The Puyallup Tribe and the Fish Wars

The Puyallup people have lived along the river that bears their name and the shores of Commencement Bay for thousands of years. In eighteen fifty-four they signed the Treaty of Medicine Creek, which guaranteed their fishing and hunting rights in exchange for the cession of their broader territory. The reservation they received was a fraction of what they had given up, concentrated largely on the tidal flats of the bay.

For the next century, state authorities systematically arrested Puyallup and other tribal members for fishing in their own usual and accustomed grounds, claiming state game laws superseded the federal treaty. The tribes disagreed. In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, a movement of civil disobedience called the Fish Wars began. Tribal members held fish-ins, deliberately fishing in restricted areas and inviting arrest, drawing national attention to what they called a broken promise.

The central figure in the Fish Wars was not Puyallup but Nisqually: Billy Frank Junior, who first had been arrested for fishing his own river as a teenager in nineteen forty-five. He would be arrested more than fifty times over the following decades. The protests he led and the lawsuits that accompanied them finally produced a ruling in nineteen seventy-four. Federal Judge George Boldt held that the treaties meant exactly what they said: the tribes were entitled to fifty percent of the harvestable salmon and steelhead returning to their usual and accustomed fishing grounds. That decision, known as the Boldt Decision, reshaped salmon management across the Pacific Northwest forever.

The Puyallup Tribe today is one of the larger federally recognized tribes in Washington, with a reservation that now extends across parts of Tacoma and surrounding communities. A landmark land claims settlement in nineteen ninety returned significant territory and resources after more than a century of dispossession.