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202the negotiatormigrated up the coast into Alaska and then back down throughCanada and Alaska, particularly our chinook and coho,” Wilkersonexplains. “We hated it. Our fish were being intercepted in bothfisheries.”But the spirit of cooperation had yet to travel north. “We havebeen waiting twenty years for a U.S.-Canada Treaty,” Billy grumbled.“Somebody has got to make sense out of protecting this resource!”With a $400 million fishery along the West Coast at stake, draftedagreements between the two countries collapsed. Talk of a salmonwar spread. The runs would never recover, biologists warned. Afterall, in eighteen years, Native spawning grounds lost 80 percent oftheir returning chinook. “What brought it home to me,” says JimWaldo, an attorney and facilitator in the post-Boldt era, “were thestatistics from one day in 1976, when 750,000 salmon were caught byAmericans and Canadians in the Fraser River. It’s obvious that nofishery could long withstand that kind of pressure.”A truce, however, was a complex proposition at best, layered withemotions and politics. Salmon that originate in Washington rivers areindeed swept up on the high seas by Alaskans, Canadians, the Japanese,and the Russians. But interception works multiple ways. Washingtonfishermen can also intercept another host country’s salmon, and do.Unbeknownst to the fish, as they travel beneath the surface of thewater, they pass through a tangled political web of jurisdictions.Charles Wilkinson, a longtime professor of Indian law, was so struckby the jurisdictional hopscotch that he took up the issue with theCommittee on Indian Affairs of the United States Senate.Today, salmon recovery in the Pacific Northwest is a patchworkquilt of many dozens of Federal and State statutes, tribal and internationaltreaties, and county and city land use plans and regulations.Once in writing an article about the Columbia River, I found that aChinook salmon born in the Lochsa River in Idaho would have topass in its life’s journey 8 dams on the Columbia, 16 passages in all outand back. And that the Chinook, in its return journey as an adult