Messages from
Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian
Way, by Charles Wilkinson. Illustrated with maps by Diane
Sylvain and black-and-white photographs. University of Washington
Press, 2000. Hardcover: $22.50. 128
pages.
The dust has long settled from
the Northwest’s fishing wars of the late 1960s and ’70s – wars
which set Indian fishers against commercial boats and state
authorities. But the fire of the struggle still burns in 68-year
old Nisqually activist Billy Frank, Jr., and it’s his energy that
drives Charles Wilkinson’s Messages from Frank’s Landing :
A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way.
Wilkinson takes us through a defiant period, when Frank and other
Indians claimed a 19th century treaty gave them rights to salmon on
Washington’s Nisqually River. The group fished despite state
authorities’ best efforts to stop them, weathering arrests and tear
gas. In the watershed era that followed, Frank convinced judges and
federal regulators to protect much of the Nisqually and its bounty
for tribal fisherman.
Wilkinson believes that
Frank brought officials into the fold because he held strong
images, passed on from his father Willie Frank, of the Nisqually
watershed’s vibrancy before dams and commercial
fishing.
“As a
lawyer, I once believed that law could change the world,” writes
Wilkinson, a law professor at the University of Colorado and a
former litigator with the Native American Rights Fund. “I no longer
think of it that way. The world changes only as new ethics,
philosophies and world views change, evolve and mature. Then laws
change to reflect the new ethics.”
Writing
Messages moved Wilkinson to a deep respect for
the natural world and the Native American traditions that revere
it. Whether you, as the reader, will be similarly moved by this
rather short book is uncertain. But the voice of Billy Frank and
the story of his achievements for the Nisqually – people and river
– are worth discovering.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The power of vision and memory.
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