Ted Strong

OREGON VOICES

Facing accusations from state and federal natural resource management agencies and the general public that they did not manage natural resources adequately or appropriately, tribal people have struggled for control of their resources and for recognition of the legitimacy of their management practices. The Celilo Fish Committee, which included representatives from the Warm Springs, Yakama, and Umatilla reservations as well as from Celilo Village, regulated many mid-Columbia River fishing stations in the 1950s. Drawing from that history, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) was founded in 1977, after a string of tribal court victories. The Commission is a cooperative management organization composed of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and the Nez Perce Tribe. CRITFC operates on the principles of consensus and collaboration, working through tribal fish and wildlife committees and in consultation with state and federal agencies to harmonize indigenous traditions with modern science. In the following oral history interview excerpt, Ted Strong, a member of the Yakama Nation who served as executive director of CRITFC from 1989 to 1999, reflects on resource management practices employed by the Yakama and Warm Springs tribes and by CRITFC. He also discusses the famous "Salmonscam" case, which resulted from a federal-state sting operation that prosecuted David Sohappy, Sr., and eighteen other tribal fishers for selling fish caught with ceremonial permits.
Strong was interviewed by Clark Hansen on January 17, 2000, and the interview is archived at the Oregon Historical Society.

SCIENCE IS IN A LARGER CONTEXT— Tribal people see the earth as a kindly mother, generous, bountiful, never forsakes her children. And it is said that her children are the water and the foods, the animals and the plants and the forests. Humans follow behind them. We didn't take science lightly. Science is something that white people use to make themselves sound smart, but it didn't make them look wise. It's true they were very smart in developing modern day technology, but the wisdom of the ages comes from the preservation of life and the careful stepping so that you don't make irreversible mistakes. So we brought scientific development here [to the Yakama reservation] only after a very thorough review by the tribal council. And there were many spiritual leaders and elders on the tribal council to help us. So it was an introduction.

Working on a Yakama Nation project at Rosa Dam, Washington, on August 3, 2007, Mark Johnston holds a returning adult spring Chinook while Joe Hoptowit scans the fish for a colored tag, which will tell them if it is a control or experimental fish and the acclimation site where it was originally released. Jerry Lewis works in the background.

Courtesy of Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission

When I came back here, for the very first time ever we developed an investment portfolio for some of our funds, and our chairman, Watson Totus, spoke broken English. We had a discussion about education and science in the tribal council chambers. There were fears expressed by some of the spiritualists that we're starting this new era of the white man, and our chairman said, "I'm not afraid of it." He said, "You build it, build your systems, bring your computer." He said, "That's education. We were promised education in the treaty, so we'll live up to that order, but it's not really our way of life." He said, "I'm not afraid of it because I have something in my heart and in my mind that I live by and I live for." He said, "I didn't put education in my mind to drive me or pull me away from what has been practiced for thousands of years." And it quieted a lot of people. I think those kinds of wisely spoken words aren't to be taken just as a political speech. So all that we developed scientifically here had its ties to being led by a spiritualist.

Tribal people don't believe that they can truly manage what is natural. Their duties and responsibilities come from a much higher power. We can't go out and shepherd the rainbow, we can't go out and say when it's going to rain, we can't dictate when the day is going to be eighty degrees or fifty degrees. But we can manage ourselves. Humans, since civilization on the American continent, have liked to believe that we are great managers of the natural resources when in fact we are the biggest polluters and contributors to the demise of the natural resources. So being directly involved with management acts I don't think really came while I was working for the Yakama Nation. My job was to develop and devise financial plans and create economic stimulus and assist in development of administrative procedures to improve the way that the Yakama Nation was accountable to its people.

