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14 | The Jolt from Boldt
M
odingRn Awned gRAy, As usuAL, along the Washington coast
on September 11, 1971. Joe DeLaCruz, the 34-year-old business
manager for the Quinault Indian Nation, crouched defiantly on
the Chow Chow Bridge, which was blocked by an old pickup truck. A sign
next to him said too many hillsides and creeks had “died for your stump-
age.” The tribe’s logging units were now closed. The Quinaults had had
enough of the incompetent paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
and the sweetheart deals offered by the state Department of Natural Re-
sources. The agencies had allowed logging companies to pay below-mar-
ket rates for Indian timber and clog rivers and streams with debris.
A charismatic leader with piercing eyes and a mane of swept-back hair,
DeLaCruz posed for photos before talking with reporters. He said his
people were taking back the land where their ancestors had lived for the
thousands of years before the white man floated in with his beads and
disease. The timber companies had driven pilings into stream beds with-
out permission from the tribe, eroding spawning beds and polluting wa-
terways. The 190,000-acre reservation was the most savagely logged area
in the state. “The damage to our fisheries is as bad as the big stump
farm” they’ve created, he said, and the broader issue could be summed up
with one word: “Sovereignty.”^1
DeLaCruz and Gorton, tough, resourceful politicians from different
worlds, were destined to collide repeatedly. DeLaCruz went on to lead the
National Congress of American Indians and World Council of Indige-
nous Peoples. One of the last things he did before he died was order a
batch of “Dump Slade” buttons.
nohwestRt indiAns’ push for treaty rights hit the front page in 1964
when Marlon Brando, the acclaimed actor, joined a fish-in on the Puyal-
lup River near Tacoma and was promptly arrested by state Fisheries De-
partment officers. For the Indians, fisheries regulation in Washington
State was a bifurcated quagmire. The Fisheries Department regulated
