“I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same. That’s what I believe in.” – Billy Frank
On May 5, 2014, one of the most respected Native American leaders of the 20th century passed away.
Born in Nisqually, Wash., on March 9, 1931, Billy Frank was a fisherman, lifelong warrior, and onetime U.S. Marine who spent a lifetime fighting for his people and their home. Branded a “renegade fisherman” by government agencies, Frank helped transform the relationship of tribes with the state of Washington, winning them an essential role in the self-management of their fisheries and in the broader co-management of the environment. As a result of his successful work in Washington, Frank became an international symbol of indigenous self-determination, and used that fame to bring vital support to the Chippewa in Wisconsin during their fishing rights struggle, and to document the struggles of native Alaskan villages after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill.
Two months ago, President Barack Obama awarded Frank the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This topped off a long list of awards and recognitions he had received in his lifetime, including the American Indian Visionary Award, the Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Service Award, and the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism. For his work hosting the film series “This Is Indian Country,” he also won the Northwest Regional Emmy Award.
Former Nisqually Chairwoman Zelma McCloud has compared Frank to the great Chief Leschi, who once laid siege to the city of Seattle. Others have compared him to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who waged their own campaigns against white supremacy.
In the beginning, Frank did not fit the typical profile of someone who would earn so many honors.
“I wasn’t a policy guy,” he once explained. “I was a getting arrested guy.”
Over the course of his life, Frank was spied on, spat on, shot at, beaten, arrested more than 50 times, and had his property repeatedly stolen by state officials to prevent him from fishing. One of his closest friends, Hank Adams, was even shot in the stomach while napping along the Nisqually River in 1971. Adams survived after undergoing emergency surgery, and went on to play a critical role in several fishing rights lawsuits and eco-management agreements, as well as the formation of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, which Frank chaired from 1981 to 2014.
“Billy and I were the prime negotiators,” Adams explains.
Frank inherited much of his personality from his father, Willie Frank Sr.; both were respected leaders of the Nisqually and spent their lives fighting for fishing rights.
As a young man, Frank Sr. had also attended a boarding school, where he was pressured to shed his culture to achieve entry into paradise.
“The religion never made much sense to Willie,” wrote biographer Trova Heffernan. “He already lived in paradise. The mountain fed the river. The river and the land fed his people.”
“He was a lifelong fighter for Nisqually rights,” said Adams. Despite being in his 80s, he was out in a canoe with the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory in 1966, who later went on a hunger strike behind bars to draw attention to treaty rights. At 103 years old, Frank Sr. was also the key witness in a momentous Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hearing on the re-licensing of Nisqually River dams.
Billy Frank’s patience and dedication were famous for winning over opponents, including the legendary Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) – a friendship that became key in passing groundbreaking legislation like the Northwest Power Act. It also sunk the career of others, like the notorious “Indian fighter” Slade Gorton.
Despite everything, Frank maintained a sweetness and friendliness to everyone – even to those who tried to make him an enemy. According to Adams, Frank got this sense of cooperation from his mother, Angeline Frank. “His mom was the principle carrier of the good neighbor principle,” Adams said. “She instilled it on him – everyone’s your neighbor. You’ve gotta always be a good neighbor.”
Battles at Frank’s Landing
Frank discovered early that he would not be able to carry on his family’s traditions without a fight. He was arrested at age 14 for fishing on his family’s property along the Nisqually River – a six-acre piece of land called Frank’s Landing. Frank Sr. had used compensation money from the U.S. government to purchase the land after his original land – along with most of the Nisqually reservation – was seized by the army in the build-up to World War I. The land became a crucial sanctuary to native fishermen, and the center of gravity in the growing fishing rights struggle that took shape in the 1960s.
“People who come into Frank’s Landing would gain strength to take into the world,” recalled Adams.
When Adams became the head of the Survival Of American Indians Association, the group decided to adopt tactics from the Civil Rights Movement, holding what they called “fish-ins” to demonstrate against racist law enforcement that obstructed their access to traditional foods. As in the South, recalcitrant state governments in the Northwest were sicking the police on people of color, and claiming that federal protections for non-whites could not constrain them.
At one infamous fish-in on Oct. 13, 1965, the people of Frank’s Landing managed to capture public attention across the country, and produced a sense of confusion and shock for people in the Northwest.
With news cameras rolling, two fishermen lowered their net into the Nisqually River in front of a small crowd of natives and a larger crowd of journalists. State wardens hiding behind bushes on the other side of the river suddenly took off in three powerboats and rammed the native canoe without warning. The Native canoe was mostly filled with newspaper men and children under 10.
Frank’s niece Alison Bridges, who was 13 at the time, recalled, “This game warden, he grabbed me by the hair and he started to slam my head into the log. … So my sister was fighting with him … and we got up to the cars and they were arresting my mom. … They were hitting my dad in the back with those brass knuckles. … They were clubbing him and hitting him. … One of the game wardens turned around and he just punched my sister in the face … the blood was just spurting out.”
One bystander summarized, “I think I’ll go home and throw up.”
Just six days before the infamous fish-in, Frank and his brother-in-law Al Bridges had been rammed without warning and nearly drowned in the Nisqually River.
“Those bastards rammed us at full speed, and knocked us clean over,” Frank later explained. “We had our hip boots on, and it was harder ’n hell to swim. I honestly thought I was going to drown.”
Frank and his friends were labeled “renegades” for claiming that states had no authority to manage Indian fishing – particularly fishing off the reservation at traditional fishing sites. This was an irritation for state officials, and for the white fishermen who saw no point in sharing. But under a strict reading of the treaties it was hard to dispute – the documents contained no language about regulating native fishing, and under the Winans ruling of 1905, judges must analyze treaties the way tribal signatories would have understood them.