[After I left my position as finance director for the Yakama Nation], I spent five years working for the Warm Springs Tribe. I found that it was very refreshing. The Warm Springs Tribe is a very progressive tribe whose leaders are highly skilled in compromise and debate and have a representative form of government that tries to reflect the total needs of its membership. They worked hard to create good relations with the governors' offices. They worked hard to ensure that they understood the federal processes, and yet they weren't afraid when they had to work within it or even challenge it. Those five years I spent with the Warm Springs Tribe were as a consultant. I helped them with a variety of areas. For five years, I did whatever the tribe asked me to do, just thoroughly enjoyed the free rein. I was asked to be as creative as I possibly could be in bringing ideas to them. My involvement with the Warm Springs Tribe eventually led me to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. A tribal attorney named Howard G. Arnett, or as we all know him "Howie," urged me to apply for the Executive Director's position. Howie and I collaborated on some issues important to the tribal government and we developed a high regard for each other.

I was selected to fill that position, [which I assumed in April of 1989]. So I had familiarity with all of the Warm Springs tribal leadership. I had familiarity with the Yakama tribal leadership and needed to become informed about the Umatilla and the Nez Perce leadership. I think that foundation work at the Warm Springs Tribe in which I saw that there was a very laid-back attitude, the ultimate in terms of patience and understanding coupled with this deep desire to be very thorough in gaining knowledge in what they were dealing with, helped prepare me considerably for the job I would face at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

[Tim Wapato's] legacy was one which immediately told me that I was going to face a great challenge. Tim Wapato was a very aggressive and very strong-willed, strong-minded individual, and he was the executive director in some of the most turbulent times [1982–1989]. He had to see the four tribes and the Fish Commission through Salmonscam and he had to see them through some of the most aggressive challenges in federal court and had to really bring them through a development period. He's the one that started with very few employees and very little budget. So by the time I got there, he had succeeded in bringing the tribal leaders to accepting the Commission as a forum for reaching consensus. Of course, Tim and I would never have had this privileged place in Oregon history if it hadn't been for another great leader and visionary named Roy Sampsel. He was the first executive director of CRITFC and began by setting the standards bar quite high.

Things were changing all over the Northwest with regard to fisheries management. Tim Wapato was a part of that change. He had a very heavy law enforcement background. He had recently retired as a detective from the Los Angeles police force and worked in the Homicide Division and had steel nerves. It was a very tough act to follow. I was intent on not trying to follow in his footsteps because his mission was different based on the circumstances of the time, and I realized that he fulfilled a role that maybe would never be played out again. I really didn't think in stepping into the executive director position that I would ever go through another Salmonscam. I really didn't think that we were going to revisit the militancy and the conflict, turmoil, confrontation of Indian fishermen versus state officials. I believed that our mood at that time was reflective of a growing revolution across America. People all across America wanted change. They didn't trust government and for a good reason. For Indian peoples, the government had really led all of the resources held in trust by the government for Indians into virtual extinction. Everything that was supposed to have been secured by solemn promises in treaties [was] being flushed down the toilet. And the governments were doing this. And the tribes' standing up to the governments brought about this very tough confrontation. So I believe that Tim was the right person for that time. I wasn't going to stand out there and be one of the bare-knuckle guys, and I didn't have the really tough mentality training that he did coming up.

I felt that what I was bringing to the job was a greater propensity to find ways to assess the past, the present, and help decide the future. So I believe that in that context, I was inheriting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to set the stage for river management, river governance, to build the strongest possible communicating and coordinating commission to serve the professional and technical needs of Indian tribes who had reserved treaty fishing rights along the Columbia River and all of its tributaries. I really and sincerely believed that it was a time of reconciliation, reconciling everything that people felt as a loss to plans for future gains in those same areas of loss. A time of reconciling between the deeply held religious and cultural beliefs of Indian peoples and the emerging and ubiquitous scientific forums that were being planned and designed, which I also felt were going to take over the Columbia Basin. I felt that it was also a time of reconciliation between the Indians, especially the Yakama Indians, who came to despise the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and the Commission itself. Because the Yakama Nation was among the first to develop self-regulatory mechanisms to meet the challenge put forth by state governments who believed that Indians could not regulate themselves, and [the Nation] felt belonging to the Commission was unnecessary.

