The most touching moments of the celebration marking the beginning of the end of the Elwha dams were tribal. They were the smiling faces on the children of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe who danced, drummed and sang in brand new outfits handcrafted for the occasion.

They were in the voices of the elder women who sang along with the Klallam love song. Who couldn’t smile during elder Ben Charles blessing, interrupted by husky belly laughs?

But the most significant moment came when tribal chairwoman took the carefully planned event off script to invite to the stage Billy Frank Jr. to speak.
Frank is a member of the Nisqually tribe, who, like the Elwha gave up land to the federal government in the 1850s in exchange for the right to fish in the usual and accustomed places in perpetuity. It was a right that was taken away in the 20th Century by an encroaching society that had little interest in the Indians traditional society and culture.

Frank fought for the right to fish, beginning when he was arrested in 1945 for fishing his beloved Nisqually River. But it was in the 1960s, when he was one of the leaders of organized “fish-ins” that Frank and a small group of tribal fishermen changed the Pacific Northwest, Indian communities nationwide and American society.

It was these recalcitrant tribal fishermen like Richard Sohappy, and 14 other Yakama fishermen that forced Pacific Northwest leaders to begin reversing a century of salmon destruction. Their court case, which went into the continuing U.S. v. Oregon case, led to the joint management between the states and the tribes. Through this process the Columbia River Indian Tribal Fish Commission patiently but firmly pressed the case for salmon recovery.

At first sport fishermen saw Indians as competitors. I wasn’t here for those fights in the 1970s and early 1980s but I did experience the same emotional conflict covering Chippewa fishing in Wisconsin restored because of the legal precedent set here.

It was ugly. Swat teams were brought in to quell the violence at Rapid River near Riggins.

There were voices in Idaho who said that if salmon meant we would have such battles then maybe it wasn’t worth it to save the fish.

But eventually, when conservation programs began bringing back steelhead in fishable numbers and fall chinook on the Columbia, sport anglers came around. Then together, they and environmentalists began challenging the very center of power in the Northwest, the hydroelectric power developers in industry and government.

In 1980, Congress passed the Northwest Power Act and salmon were legally placed on the same plane as electricity. Then Billy Frank and the other fishing rebels moved their ideas into the mainstream.

“Pacific salmon will survive, they have to,” Frank told the crowd, including many who had opposed him in the past.

The Elwha ceremony's recognition of the fighters for treaty rights underscores how their impact went beyond the lives of Indians.