The Boldt Decision: Half the Fish, All the Fights

In February of nineteen seventy-four, federal Judge George Boldt issued a ruling in United States versus Washington that transformed the Pacific Northwest. His conclusion, drawn from the plain language of the nineteenth-century treaties signed by the Quinault, the Makah, the Skokomish, and a dozen other tribes, was that those treaties entitled tribal nations to fifty percent of the harvestable salmon and steelhead in their ceded territories. The treaty language, 'the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds and stations,' meant exactly what it said.

The state of Washington had spent decades ignoring this. State fish and wildlife managers enforced regulations against tribal fishers in ways that treated treaty rights as nuisances rather than federal law. Tribal fishers on the rivers had faced harassment, equipment seizure, and arrest for practicing rights their ancestors had negotiated explicitly to retain.

After the ruling, the response from non-Indian commercial and sport fishers was immediate and, in some instances, violent. What they called the fish war lasted the better part of a decade. Boats were rammed on the rivers. Nets were cut. State fishery managers initially refused to comply with the ruling, and federal marshals had to escort tribal fishing operations on the Nisqually and other rivers in the late nineteen seventies.

The Ninth Circuit upheld Boldt in nineteen seventy-five. The Supreme Court upheld Boldt in nineteen seventy-nine. The state complied.

Biologists who had predicted that tribal co-management of the fisheries would collapse salmon runs found instead that the Quinault and other tribes brought substantial habitat and conservation expertise to the process. Some salmon runs have improved under co-management. The Boldt Decision remains the most significant federal court ruling on Indigenous treaty rights in the twentieth century. It is also largely unknown outside the Pacific Northwest.