‘Salmon Wars’ episode 3: The court battles

The “Salmon Wars” podcast series tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before — through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations.

Federal officials took away a way of life that had sustained Pacific Northwest tribes for centuries. So some tribal members became outlaws. During the 1960s and beyond, Native activists fought back against state and federal restrictions on their fishing rights — a period known as the “fish wars.” They held “fish-ins” and fought for their rights in court. Randy Settler’s parents won some major battles in the fish wars, but their methods were controversial even within their tribe.

Our theme music is by Kele Goodwin and Sean Ogilvie.

Special thanks to Katie Campbell and Sarah Blustain at ProPublica.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Randy Settler: You can turn right behind that, not this turn, but the next one.

Tony Schick: 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.

Katie Campbell: So does that go across?

RS: Yeah, You can go, I just go back on Highway 84…

KC: OK.

TS: My reporting partner, Katie Campbell, is driving. I’m in the backseat, mostly staring out at the water, thinking back on the day I’d 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...

TS (on tape): Can I ask you a big picture question?

RS: Yeah.

TS (on tape): So, you spent, like, 40 years before you even had a season. You spend a lot of time in court, you have, I mean, it’s like constant something with your boat, with et cetera. I’m just wondering, like, why do you, why do you do all that?

TS: 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.

RS: My father, he was jailed. My mother was jailed. They fought cases to establish the fishing rights here, on the Columbia River.

TS: 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 that 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, in the April 26, 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, “the only way we can get justice.” We found another clip in The Columbian newspaper from 1982. It declared Randy’s mom, Mary Goudy 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 live, and Randy’s family was in the thick of it.

RS: Go ahead and drive in. So this is where I went to school from. I moved in here in 1959.

TS (on tape): This is where you grew up?

RS: Yeah.

TS: The reasons behind those fishing protests become clearer when you see where Randy’s family lived — beside the river, in the shadow of The Dalles Dam that destroyed their livelihood.

RS: When we had fish, we could eat. When we didn’t have fish, we pretty much starved.

TS: The law had taken away their way of life. So, they became outlaws. This is “Salmon Wars.” I’m Tony Schick.

(music)

TS: At Lone Pine, Randy steps out of the car into a village that looks remarkably similar to when he lived here 60 years ago. It’s a shadeless stretch of scrubland 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.

RS: No electricity, no running water. There was no bathroom facility. We had outhouses and a hand pump.

TS: Here at Lone Pine in the ‘60s, the Settlers’ daily lives were a form of protest. You’ll 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 it destroyed, like Celilo. 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, Mary and 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.

RS: When the sun was out, we roasted. When it was cold, we froze. And there was, this whole place was filled with people who didn’t wanna move back to the reservation.

TS: 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 Lone Pine. He remembers finding spearheads and beadwork where he was playing in the dirt as a kid, and wondering how old they might be.

RS: I believe it was [the] west end of The Dalles, 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 vertebrae. They found this necklace that had salmon vertebrae around it and 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 a hundred generations, or a thousand generations.

TS: 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.

RS: I grew up in that first wave of people who had to figure out where they were gonna fish because all the locations had changed, and the main fishing area was underwater.

TS: States had tightly constricted when and where tribes could fish. Meanwhile, nontribal, commercial fishermen were still catching tons of salmon in the ocean. That meant the fish were intercepted before they migrated back upriver, where the tribes fished. It was around this time that Native people in the Northwest took notice of the Civil Rights Movement.

RS: 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.

(music)

TS: The Civil Rights Movement made use of sit-ins. The tribal rights movement had fish-ins.

1970 NBC Broadcast: Now there’s some new laws about what kind of nets can be used, and the Indians insisted on using illegal nets. So the police came.

TS: 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.

1972 ABC Broadcast: One of the oldest disputes between Indians and the government is over fishing rights. And that dispute has led to violence in the Northwest.

TS: 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.” Native fishermen would set nets the state considered illegal. Police and game wardens would try cracking down.

1970 NBC Broadcast: Tacoma police attacked with tear gas grenades.

TS: The confrontations turned violent.

