June 12, 2018 — There was a time when the murky waters of the Skagit River offered bountiful salmon harvests to the Swinomish Indians of Washington State. They could fill an entire boat with one cast of the net back then, and even on a slow day, they could count on hauling in dozens of fish.
But on a cloudy morning last month, the tribal community chairman, Brian Cladoosby, was having no luck. Drifting in his 21-foot Boston Whaler, he spotted his 84-year-old father, Michael, standing in yellow overalls in another boat, pulling an empty net from the water.
“Where’s the fish, Dad?” the son asked.
That has been the dominant question for years among the Swinomish and other Native Americans, who have seen their salmon harvests dip by about 75 percent over the past three decades.
But on Monday, they got reason to hope that their salmon harvests would tick back up.
The Supreme Court, in a 4-to-4 deadlock, let stand a lower court’s order that the state make billions of dollars worth of repairs to roads that had damaged the state’s salmon habitats and contributed to population loss.
It was a momentous outcome in a decades-long legal battle that drew attention because of its implications for Native American treaty rights and state sovereignty.
“This ruling gives us hope that the treaty we signed was not meaningless, and the state does have a duty to protect this most beautiful resource,” Mr. Cladoosby, 59, said on Monday.