#but the boldt decision was such an important landmark decision

[laelior]

Happy 50th Anniversary of the Boldt Decision, to those who celebrate!

[rjzimmerman]

Yeah, those treaties that we have consistently and persistently ignored to the detriment of Native Americans may offer an important oooomph element to make progress on environmental issues when the politicians don’t want to do anything. Nothing like a treaty with its constitutional protections to force hands. Think of the irony of it all.

Excerpt from this story from The Pew Charitable Trusts:

Federal and state officials signed nearly 400 treaties with tribal nations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Threatened by genocidal violence, the tribes signed away much of their land. But they secured promises that they could continue to hunt, fish and gather wild food on the territory they were giving up. Many treaties also include cash payments, mineral rights and promises of health care and education.

For the most part, the U.S. has ignored its obligations. Game wardens have targeted and arrested tribal members seeking to exercise their hunting and fishing rights. Governments and private interests have logged and developed on hunting grounds, blocked and polluted waterways with dams and destroyed vast beds of wild rice.

If Native treaty rights had been honored, the natural landscape of the U.S. might look very different today.

In recent years, some courts, political leaders and regulators have decided it’s time to start honoring those treaty obligations. Some legal experts think that asserting these rights could prevent—or even reverse—environmental degradation.

The foundation for contemporary treaty claims is a landmark 1974 case known as the Boldt decision, a ruling issued in a federal district court and upheld by an appeals court. The case affirmed that tribes in Washington state have a right to fish for salmon in off-reservation waters. It forced the state to abandon its attempts to block Native fishing, making the tribes co-managers of Washington’s fisheries along with state wildlife officials.

“It started bringing to light the fact that these treaties aren’t ancient history,” said John Echohawk, founder and executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a tribal advocacy group that successfully litigated the case. “They're the supreme law of the land. If the courts are going to be enforcing those rights, [political leaders] have got to pay attention.”

Treaty rights earned another milestone victory in 2018, with another case involving Washington tribes that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. That year, the court ordered the state to rip out and replace about 1,000 culverts that blocked the passage of migrating salmon, at a cost of billions of dollars. The ruling held that Washington couldn’t uphold its treaty obligations to the tribes simply by allowing access to waters where it had already destroyed the fishery.

Legal experts say that decision has changed the landscape—motivating political leaders in many states to consider whether their decisions could affect treaty-protected hunting, fishing or gathering rights.