1970 NBC Broadcast: A bullet smacked into the river, 10 to 20 feet from the boat.

TS: Here’s Frank Jr., explaining to a news reporter in 1972 why they started breaking the law in protest.

Billy Frank Jr.: The state of Washington does not recognize an Indian fishery on this Nisqually River, but they recognize these non-Indian fishery with purse seine boats, gillnetters, out in the Sound from here on out from the mouth of the river on out.

TS: Basically, the white fishermen were allowed to fish in a way the tribes were not.

BF: We’ve been here since time began, and they don’t allow us a thing.

TS: He could just as easily be describing the Columbia River, where a small band of tribal fishermen were fighting the same fight.

(music)

RS: You know, here on the Columbia River, we did the same thing in the ‘60s and my father and my mother, they were a part of that struggle.

TS: “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 up violations and arrests. They pushed so hard on fishing rights that they ran afoul of their own tribe’s government. Tribal council members feared the Settlers’ law-breaking would jeopardize the Yakama Nation’s relationship with the state.

RS: The police would come in and handcuff my dad or my mom, and, and drag them into a car and then arrest them. I’d see them getting drug off and I’d cry, you know, that’s a natural reaction.

TS: Randy was about 8 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 a legal dictionary, trying to decipher case documents from their many arrests.

LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot: She was a very intelligent woman. She was uneducated, but you can be uneducated and still be intelligent.

TS: LiaDonna 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 LiaDonna helped her learn to read with a pile of Cosmopolitan magazines.

LW: Well I did tell her, if you’re gonna keep getting in trouble, you have to learn how to read.

TS: LiaDonna remembers one protest on the Willamette, the main river through Portland, that flows into the Columbia.

LW: The first thing when we got down there, there was a hog line, they call it. All the boats, they spaced themselves clear across that river — boat to boat to boat, all facing the same direction.

TS: When they got to the river to stage a protest, they’d found non-Native fishermen had essentially formed a blockade.

LW: So, we’re all going up there and my former fishing friend, he says, “Look at that hog line. What are we gonna do? They’re not gonna let us through.”

TS: When you listen to this next part, don’t picture LiaDonna as a little old woman who’s had two strokes, sitting in a wheelchair in a house full of family. Picture her cruising down the river, wind in her hair, staring down a blockade, absolutely fearless.

LW: And I looked at him and I said, “Put the throttle all the way down, and when the rooster tail comes up off our motor, they’re gonna move.”

TS: Now picture her in front of that rooster tail — a fountain of water blasted sky high in the wake of the speeding boat.

LW: Anyway, he went ahead and he did that. Everybody looked at me like I was crazy, but he put the throttle down and the boats opened wide and we went through. It was fun watching them part so 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 Willamette Falls because we were gonna take our fish, because we needed it to eat, to live.

TS: During most protests, though, the family assigned LiaDonna 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.

LW: She was trying to make sure that as many people could live as she could make it possible.

TS: Eventually, Mary became one of the biggest fish dealers on the river.

LW: She was a gutsy woman. She had courage. She was a gambler and she would play high stakes, not just in a casino, but I’m talking about in, in the game of life.

TS: State and federal policies toward tribal fishing had turned it into an illicit business. Thieves stole from nets because there were too few fishing sites. Dealers like Mary had to find a market for illegally caught salmon, which, LiaDonna will tell you, meant selling to some less than upstanding citizens.

LW: The people that bought the fish? I suppose if she told on them, she’d have probably been rubbed out before she ever got to, got to court with that story.

TS: The family would send middle school kids, like Sam George, to camp by the river late into the night to watch their nets for thieves.

Sam George: She had crews just for cleaning, crews just for packaging. She had a couple ladies, crews cooking. Some people call themselves ‘fish hogs.’ She was a true fish hog. Like, she, she, she wanted it.

TS: You remember Sam. Last episode, we spent a lot of time with him and his daughter, Aiyana. They talk about Mary often when they’re at camp, fishing the river sites she claimed, and Sam passes on the lessons Aiyana will need to be a fisherwoman like her Grandma Mary.