After Frank and five other fishermen were arrested in March 1964, the resulting legal dispute went to the U.S. Supreme Court three times in a case called the Puyallup Trilogy.
“There was six of us that actually kept going back to jail,” Frank once recalled. “We kept defying the state of Washington and the state judges. These sportsmen were shooting at us down at the mouth of the river. You could hear them spraying the boat.”
The Boldt decision
After years of demonstrations, fish-ins and arrests, plus some help from actor Marlon Brando, a breakthrough finally occurred. In 1974. The notoriously conservative Judge George Boldt delivered a ground-breaking decision in favor of native fishermen in U.S. v. Washington. In 1969, Judge Belloni in Oregon had ruled that tribes were entitled to a “fair share” of the fish runs. Now Judge Boldt ruled that a “fair share” meant a full 50 percent of all harvestable fish belonged to the tribes. Boldt also ruled that tribes had a right to self-regulate their fisheries, and the right to co-manage natural resources.
The second phase of U.S. v. Washington was another victory for the tribes. In 1980, Judge Orrick ruled that the government’s duty to protect Native fishing rights is also a duty to provide suitable salmon habitat. Sixteen businesses supported an appeal of the decision until Frank convinced the National Congress of American Indians to retaliate with a boycott. Mike Berry, president of Seafirst Bank, later described that legal action as kicking over a hornet’s nest. The companies backed down and were persuaded to join a new mediation and dispute resolution initiative called the Northwest Renewable Resources Center.
Charles Wilkinson, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said: “You can’t understand American justice fully without understanding the Boldt decision. It is that paramount. It holds that high a place in our legal system and in our history and in our collective national consciousness.”
Wilkinson continues, “This is American justice at its absolute highest: where you have established, wealthy, vested interests, and poor people — dispossessed people who have nothing to hang their hat on other than a treaty 120 years earlier that many are saying is outmoded.”
But the backlash from white fishermen was swift. Slade Gorton, Washington’s attorney general, fueled the fire by promising he would overturn the Boldt decision at the Supreme Court. Within weeks, 700 people marched in front of the U.S. Courthouse in Tacoma, parking their boats on trailers, and hanging an effigy of Judge Boldt from a tree. Commercial fishermen declared “reverse discrimination” and called themselves “the forgotten majority.” Multiple assaults were documented against officers enforcing restrictions on white fishermen, and their patrol boats were rammed. One gillnetter commented, “It was kind of a shock to realize we were going to have to share this with somebody else.”
"Attorney General Slade Gorton argued before the state Supreme Court that the Boldt decision was racially biased in favor of Native Americans and therefore violated the 14th Amendment – the law that provided equal rights for former African slaves. The state Supreme Court agreed with him, and held that the Department of Fisheries could not follow the federal ruling without violating the equal rights of non-Indians."
In the meantime, Frank and Adams traveled to Portland for the first convening of the Puget Sound tribes as they hammered out a plan to manage their fisheries. The original conception of what would become the Fisheries Commission was exceedingly narrow and did not please the renegade fishermen.
“I told ’em I was tired of having the treaty fishermen treated as a criminal class – that wasn’t the purpose or intention of U.S. v. Washington – it was to improve management of resources,” Adams explains.
“I said, just look at your charts – they’re all directed towards whose gonna arrest the Indian fishermen now. And I tore the charts,” Adams said with a laugh. “I told ’em when I tore the charts down, you’re gonna have to start all over.”
As the first chairman of the new Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), Frank was curt in his dismissal of the state’s Supreme Court opinion, calling it “plainly rooted in racism and dedicated to the proposition of white supremacy.”
The NWIFC responded by demanding the federal government assume control of the state fisheries. On Sept. 1, 1977, Judge Boldt did just that, sending in U.S. marshals from around the country.
But the federal government also took other steps to defuse the anger of white fishermen – it reduced the tribe’s share of fish by 5 percent, and later recommended a new deal that reduced the tribal allocation even further and proposed to replace ancestral fishing grounds with smaller commercial management zones managed by the tribes, while asking tribes to give up commercial fishing for steelhead altogether – which was highly coveted by sports fishermen.
The Boldt decision was later upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court in July 1979, and some of the anger began to fade. In addition to upholding the native right to fish, the court highlighted “the state’s extraordinary machinations in resisting the decree.” According to the court, “except for some desegregation cases … the district court has faced the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”
Since the Boldt decision, Frank and his allies recognized that protecting salmon habitat would be the next major issue facing fishermen.
Since the high point of the fish-ins, the battle lines have included everything from logging companies to hydro-electric dams, and from poorly designed roads and culverts to the all-encompassing threat of climate change. Since the recent undoing of the crude oil export ban, oil trains pose an even bigger threat to safety and watershed restoration across the region.
Billy Frank Jr.’s legacyIn 2014, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law that helped overturn convictions prior to the 1974 Boldt decision.
“I’m thankful Billy was here to see the 2014 Legislature pass a bill helping to overturn convictions from treaty protests,” Inslee said. “Billy was right on this issue, and the state owed this gesture of justice to him and others who jeopardized their liberty to fight for treaty rights.”
Within the past five years, some of the world’s largest demolitions of hydro-dams have taken place in Washington – largely due to this earlier movement for indigenous self-determination. Billy Frank Jr. was there to celebrate the removal of the Elwha Dam in 2013. Two years earlier, the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River had been the largest ever removed in the United States.
In a statement on the death of Billy Frank Jr., Paul Lumley of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission wrote: “His impacts knew no boundaries and were often felt from the streams of the Pacific Northwest to the halls of Washington, D.C. Billy was a living icon whose legacy will be seen in every fish return, every tribal fishery, and every battle for those resources that has yet to be fought.”