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Choose from one of the options below to determine the significance of that method of taking action during the Fish Wars.
“I think it was really helping out one another. Reaching out to the other tribes, how are we going to help? Having that connection, because of the age-old relationship between the tribes that we’ve always had… I saw it as a coalition, letting the non-tribal people know why we were doing this.”
Members of Muckleshoot Indian Tribe walk past Muckleshoot Community Hall east of Auburn at the beginning of their Auburn-Federal Way trek to call attention to their dispute with the state over fishing rights.
Photograph by Larry Dion, 1966, courtesy of Seattle Times
Billy Frank Jr. (Nisqually) and other Native community members fished the Nisqually River in 1973 in an act of civil disobedience. While their fishing was legal according to the treaties they had signed with the U.S., it was illegal according to Washington State law. Washington State had criminalized off-reservation fishing and officials arrested dozens of tribal fishers, including Frank.
Photograph by Tom Thompson, courtesy of Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
Puyallup citizen Allison Bridges during a September 4, 1970, raid on a fishing encampment. Allison was three years old when she first watched her father, activist Alvin Bridges, get arrested for fishing. In this photo, she is being arrested by a state game agent at the Puyallup River encampment, a highly visible fishing protest site.
Photograph by Dolores Varela Phillips, courtesy of Dolores Varela Phillips.
David Leach being arrested at a Puyallup fishing-rights confrontation with law enforcement, Puyallup River, Tacoma, Washington, September 9, 1970.
Photograph by Dolores Varela Phillips, courtesy of Dolores Varela Phillips.
“You know the fishing rights was just a small thing, until we brought in people. We brought in Dick Gregory, after that we brought in Marlon Brando. And after that the media came.”
Robert Satiacum and Marlon Brando, a well-known actor and celebrity, shortly before they were arrested in a 1964 protest. Satiacum, a citizen of the Puyallup Nation, had been staging protests and going to jail as a result since the early 1950s.
Photograph by Richard Heyza, courtesy of Seattle Times
Comedian and civil rights activist, Dick Gregory, right, joined Edith and Janet McCloud (Tulalip).
George Carkonen, courtesy of Seattle Times, September 9, 1970
“We set up a security camp for our fishermen, there on the Puyallup River—right in front of God and everyone—and we set it up so that we were very, very visible… We got TVs and lined them up and we were out there…
They said, ‘What’s going on with the Indians?’ And there was an outcry, a national and international outcry. And the federal government, who had never protected us, were humiliated and called to task.”