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The Fight of the Salmon People [1]
['Tony Schick', 'Katie Campbell', 'Katie Campbell Is An Emmy Award-Winning', 'Edward R. Murrow Award-Winning Filmmaker']
Date: 2023-01
Randy Settler’s family has spent generations fighting for their right to harvest salmon. But the federal government squandered its chance to recover the endangered fish before the onset of climate change. Now, Settler sees it all slipping away again.
Series: Broken Promises Salmon Disappear From the Pacific Northwest
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April 2022, early spring Chinook season
Last year’s tribal catch: 1,605,000 lbs (worst spring season in 22 years)
The salmon were late and the nets were empty.
Two weeks had passed since the Yakama Nation opened its ceremonial and subsistence spring fishing season on the Columbia River. Randy Settler and Sam George had spent $400 on gas for their boats, and had just two fish so far to give to their tribe for ceremonies.
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This year’s salmon fishing was forecast to be better than last year’s. But it was the slowest start to a season that Settler could remember. It was also his first season without his mother, Mary Goudy-Settler, who died in October 2021.
Settler was sitting in the riverside house that used to be hers, reflecting on all that had been taken from his family, all his parents had done to claw back what they could. They had fought for their right to fish, a right the U.S. government promised to honor more than 150 years ago and then violated generation after generation through laws, policies and flat-out discrimination. He inherited that fight. Now, with climate change threatening the remaining salmon runs, he thinks about the legacy they left for him, the one he’ll pass down to his nephew, George, and to George’s 10-year-old daughter.
ProPublica Related Video Salmon People: A Native Fishing Family’s Fight to Preserve a Way of Life
“Áwna sɨ́nwit UllaQut’.” His eyes welled up when he introduced himself by the Yakama name his mother gave him.
“But I’ve never claimed that name,” Settler, 67, later said.
The name, UllaQut’, translates to “frog.” It means more than that.
Mary Goudy-Settler and tribal elders bestowed it in a traditional ceremony when her son was 42, the same year he was elected to the governing council of their tribe.
It is a variant on the name of a famous war chief, one that Settler is tied to through his family’s lineage. To carry that name, he said, “you have to be a big deal in Indian Country.”
He has spent a lot of his life trying to live up to it.
1850s How The Land Was Lost Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens and Columbia River tribes at the Walla Walla Council of 1855, where several treaties were signed Credit: Washington State Historical Society. A hundred years before Randy Settler was born, Native American tribes signed a series of treaties that ceded millions of acres to the United States. This was not done by choice. In 1855, the first governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, pressured tribal leaders to attend a treaty council and, according to witness accounts from the time, told his translator to “tell the chiefs if they don’t sign this treaty they will walk in blood knee-deep.” The tribes did, however, hold on to the rights to fish, hunt and gather foods in their “usual and accustomed places.” But in the century that followed, state and federal governments ignored those agreements. The tribes — recognized today as the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation — would have to fight for their rights.
June 1855, spring Chinook season
Estimated yearly catch: Over 10,000,000 lbs
Settler’s great-great-great-grandfather was one of the signers of the treaties.
Tuekakas, also known as Old Chief Joseph, chief of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce, had been an early adopter of Christianity among Native people and an advocate of peace with white settlers. He brought his sons with him to the treaty council: Young Joseph and Ollokot, the original Frog.
Ollokot, Settler's ancestor and namesake, in 1877 Credit: U.S. Library of Congress
But the chief’s faith in that peace was shaken when, a few years after the 1855 treaty, the U.S. government seized nearly all of the tribe’s remaining land. It claimed this was permitted under a new treaty that had been signed by other members of the Nez Perce.
Tuekakas refused to acknowledge the new treaty. He tore up the Bible he’d been given by missionaries, disavowed the government and gave his sons a warning: “When you go into council with a white man, always remember your country,” he told them. “Do not give it away. The white man will cheat you out of your home.”
After their father’s death, Ollokot’s older brother became the tribe’s recognized leader, later to achieve fame as Chief Joseph. Ollokot became a war chief. After their band of the Nez Perce refused to move to a smaller reservation, the U.S. Army hunted them down.
Ollokot led severely outnumbered Nez Perce warriors to many victories in battle, repeatedly fending off U.S. forces that pursued them for more than 1,000 miles as they fled toward safe haven in Canada.
U.S. troops finally overwhelmed the Nez Perce 40 miles from the Canadian border. There, at the Battle of Bear Paw on Sept. 30, 1877, Ollokot was killed.
His brother, the chief, surrendered within the week. The surviving Nez Perce weren’t allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest for another 10 years.
Across the Columbia Basin, tribes had been left with just a sliver of their lands. The treaties still protected their right to fish, but that was not to last.
1900-1957 How The Fish Were Lost Dipnet fishing at Celilo Falls on the Columbia River, around 1957 Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Even after they were forced onto reservations, Columbia River tribes continued to make use of their usual fishing grounds like Celilo Falls. Salmon remained the staple of their diet and their most valuable trade commodity. But two threats were coming. Commercial fishing was growing. And as it did, state governments spent several decades adopting laws that cut Native Americans out of the salmon harvest. Then the federal government made plans to harness what it considered “the wasted power of the Columbia” by building dams to produce electricity and aid farming and shipping. Construction began in the 1930s, blocking off massive swaths of habitat and drastically altering the river. The dams preserved the lower river salmon prized by commercial and sport fishers, but sacrificed those upriver, where the tribes’ fishing rights were ensured by treaty. In 1950, Congress authorized a new dam at Celilo Falls, the last great fishery, and the most sacred site, for Native tribes on the river.