The tribal members here at Yakama detested what they felt were unnecessary restrictions upon their right to a free access to fish and fisheries. Many of the Yakama tribal members blamed the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission for Salmonscam. They blamed the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission for the time that David Sohappy would spend in prison. And blamed the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission for the declining numbers of salmon. There were suspicions that the Yakama Indian Nation was having to give up some of its historical, ancestral lands that were known to hold their ancient fishing grounds in favor of this consensus-building with Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce. So my assessment at that time was — there's an awful lot of work here.

I would develop this deep-down respect for the professional staff at the Fish Commission. We had scientists who earned renown working in all places of the world where salmon were being managed. We had attorneys there who cut their teeth on tribal court issues who are still there today. They outlasted the former executive director; they outlasted me. They've got a commitment not only to their profession but to the tribes and to salmon. Those tribal attorney staff over there, I really commend them for staying with this process. And there were tribal members who are still there who were there since day one, and they love the work. I commend them for their fortitude. They went through the worst of times at the Commission. And I would say that when I came to work there, I added to some of those worst of times because I arrived there taking stock of all of these things that I'm referring to and announcing, "Okay, we're going to change. Structurally we're going to change. The manner in which authorities are delegated will change. The manner in which we set priorities is going to change. People's job descriptions are going to change." And I didn't realize that change itself created some anxieties almost to hysterical levels. People's comfort zones were invaded and people's security was threatened. I didn't realize a lot of that when I arrived there and began making all of the announcements.

It's to the employees' credit that they stayed with it. The Commissioners at that time realized through the assessments that I provided them that change was necessary. So we had a new organization chart. We created management, mid-management positions, where in the past they didn't have mid-management positions. We began to specialize and we created an environment and an atmosphere in which science was going to be not only brought in as our partner and coupled with our traditional cultural aspects, but we in fact were going to unmask this science person and see who it was and why science did what it did and was science being honest with us. And to do that, we had to ourselves become familiar with the role science played historically, and we had to envision what science would do as a role player in the future. And it was a radical departure from the old days in which the call-to-arms was litigation.

The second thing was that we would reorganize the Commission, and we had three principal goals.

The number one goal was communication. We would have communication at all levels within the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. We would have communication at all levels within each tribe. That meant [from] the tribal council, the tribal council fish committees, and the professional staff out to the tribal membership. We would have communication among the four tribes. We would have direct communication at all times between and among the four tribes and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

The second goal was coordination, so that we weren't individually as tribes making deals with the federal or state government without the other tribes being aware. That we were coordinating on areas of litigation and that we were coordinating on areas of signing agreements that would impact vast territorial areas or create new scientific precedents.

The third goal was control. That we alone as Indian people would control and dictate what was taking place with regard to our own resources. And that meant we had to have immediate accountability, for our actions, for our budget expenditures. And in order to do that, we brought in scientific management. To be accountable, we had to have excellent documentation for our policies, procedures, litigation and public interaction, which included the White House and administration, U.S. Congress, state governors and legislatures and other local governments. Strategic planning became a big part of the Commission.

IF THERE WAS ANYTHING that I could point to that I believed was to be my own legacy, it was bringing scientific management principles to the Commission. It was not easy. We wrestled with strategic planning, and it took us three years to just get the first strategic plans implemented because it meant education throughout the Commission. It meant education for the Commissioners themselves, and it meant education at the reservation levels. So that's what I believe: I inherited that opportunity to do that, I inherited a great set of people, a Commission that had achieved regional and national prominence, and I inherited the opportunity to do something to improve that. It was jumping on a merry-go-round that was already going ninety miles per hour. I guess my task was to see if it could go two hundred miles per hour.

