Fishable Waters

In the Spring 2013 American Indian Law Journal, Catherine A. O’Neill examines what it means to indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest to have fishable waters. In her discussion of the fish and fishing peoples of Washington State, O’Neill documents the depletion and contamination of treaty-secured resources, and charts a path that honors these treaties. For the tribes, whose rhythm of life was once sustained by the cycle of ceremony and subsistence related to the harvest of seafood, the regulatory violence of lax environmental standards that has diminished tribal properties begs the question of whom our laws protect–the people or the polluters.