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In the Pacific Northwest, treaties with Native Americans — signed in
bad faith more than 150 years ago — continue to haunt the federal courts
and state governments. Most were made to justify land grabs by newly
arriving settlers, and what was guaranteed to the tribes must have
seemed inconsequential.
Washington's first territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, negotiated a
bundle of these treaties in the 1850s and 1860s, baldly promising state
legislators that he would “extinguish, as quickly as possible, the
Indians' claims to their traditional lands so that settlers could be
given legal title.”
The governor's duplicitous treaties eventually led to war with the
Nez Perce, the Umatilla and the Yakama tribes. Most of his other
treaties with tribes on Puget Sound sparked legal battles that have tied
up federal courts for more than a century.
Then, this June, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals added yet another
loss to Washington state’s nearly perfect record of defeats, which began
in 1905, with a case challenging the Yakama Tribe's treaty right to
hunt, gather and fish in “all of their usual and accustomed places.”
As Matthew Love and Carly Summers explained in the July 2016 National Law Review,
this new decision grew out of litigation that began in the 1970s. Back
then, Washington's attorney general (and future U.S. senator) Slade
Gorton challenged the tribes' fishing rights, with hopes of
extinguishing them forever.
The lawsuit also sought to clarify three issues stemming from the
original treaty with Gov. Stevens: Did the tribes have a guaranteed
right to a percentage of the annual commercial catch; should
hatchery-bred fish be included in that percentage; and do treaty rights
implicitly safeguard the environment so that the tribe's right to fish
in “all the usual and accustomed places” is protected?
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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