She had a government offer to her, give them the name of ten Indians that she bought from, or give them the names of the people that she sold to. 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. That means you did the crime now. Go do the time. We already discussed this. There's no change in it now. Discussive to time. What ten Indians do you hate so much that you would cause them to go to prison? So she did know that she was breaking the law. She knew that as the law was written, according to the state regulations, that she violated the law. But who was really being violated? Was there any law for us? So it was almost like she was protesting by selling. You could say that very clearly that she protested, because she said, we have an inherent right to fish, a God-given right to fish. And that's just a paper. What says that we cannot, it's just a paper. I mean, you said you worked closely with her every day. So did she try to protect you from the illegal stuff that she was doing? She was protecting me by allowing me to earn money to be able to feed my own three children. I was well educated and lawful since at least the fourth grade, but I was raised with all my life to hear all the conversations at the table. They were commonplace. We didn't talk about football and fashion shows or soap operas. We talked about what affected our lives. So you talked about fishing laws? Yeah, it was common. Leodonic clearly admired her Aunt Mary. She painted a picture of a savvy woman who always had a mind for business. She started out as an entrepreneur selling soda pop at the Lionel Falls, where her brother's fished. And she walked along the shores and sold pop. At a very young age, she was already an entrepreneur. So selling the fish was another expression of her entrepreneurial skill. Yeah. She had a product and she was going to sell it. But she was doing things differently than other tribal members in terms of... Not so different, no. You'd occurred many, many places along the river. I think she was more notorious and that she was highlighted. But yes, many people did the very same thing, because they needed to survive and feed their families, just like everybody else in this world. And did she protect them? I mean, you were saying she didn't give the names of other people. She could have completely avoided prison, if she was willing to sell her own people. So when she asked me what would I do, I said, well, you always have to come back and live with your own people. How would you feel if they didn't want you back? Leah Donna told me that Mary never really considered this option. And she had already made up her mind about going to prison and she asked her niece what she would do. We also talked a bit about Leah Donna teaching Mary to read when Leah Donna was a teenager. Well, I did tell her that if you're going to keep getting in trouble, you have to learn how to read. What if nobody's staring? You make a big mistake? Or you signed the wrong thing? You have to learn how to read effectively to protect yourself. You can't put all your trust in any other person. So then we start reading things like Cosmopolitan magazine instead of just looking at the pictures we would read the story. Or if it wasn't Add, she had to read the whole Add in the back of the book, not just, you know, see what they're selling. And I made a read aloud to make sure that she wasn't skipping all over. And what did she think about that? She enjoyed learning to read and she became one of the most avid, avid readers sitting by one newspaper when we went to the airport on certain days she went by five newspapers. And she read all of them and she made sure that we read all of those newspapers too to know what's going on in the newspaper. What's going on in the world and what the world was really like and what economics were really like. Leadana and I talked for quite a while. And toward the end of the conversation, I asked her what she wished non-native people understood better about the fish wars. Well, I wish they'd worry more about cleaning up the clumb of river controlling all the taking of water, for farming, foresting, all the things, the development along the river, all the businesses, everybody that uses the water. If they understood more about that, we would have more fish. I think they said it was Thomas Jefferson that said, we have to harness that river to work, to build a great country. But they harnessed it so well they put in ground, could we down? With no access for the fish to get beyond there, they die at the foot of that dam. And when you stand on that bridge, stand on that dam, you can feel death beneath your feet. Why would they do that? That's what I can understand. Why would you just wipe out a species? Yeah, you must know that it was planned to wipe out the natives. We were not supposed to be still here. The government planned to exterminate us, and it's been discovered in government documents. And I used to collect those kind of things and live off them, but I realized that they were making me have a hateful use of my life. Maybe it made me hard to deal with, but I decided I'm not going to live a life that's predicated on hate. That's it for this bonus episode of Salmon Wars. We'll be back in your feet soon with a new full episode. 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 Julie Savatier and I produce this episode along with Tony Schick, Katie Campbell at ProPublica contributed to the reporting. Our editor for this project is Anna Griffin. Our sound engineers are Nelline Silva and Stephen Kray. Original music for Salmon Wars was created by Keeley Goodwin and Sean Oglevie. Thanks to Charles Hudson for reviewing our episodes prior to publication with an eye toward cultural context. Visit our website, opb.org, for more in-depth reporting on Salmon, Dams, and Pacific Northwest tribes. And 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.