Page 17 - Pierce County Lawyer - September October 2025

Hughes started his career as a reporter for the Aberdeen Daily World in
1966, becoming editor in 1977. He remembers the anger of those years.
“The charter board operators, the commercial fishermen, the sport fishermen,
they feared that their livelihoods were at risk, that they would be auctioning
off their boats; they felt it was singularly unfair. Which I could never grasp.”
In 1978, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th
Circuit affirmed the findings of
Boldt’s decision, challenged in a related case. Circuit Judge Aldred Goodwin
wrote, “Except for some desegregation cases…the district court has faced
the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a
federal court witnessed in this century.”
Still the state did not relent, Washington State Attorney General Gorton
insisted the decision granted special rights, violating the equal protection
clause of the Constitution. He appealed the decision again, this time to the
Senator for Washington – told commercial and sport fishers the ruling would
surely be overturned, and quickly appealed it.
Meanwhile, illegal fishing by nontribal fishers was so rampant, Boldt
personally took control of the state fishery, using federal magistrates to
enforce the law. They issued thousands of poaching citations and made
hundreds of arrests.
B Y R I C H A R D D E J E A N
Section 2201 and 2202, concerning off-reservation
Treaty-Right fishing within the case area by plaintiff
tribes, which long has been and now is in controversy,
and for injunctive relief to provide enforcement of
those fishing rights as they previously have been or
herein may be judicially determined. The case area
is that portion of the State of Washington west of the
Cascade Mountains and north of the Columbia River
drainage area and includes the American portion
of the Puget Sound Watershed, the watersheds of
the Olympic Peninsula north of the Grays Harbor
Watershed and the offshore waters adjacent to those
areas."
An anadromous fish is spawned in a freshwater river
whose mouth empties into the ocean. As a fingerling, it
begins its journey down the river and enters the saltwater
where it lives for one, two or sometimes three years and
then returns to the same place in the same river in which
it spawned and lays its eggs to begin again the process.
Both salmon and steelhead are anadromous fish.
At the very outset of his opinion, Judge Boldt dealt with
the interpretation of the Treaty. In doing so, he quoted
from a United States Supreme Court decision considering
a similar situation:
“In construing any Treaty between the United
States and an Indian Tribe, it must always be borne
in mind that the negotiations for the Treaty are
conducted, on the part of the United States, an
enlightened and powerful nation, by representatives
skilled in diplomacy, masters of a written language,
understanding the modes and forms of creating the
various estates known to their law, and assisted by an
interpreter employed by themselves; that the Treaty is
drawn up by them and in their own language; that the
Indians, on the other hand, are weak and independent
people, who have no written language and are wholly
unfamiliar with all the forms of legal expression, and
whose only knowledge of the terms in which the Treaty
is framed is that imported to them by the interpreter
employed by the United States; and that the Treaty
must therefore be construed, not according to the
technical meaning of its words to learned lawyers,
but in the sense in which they would naturally be
understood by the Indians.”
The Court decided to employ use of the Chinook Jargon
together with interpreters familiar with it and familiar
with how certain terms in the English language would be
understood by the Indians. As the Court stated:
“The Treaties were written in English, a
language unknown to most of the tribal
representatives and translated for
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