SG: That’s what Aiyana asks me, it’s like, how’d you learn? What did you learn from Grandma Mary? It’s like, I learned just to go get it. She would uh…

Aiyana George: I thought you said your Uncle Mike taught you.

SG: Yeah. He taught me how to fish, but she taught me how to want bigger things.

TS: 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 2 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 the 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.

LW: 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 them to go to prison?”

TS: Mary decided to plead guilty.

LW: She already knew what she was gonna do, and I already knew what she was gonna do.

TS: 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 salmon missing from the Columbia. They fingered one of Randy’s close friends, David Sohappy, as the ringleader. He got five years in prison. Except it turned out the fish weren’t actually missing. They’d 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 now anything but disavowed by their tribe. In episode one, you heard the reverence people now hold for Mary.

Ceremony Attendee: What Mary did was fight for salmon and fish and the núsux̱!

TS: 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.

RS: We have some of the landmark cases, and they’re standing to this day.

TS: Coming up after a break:

1972 ABC Broadcast: 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 is jeopardizing Indian culture and threatening the Indians’ economic survival.

TS: The fish wars never really ended. The battlefields just changed.

(music)

1972 ABC Broadcast: A militant American Indian group plans a legal attack on the U.S. government.

TS: “A militant American Indian group planning an attack” — that’s how national newscasts at the time described tribal people filing 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 Oregon’s fishing regulation from Yakama fishermen — namely, the Sohappy family, who like their friends the Settlers were always clashing with police. U.S. District Judge Robert Belloni ruled that Oregon had violated treaty rights by failing to ensure tribes got “a fair share” of fish from the Columbia River. That ruling kicked off decadeslong negotiations over just how much the states could actually regulate treaty fishing. Five years after that momentous ruling, in 1974, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in another landmark case.

RS: “Settler versus Lameer.”

TS: 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.

LW: 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.

TS: That’s because the ruling said treaty fishing right 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.

LW: The states are coming against the Indians, regularly taking them into the state courts, you know, into the counties, putting them in the jails along the river. And they’re assuming jurisdiction over us. Well, “Settler versus Lameer” made them come to the reality that maybe legally they didn’t have jurisdiction

TS: That same year, there was another legal victory, perhaps the most famous in the fish wars. It’s known as the Boldt decision, after Judge George Boldt 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 a precedent that tribes throughout the Northwest had the right to half of all harvestable fish.

LW: I call it the big lie, because no one ever had any intention of enforcing the ruling in favor of the Indians.

TS: We’ll unpack that in a later episode. There’s a reason LiaDonna and other tribal members feel that way. But that’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 Boldt decision. Even national news, like this ABC broadcast, painted it as some kind of charity case for the tribes.

1976 ABC News Broadcast: Indian fishermen in the state of Washington have less money, fewer votes, 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.

TS: The Boldt 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 in Tacoma, Washington. Attorneys for the state tried to weaken his decision. Again, here’s what you would have heard watching network news at the time.

1976 ABC Broadcast: 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.

TS: I’m hoping this podcast ages better than that.

(music)

TS: The Boldt decision went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1979. And the tribes won. And then, in the 1980s, states and tribes hammered 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 the 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 endgame. 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.

RS: I know what was asked of me, and it was substantial, but before there was me, there was another Yakama tribal member, and before them, there was another one and another one and another one.

TS: Native people today may only account for about one percent of the Northwest’s 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.

LW: They took our land and predicated it on a lie. So then, is it 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, then you might fight back too … I did pray not to cry … But when you speak about genocide, how can you not cry? Because when the Columbia River area was settled by non-Indians, they killed the Indians at will and they 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.

(music)

TS: LiaDonna’s people endured. Nothing could keep them from the river. LiaDonna inherited the fight. So did Randy. But the fight had changed.

RS: We can’t have a river with no fish.

TS: That’s next, on “Salmon Wars.”

View all episodes of the “Salmon Wars” podcast here.