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134the shelf life of treaties“Good men and good countries keep their word,” added attorneyJames Hovis. He called his legal strategy the “God and Countrydoctrine.”“Give us a decision . . . end the need for endless litigation . . . allowboth Indians and non-Indians to get on with their fishing,” pleadedan attorney for the state.According to the state, if left to their own devices Indians couldmodernize their fishing techniques and overfish salmon runs. Theyshould be treated the same as all citizens and not granted a superiorstatus: “The U.S. Supreme Court always has drawn the line at thereservation boundaries and that Indian rights beyond that are incommon with the rest of the citizens.”But even parties within the state disagreed on the answer. TheGame Department pushed to ban Indians outright from steelhead inoff-reservation waters; the Department of Fisheries proposed allottinga percentage of salmon for the tribes.On the witness stand the Game Department’s Carl Crouse defendedthe total ban. The resource simply couldn’t survive Indian commercialfishing, he told the court.Meantime, Walter Neubrech, now retired from the Department ofGame, was asked point-blank if “his enforcement agents ever joinedsportsmen groups as vigilantes.” Neubrech said he knew nothing ofthe practice and blamed the riverbank flare-ups on a few “dissidentIndians.” Moreover, Neubrech said it was extremely difficult toidentify Indians of treaty tribes: “It is almost impossible to acquire anofficial roll of tribal membership except for the Yakama Tribe. Weknow of no guidelines that have come down from the courts definingwhen an Indian is an Indian and when he isn’t an Indian and whatdegree of ancestry he must have. It is difficult to decide whether aperson you found on a stream with a net is, in fact, an Indian of theUnited States and a member of a treaty tribe.”According to Neubrech, numerous arrests had been made andmost resulted in convictions. He gave specific examples to the court:“There was one Indian from a non-treaty group over in Eastern