50/50
by Ben Brockhaus-Hall
Entering Buck Meloy’s Bellingham home is reminiscent of entering the hold of an old sailing ship. A picture of various species of Pacific salmon adorns the front hallway. A few boxes of canned wild and smoked salmon rest on the floor. In the living room, a parrot squawks in its cage next to an oil painting of an old, salty sea captain.
Meloy has been a commercial fisherman for more than three decades. He is one of a handful of Puget Sound fishing veterans who has endured the hardships of fishing and managed to stay in the industry.
From the Boldt Decision on tribal fishing rights, strict regulations and dwindling salmon runs to the infiltration of farmed salmon, the fishing industry has taken many hits. Tribal and non-tribal fishers struggle to make a decent living, an attempt that grows more difficult each year.
Meloy began fishing out of Bellingham Bay in 1972 as a first crewman on the Chuckanut Bell, a vessel rigged for gillnetting. He now limits himself to salmon fishing in Alaska during the summer months.
Meloy currently runs Flopping Fresh Fish Company, which sells canned and smoked salmon from various locations in Bellingham and through the Internet. He also edits Pacific Fishing Magazine.
Meloy said that in the early to mid-1970s, a fisherman could make a living fishing only salmon. But these days, a typical Bellingham Bay fisherman will fish chinook, coho and chum salmon in Puget Sound in the fall, crab or herring in San Francisco Bay in the winter, and sockeye salmon in Alaska in the summer. Even then, making a lot of money as a fisherman is hard, he said.
The earliest fishermen in Whatcom County, however, had little to worry about aside from the weather. Lush evergreen forest blanketed the then new state of Washington. Bellingham Bay and the surrounding waters were pristine, with countless rivers and streams feeding them and an abundance of fish.
The Lummi people fished the waters and depended on the salmon for survival. By the time Lummi children could walk, they were learning how to fish for salmon in the Nooksack River.
“Salmon is our culture,” said Merle Jefferson, director of the Lummi Natural Resources Commission.
The Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855 forced the Lummi people, along with parts of the Samish and Semiahmoo tribes, to move to the Lummi Reservation at the mouth of the Nooksack River.
The Lummi continued to fish the Nooksack River and surrounding waters without competition until late in the 19th century when the new settlers started to realize the abundance and monetary value of the salmon runs.
By 1899, 11 of the largest salmon canneries in the state were located in Whatcom County. Between 1880 and 1900, the total non-native population in Whatcom County skyrocketed from 3,137 to 22,512, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
From the time they moved onto the reservation until the 1970s, the Lummi lost access to many of the salmon runs their tribe had always depended on. The state tried to force the Lummi fishermen to remain strictly on tribal waters.
“They were excluded over time, and gradually squeezed out of their share,” said Daniel L. Boxberger, author of “To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing.” “This was due to regulations, general discrimination and the nature of the economic system.”
Jim Wilson, the 77-year-old vice chairman of the Lummi Natural Resources Commission, said he has been fishing since he was 12 years old. He can remember state fishery workers harassing and arresting him in the 1950s.
The state workers would patrol the waters from Treaty Point to Point Francis, Wilson said.
“They would work the line every day,” Wilson said. “If they caught us off (the reservation), they would chase us back on.”
Randy Kinley, chairman of the Lummi Natural Resources Commission, said his people had fished the Pacific Northwest waters for years and even sailed up to the Fraser River to fish the sockeye run.
In 1970, the federal government — along with a dozen Native American tribes including the Lummi — sued the State of Washington on the grounds that the state was not honoring the treaties signed by Washington Territory Governor Isaac Stevens in the 1850s.
The Treaty of Point Elliott, the same treaty that forced the Lummi onto the reservation, said “The right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations, is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the Territory ...”
The case U.S. v. Washington finally reached trial in August 1973, with Judge George Hugo Boldt, senior judge of the Federal District Court in Tacoma, presiding.
On February 12, 1974, after almost six months of court proceedings, presentation of evidence and dozens of witnesses heard, Boldt handed down his historic ruling, which became known as the Boldt Decision.
Boldt ruled in favor of the Native Americans, reaffirming treaty rights and allocating 50 percent of the harvestable commercial fish to the native fishermen. Tribal fishermen throughout Washington were happy with the decision, while non-native fishermen and fishermen from tribes not recognized in the treaties were outraged
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Boldt Decision in 1979, but upheld the general principle and the 50-50 allocation.
In 1994, U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie ruled that shellfish were to be split 50-50 as well.
