Samish Tribe tries to regain fishing rights it lost 2 decades ago

The Samish Tribe was back in federal court Wednesday, arguing for a motion to revisit a landmark ruling that stripped the Northwest tribe of its fishing rights more than 25 years ago.

Tribal Chairman Tom Wooten said the tribe isn't asking for anything extraordinary, "just what has been rightfully ours all along."

"We want to partner equally in the harvest and production of our shared natural resources," he said.

The 2 1/2-hour hearing in a Seattle courtroom was filled with technical terms and references to complex rulings and remands.

But what's at stake is clearcut: the dwindling fishing harvests near Bellingham and the San Juan Islands. The U.S. government has taken a neutral position on the motion.

The Samish are arguing they are the successors to aboriginal tribes that fished in those areas -- tribes already legally ruled as part of the history of the Lummi, Upper Skagit and Swinomish.

Attorneys for opposing coastal tribes argued that the Samish were tardy in filing their motion to reopen the ruling and have "flip-flopped" in their arguments.

"We could lose an essential piece of our very identity. Samish wants to strip us of that," said Jim Jannetta, attorney for the Swinomish Indian Tribe. "We will lose these precious rights."

The hearing comes two years after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that federal recognition of a tribe "is a sufficient condition for the exercise of treaty rights."

The Samish, after losing their federal recognition decades ago, won it back in 1995.

The appellate decision reversed an earlier ruling by a judge who said the Anacortes-based tribe had no right to reopen the Boldt decision, the ruling that took away the Samish's fishing rights while giving other Puget Sound-area tribes half the salmon harvest.

The Samish have been fighting the federal government off and on since 1969, when a low-level Bureau of Indian Affairs official mysteriously dropped the Samish from a list of recognized tribes, even though the tribe had been recognized since 1855. The tribe then went to court to regain its status.

But that was long after U.S. District Judge George Boldt ruled that the Samish and four other tribes were not entitled to treaty status in 1979. His last act on the bench and done while suffering from Alzheimer's disease, it was a virtual rubber stamp of a government-proposed order.

"What happens today will benefit my great-grandchildren," said Shirely Olsen, a 71-year-old Samish Indian member, excited to be in court.

Around her were fellow tribal members, some in traditional woven cedar-bark hats, who packed the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez. "It's the young people's future," Olsen said.

If Martinez rules in favor of the Samish, it would be the beginning of a series of hearings and conferences on whether to allow the tribe to exercise fishing rights.