Sohappy Fights On Despite Jailings, Illness, Threat -- Native American Stands Firm On His People's Right To Fish

COOKS LANDING, Skamania County - The old fishing platform is sagging, held up by ropes, a few rotting boards and perhaps the ghosts of dead fishermen.

David Sohappy is also sagging. But he is held up by the fight to protect the rights of living fishermen. Sohappy believes Native Americans should be able to catch as many fish as they want, when they want, from the Columbia River.

``I want to go fishing whenever I feel like it. With no strings attached whatsoever.''

It is an idea as quaint as the old-fashioned fishing platform that has long been replaced by power boats.

The federal government has ruled that Native American are entitled to only half the harvestable catch from the river. And a coalition of four Native American tribes sets the season dates.

Despite two jail terms and a stroke and the threat of eviction from his ramshackle home, the 65-year-old Yakima Indian is not giving up his fight.

Lawyer and longtime friend Tom Keefe calls him ``the Martin Luther King of fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest.''

In the latest development, Sen. Brock Adams, D-Wash., and Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, are asking the government to stop eviction efforts against Sohappy.

Buried in the 365-page appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior was one paragraph directing Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan to reconsider the 21-year battle to evict Sohappy and his family. It asks Lujan to meet with the Yakima Tribe and report back to Congress within four months. The bill still awaits the president's signature.

Adams said the senators believe the paragraph will end the eviction effort.

``The few remaining families of mid-Columbia river people, living at Cooks Landing and Underwood, are a link to the past,'' Adams said. ``Our federal government has more important business . . . than persisting in this eviction effort.''

Adams took the action because the Interior Department apparently planned to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court an appellate court ruling in the eviction case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs in Portland, Ore., has been in charge of the eviction case. Fisheries administrator Frank Halfmoon said he could not comment on the bill.

Sohappy built a longhouse - a communal dwelling that also serves as a church - on this spit of land on the shore of the mile-wide Columbia in the early 1960s. He lives there with his wife and some of his seven grown children.

The action was a protest over the 40 homes and 37 fishing sites of Native Americans that were flooded by construction of Bonneville Dam in 1937. The government agreed in 1945 to replace those homes and fishing sites, but has made little progress, Keefe said.

The Cooks Landing fishing site is supposed to be a river access point for all Native Americans, and the government contends no one is supposed to live there year-round. But Sohappy contends he has a historic right to live and fish on the river.

His trial in the mid-1980s for illegally selling salmon out of season was labeled ``Tradition on Trial'' and won international attention from human-rights groups.

The 20-month prison term that followed was attacked by Inouye and others as unusually harsh, considering the crime. Inouye noted that heroin dealers, child-molesters and arsonists all would get lighter sentences than Sohappy. He remains on probation.

For all the fuss he has created, it is something of a surprise to find that Sohappy these days is a frail old man with one arm crippled by the stroke. He can speak barely above a mumble and must lean on an old golf putter to walk. But his mind is sharp and sly.

``I speak softly but carry a big stick,'' he joked, brandishing the putter.

His immediate goal is the return of about 230 fishing nets he said have been confiscated by state officials over the years.

``The state has no jurisdiction to molest Native American fishermen on fishing rights,'' Sohappy said.

Sohappy is a leader of the feather religion, and he speaks these days of the dire consequences awaiting whites who hurt Native Americans.

``They're just asking for trouble,'' he said.

Among those making Sohappy unhappy are windsurfers who in the past decade have flocked to the Columbia River Gorge. Fishermen complain the sailboards damage their nets. He warns that nature may still the gorge's famous winds.

During the visit a military helicopter flew low through the gorge, past the longhouse. Sohappy believes it was for him.

``They are watching me all the time,'' Sohappy said.

What they are looking for Sohappy said he still occasionally goes out on the river to fish, the last time about a month ago.

But his days are usually spent around the longhouse, watching soap operas like ``Days of Our Lives'' and the news.

Sohappy and his son David Jr. were arrested after an undercover sting operation called ``Salmonscam'' by federal and state wildlife agents in 1981 and 1982. Sohappy was accused of selling 317 fish out of season.

The Sohappys were convicted in federal court in Los Angeles in 1983 of violating the federal Lacey Act.

The act makes it illegal to possess, sell or transport illegally caught fish and game across state lines. The Sohappys appealed and a Yakima Tribal Court jury in 1987 acquitted them of tribal poaching charges. But they were ultimately sentenced to five years in prison under the first conviction.

In 1987 Myra Sohappy, David's wife, addressed the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

``Our family has been constantly harassed and bullied by state of Washington fish and game officials for over 20 years . . . , '' she told the commission.

Sohappy was released on May 17, 1988.

Mrs. Sohappy is angry at what her husband has endured.

``David and my son were not supposed to be sent to prison,'' she said.

For Sohappy there is no compromise on his belief that Native Americans have the right to fish when and where they want, guaranteed by the Yakima Indian Nation's Treaty of 1855.

But in 1974, U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt of Tacoma issued a ruling limiting Native American rights to half the harvestable salmon and steelhead. Ironically, that decision arose in part from protests Sohappy and other Native American fishermen conducted starting in 1968.

The Boldt decision angered both white fishermen, who lost rights to half the fish, and Native American fishermen who claim treaty rights to all the fish.

``They had nothing to trade us. It was all our fish to begin with,'' Sohappy said.

Sohappy said he will never leave his home.

``Move out and let them win. No way. We still own the land.''