March 1957, spring Chinook season
Yearly catch at Celilo Falls (pre-dam): 1,894,000 lbs
In the run-up to dam construction, the federal government forced Native people out of fishing villages along the Columbia.
Alvin Settler and Mary Goudy-Settler were relocated to the Yakama’s inland reservation and told to try farming. But they weren’t farmers. They struggled to feed their four children and themselves.
Alvin knew The Dalles Dam would mean the destruction of Celilo, and the end of the way he and his family had always fished. He also needed money.
So he went to work building the dam.
Mary Goudy-Settler and Alvin Settler, with a nephew, in 1967 Credit: Courtesy of Randy Settler and Marcella Settler-Kantjas
“They did it for survival,” Randy said of his father and other relatives who helped build the dam.
Several years after the dam was completed, the Settlers returned to the river, even without Celilo, for the only life they knew: fishing.
They settled in a shanty village called Lone Pine, in the shadow of The Dalles Dam. It was one of 31 treaty fishing access sites the government offered tribes after damming and destroying their usual fishing grounds.
Native people fish from platforms near The Dalles Dam. This hydroelectric dam flooded the tribal fishing area in and around Celilo Falls. Credit: Katie Campbell/ProPublica
Randy remembers finding spearheads and beadwork in the dirt where he played and thinking about how old they might be.
The government forbade people from building permanent homes on those sites. So, on the banks of the river that had long ago made their families wealthy, the Settlers and their four kids made their home in a corrugated tin shed built for drying salmon.
“If the sun was out, we roasted. When it was cold, we froze,” Randy said.
Throughout Randy’s grade school years, they lived, cooked and slept in that one-room shed with no electricity and no running water.
He remembers showing up dirty to school, where he and the other kids from Lone Pine would be stripped down and showered off in the boiler room.
They drank river water, bathed in river water and lived off what they could catch, eating fish or selling it to afford fruit and potatoes.
“When we had fish, we could eat. When we didn’t have fish, we pretty much starved,” Settler said.
When boat hulls or engines needed repair, the family couldn’t buy food. Randy remembers an $1,800 boat repair bill that prompted him and his older brother, Carl, to learn how to work with fiberglass themselves. The youngest of four siblings, Randy began operating his own boat when he was 9.
His parents, along with fellow fishing families at the river, started getting more assertive about their rights to catch and sell fish, defying the many state regulations meant to limit their ability to do so.
“It was a war for survival,” Settler said.
The Fish Wars, as they are often known in the Northwest, were about to begin.
1960-1980s How The Fight Began Members of the Columbia River tribes including Mary Goudy-Settler, pictured in the article at right, fought for fishing access. Credit: The Oregonian, 1966, and The Columbian, 1982. As Native families on the river struggled to make a living, they watched non-Native commercial fishing crews harvest salmon in great numbers. Inspired by the civil rights movement, they set out to assert their rights. Native Americans fished without state permission as acts of civil disobedience, They challenged state laws in court. They held “fish-ins” as public protests. In one famous incident, actor Marlon Brando was arrested for protesting with Puget Sound tribes. Some made headlines and landed in jail — reviled at the time by mostly white sport fishers as troublemakers. David Sohappy of the Yakama Nation was imprisoned. Billy Frank Jr. of the Nisqually Indian Tribe and Janet McCloud of the Tulalip Tribes were arrested several times. Frank, Sohappy, McCloud and others would come to be regarded beyond Indian Country as civil rights pioneers.
April 1966, spring Chinook season
Yearly catch: 294,000 lbs
On April 26, 1966, the headline of the morning Oregonian read, “Rifle-Toting Indians Go Fishing.”
Below it was a photo of a Native man, smiling with a 16-pound spring Chinook salmon, while his friend stood guard, one-handing a rifle pointed into the air.
They didn’t have state permits to fish, and they’d been getting harassed by non-Natives at the river and targeted by police. But they didn’t need state permission to fish, they said. They’d had the right since time immemorial, and the treaties said so.
The armed guards, Alvin Settler told the newspaper, seemed to be “the only way we can get justice.”
By the time Randy saw his dad in the paper, he was used to his parents being arrested for fishing. He was about 8 the first time he saw them dragged into a police car, and he cried.
Eventually, he’d get arrested, too.
Sometimes the police would stop by The Dalles Wahtonka High School to see if he was there. If he wasn’t, they knew to search along the river for his family.
More often than not, though, teenage Randy Settler was there in school, frequently asleep during first-period history. He’d spend all night setting nets and the early morning pulling them and trucking the catch over to his mom. When he got to school, he’d slip into the back of the classroom and nod off.
“I didn’t mind sleeping through manifest destiny,” he said.
The Settlers became one of the most aggressive commercial fishing families on the river. Alvin, who’d later become a tribal judge, taught himself the law and began to test the limits of the state’s authority over tribal fishing.
Mary Goudy-Settler and Alvin Settler took such a hard line on treaty rights, and racked up so many fishing violations, that one of the Yakama Nation’s council members tried to distance them from tribal government.
But they were building something.
Goudy-Settler told the Yakama Nation Review at the time that while tribal council was worried they’d jeopardize the tribe’s relationship with the state, “all I could think of was the despair of the Indians.”
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