When the state began to seriously enforce the Boldt Decision in 1978, violence erupted on the waters. Non-native fishermen continued to fish illegally, protesting the ruling. State fishery workers shot one non-native fisherman while he was fishing on Puget Sound. The state workers claimed the fisherman was trying to ram their boat. Also, non-native fishermen attempting to interfere with fishing operations damaged a Lummi boat at Point Roberts. The Coast Guard escorted the fishermen away.
Meloy said that along with many non-native fishermen, he supported the concept of the Boldt Decision but did not think it was fair to all fishermen.
“Although some of us supported the concept, we didn’t feel it was appropriate for the U.S. government to say that a handful of non-Indian fishermen had to pay the whole bill for our failure to enforce national treaty obligations,” Meloy said.
He said the main problem with the Boldt Decision is the way it is handled by the state fisheries management. In the ruling, 50 percent was not a mandate, but a ceiling, he said.
“The actual amount, the Supreme Court said, is to be determined by the Indians’ needs or ability to achieve a moderate living,” Meloy said. “That moderate living clause is an important clause, because it was meant to be a way of determining what percentage, not higher than 50, the Indians were entitled to, and that has never been resolved. So (state) management continues as though 50 percent is a mandate even though 50 percent is a ceiling.”
At the time, Meloy said Native Americans had been catching only two percent or three percent. All of the sudden the amount of harvestable fish available to non-native fishermen was cut in half.
“A lot of non-Indians bailed out of the industry, selling their boats and stuff,” Meloy said. “I recognize some of the Indian boats down here that have names on them. I know what the names used to be.”
Meloy remembers a conversation he had with a Lummi fish-buyer after state fishery workers began to enforce the Boldt Decision.
The two men had agreed that relationships between native and non-native fishermen had been getting better, but that virtually overnight the Boldt Decision had thrown out all of the advances.
“There was a lot of hostility and resentment (between non-native and Native American fishermen),” Meloy said. “A lot of that resentment was misdirected. It was the federal government that had done this to us, not the Indians.”
Wilson, Kinley and Jefferson — of the Lummi Natural Resources Commission — all said they recall fights between fishermen on the docks. That violence spilled over into fights between native and non-native kids in schools.
“It was bad. It was sad,” Kinley said of the violence. “I’m sorry to say it, but racism is still alive and kicking in our schools.”
Despite the illegal fishing, violence and protests, however, the Boldt Decision ruling of a 50-50 allocation remains today.
Today, both Native Americans and non-natives in the commercial fishing industry face even more obstacles. Meloy and the Lummi Natural Resources Commission agree that farmed salmon have hit the fishing industry hard by lowering prices.
Meloy said salmon farming has been increasing for about 25 years. In the early 1990s, he said, the farmed salmon began to impact the fishing industry and prices started dropping.
Although the Whatcom County Council banned fish farms from the county in 2002, importing farmed fish is still cheaper for stores than buying wild salmon.
“For every wild fish there is in the world, there’s two farmed salmon,” Meloy said. “So what farm salmon has done is added 200 percent more fish to what has to be sold every year. Farmed salmon are about 67 percent of the market’s salmon available in the world. Most wild salmon cannot be caught inexpensively enough to compete with (farmed fish) prices.”
The impacts of the farmed fish are devastating to the Lummi fishing fleet, Kinley said. In the last 10 years, the fleet has dwindled from 30 purse seine boats to three, and from more than 160 gillnet boats to approximately 50, he said. Abandoned fish nets and fishing boats litter many yards on the Lummi Reservation.
Jefferson said he remembers seeing coho salmon sell for as much as $2.50 per pound and sockeye for as much as $5 per pound back around 1980. Now, he said coho can sell for as little as 30 cents per pound.
Another problem commercial fishing faces is environmental damage to habitat. Kinley said there has historically been a lack of respect for salmon and their habitat.
“In the Nooksack we’ve got critical water temperatures, flows, quantities, you name it,” he said.
To protect the resource, the Lummi people have not fished the spring chinook salmon run in 25 years, even though it used to yield many fish, Jefferson said.
The Lummi Natural Resources Commission, along with the other tribes that received 50 percent of the fisheries control under the Boldt Decision, have to work with not only local governments, but state, federal and even the Canadian government to try to preserve salmon runs for future generations, Jefferson said.
“I think (the habitat and salmon population) is going to gradually improve,” Jefferson said. “But it is not going to happen over night. It’s not gonna happen by itself. All of the agencies and the farmers have to work together.”
Kinley said he believes it is up to the generations of today to make sure that future generations get the opportunity to see the salmon that he has had the chance to enjoy.
“Salmon is as important to us as the air we breathe,” he said. “We’re the fish people . . . the salmon people.”
