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Chapter 4SurveillanceYears after a forty-two-year-old black seamstress refused to give upher bus seat to a white man in Alabama, Billy Frank Jr. refused to pullup his net in Washington. The civil rights movement accused a nationof calling one race better than another. The Northwest fishing struggleaccused a country of breaking a treaty in its own backyard. Like thecivil rights movement, the fishing struggle has deep roots. By theearly 1960s, more than a hundred years had passed since the signingof the Medicine Creek Treaty secured off-reservation fishing rightsfor tribes.“We ceded all this land to the United States. . . . We made thepeople of this country free,” Billy told a Department of Commercegathering in 2005. “They weren’t free. You weren’t free. The peoplethat come out there in the state of Washington and our territory wasnot free. They didn’t own nothing until we ceded the land to them.Now after that, they could go to the bank, start a bank. They couldstart a town. But then, they didn’t honor that treaty. They didn’t honorthat treaty one bit.”When the 1960s brought diminishing fish runs, trouble stirred upon Washington riverbanks. Fisheries managers for the state called theruns “alarmingly depopulated” and “erased from the American scene.”58