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80renegadesyou know, bank robbers and everybody. They’d always ask us: ‘Whatare you guys in for?’ ‘We’re in for fishing.’ ‘Fishing?! What the hellare they doing? We’re here for robbing a bank and killing somebody.’”The renegades lost ground with their tribes, but gained groundwith sympathizers. Their struggle remained front-page news. “First,at the beginning, nobody saw what we were doing,” says Billy. “Wewere getting raided, and then finally they were beating on all of us, upand down the river. Finally, we got connected with the churches andall of the kind of fathers of Seattle. They come out here to witnesswhat was going on. And that was a big time, a big change.”Although the struggle of Indian fishermen hit the papers, theyremained an undisputed underdog. White society “didn’t think wewere smart enough, educated enough, or organized enough” to pulloff the uprisings, says Joe Kalama, archivist for the Nisqually Tribe.The fishing struggle worked its way from the riverbank to thefloor of the U.S. Senate. Billy and the tribes could have lost theirtreaty rights in a buyout. In an attempt to resolve the fishing crisis,Warren Magnuson, Washington’s longtime U.S. senator, proposedthe government buy the tribes’ treaty rights or allow the state toregulate off-reservation Indian fishing. “These [Indian] treaties arestill on the books today,” Magnuson attested. “They are supreme lawof the land and they must be respected and honored. . . . The onlyconcession reserved to the Indians was the right of taking fish at allusual and accustomed grounds and if they are to be deprived of anypart of this they should be properly compensated. . . . I believe thesetreaties are part of our heritage—but solely, in support of fish conservation,I believe that these treaties should fit present day conditionsin the overall consideration for maintaining our fishery resources.”Magnuson told the U.S. Senate that his request for an estimate ofthe Indian fishery from the Department of Interior remained unanswered;such a figure could not be estimated “since this includescommercial as well as subsistence fishing.” The Interior Department