My job was to try and bring [the tribes] together. Quite frankly, it took the power and persuasion of personality. It's nothing else. There isn't anything monetarily, there isn't anything politically, there's nothing economically or legally that could induce tribes to work closer. I had to build that trust. I had to help tribes find ways to be sincere in wanting to reach a resolve. If a person didn't have trust, character, and integrity when it came to these tough tribal issues, you might as well forget it. Issues that arose annually included allocation, particularly of the spring ceremonial salmon. Those were always the hardest issues to reach consensus. Quite often it was just accommodation. We realized that we didn't have reasons to fight with each other, but it's hard to just say, well, it was the white people who destroyed these salmon runs. We were there as tribes sometimes dividing up as few as 390 fish among 17,000 tribal members. We didn't kill them, we didn't pollute the waters, we didn't build the dams, we didn't create the irrigation diversions, we didn't establish policies to give the industrial users of the river subsidies so that they could expand the scope of their operations while they killed more salmon. We found ways to try to understand the situation and ease some of the conflict. But the Commissioners knew that they would have to go home and face their own tribal membership. And any elected tribal official coming home and saying look, we're only going to get ninety fish this year, has to face tribal members here who will say, "That's why we should never have agreements with the state. The state doesn't do a damn thing to help us. The state isn't there when we're trying to allocate these 390 fish among 17,000 tribal members. They're over there gloating over their scientific restrictions," and so forth. So understanding and creating this equality to really be there and suffer along with the tribal leaders, to be willing to go out to their reservations and share this bad news with their tribal members, those things are a big part of building consensus among the tribes. Everyone had to share the burden equally and find the optimism to go forward despite poor fish runs and failed fish restoration plans.

I think that over time, the older Commissioners try hard to say, "Well, let's not be so militant about some of these shortcomings that we have." I think it was the knowledge and the wisdom, the compassion that the elder Commissioners had that helped forge consensus, and yet you couldn't overlook the anger and the militancy in some of the younger Commissioners because they were right to want to go out and fight. Many times, I just felt like well, maybe we should just launch this all-out war against the states or the federal government, but it takes restraint and it takes as much heart as it does mind. I think in consensus-building exercises among the tribes, you look at everything. You don't just sit down for a one-hour session and agree on consensus. Sometimes it takes three or four days. It is spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically challenging. All of these issues [facing the tribes] require extraordinary leadership skills, and I believe that it's where the tribes really look to their own people, that they can trust.

The fact that I was there ten years, I probably could have stayed as long as I wanted to, but I saw a change coming, quite honestly.

I was changing, I am now in my early fifties. When I took over at the Fish Commission, I was in my early forties. I felt different. When I arrived there, I felt invincible, I felt energized every day. But public service takes a lot out of you. The demands that come from worrying over the tribes' appearances in public, worrying about the elders who you just know aren't going to live to see the return of these salmon. I saw all of that and it changed my own way of thinking when I got near fifty. I saw my fellow Commissioners [pass away], people whom I would say today I had complete love and respect for. I saw these changes coming, and I no longer felt the deep spiritual and cultural ties to the younger people coming in and they in turn didn't have the same style as the elders before them. They don't exude the same confidence and patience. I didn't think that I was going to be able to withstand a whole new decade of learning and training. I myself was the recipient of learning and training from these elders who are now gone, and it took something out of me when they bid us farewell forever. I felt like it was time for someone else with that same invincible attitude and, to a certain degree, naïvete. I left that opportunity to my successor, Don Sampson. He's been a tribal chairman before, he's got a degree in biology, and he's got that attitude that we're going to win. He's motivated, and he's very young. So I left that for him, and I think that all in all, I just felt that the whole idea of change is a part of reconciliation. The changing times created a need to reconcile, and I wasn't up to defining the future reconciliation point. I found more comfort in the past with the elders telling stories, using tribal humor, applying time-tested wisdom and reflecting ageless dignity. I didn't see more of this on the horizon; I saw less of this. Some things never are completely reconciled.

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