To honor Hank Adams, we must all honor the promises of tribal treaties

Hank Adams, a visionary thinker, strategist and archivist of the movement for Native American treaty rights and sovereignty, died in Olympia on Dec. 21 at 77.

His loss is painful, but his legacy is inspiring and full of life: It is alive when Indians in Western Washington tribes fish in their “usual and accustomed places,” as called for in the treaties their ancestors signed in the 1850s. It is alive as tribes and state government act as co-managers of fish harvests and habitat. It is alive in the evolving government-to-government relationships between tribes and local and state governments. And it lives in the ever-wider recognition that tribes all across America are nations within a nation, a unique status decreed in treaties that the U. S. Constitution defines as the supreme law of the land.

Adams shares that legacy with other legendary Indian leaders and activists who, in the 1960s and ‘70s, rose up to demand recognition of their treaty rights, which had been so severely violated that some tribes had been “terminated” from federal recognition altogether. But Hank Adams will be remembered and revered as “the most important Indian,” a sobriquet bestowed on him by another very important Indian, Vine Deloria.

Even in his 20s, Adams knew more about Indian law than the lawyers, and could explain it plainly and persuasively. He was a master tactician, negotiator, and communicator who stayed out of the limelight but was always where the action was, and always thinking several steps ahead.

Ron Allen, the tribal council chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, compares him to Yoda — “always there, always reflective.” Willie Frank III, a Nisqually Tribal council member and the son of Adams’ close friend and collaborator Billy Frank Jr. says “He was like Forrest Gump. He was part of every major event in Indian Country. He even turned up in Nicaragua to help out the Indians there.”

He negotiated peaceful endings to a six-day takeover of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D. C., on the eve of Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election, and the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota the following year. Before that, he had worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Poor People’s Campaign and on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for President. He seemed to know everyone in every tribe, as well as every relevant decision-maker in Washington, D. C.

He often carried a camera, and kept archives that, according to Willie Frank, meant his house was so full of documents “there was just enough room to get through the hallways. But he could always go right to anything you wanted.” With Carol Burns, he made a sometimes cryptic but compelling film called “As Long as the Rivers Run” that is available on YouTube.

In the course of the fishing rights struggle on the Nisqually and Puyallup rivers in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was arrested, beaten, and shot. But his greater value lay in his authorship of press releases, strategic plans and legal documents, and his recruitment of celebrities such as actor Marlon Brando to draw greater attention to the cause.

He played a critical role in crafting the legal arguments that resulted in the famous Boldt decision, which restored treaty rights for off-reservation fishing, made tribes co-managers of fisheries, and decreed that treaties preserved the tribes’ right to 50 percent of harvestable salmon. That victory electrified indigenous people’s struggles across the U.S. and around the world.

Yet even in the midst of endless campaigns and conflicts, he also researched local tribal families and understood the complex intermarriages that knit communities together and complicated questions about who was enrolled in which tribe.

Charlene Krise, now the executive director of the Squaxin Island Museum, Library and Research Center and vice chair of the Squaxin Tribal Council, met Adams when she was a shy 20-year-old. “I was surprised he knew about me before we met — he knew my family and our history,” she says. He taught a Squaxin group about Indian law before they went out fishing, where they were confronted by angry, hateful white fishers who rammed their boats. Adams “learned about war but also about conflict resolution,” and negotiated a peaceful solution following that incident.

“He made sure we had good teachers about Indian law so we could use it to defend ourselves, and so non-Indians could learn it too. And he was the wind beneath the wings of our eagle, Billy Frank Jr.,” Krise says.

“What he wanted for his legacy was that we would remember what he taught us, and that we would shoulder it until it’s our time to cross over to the next life. It was a sacred word that these treaties would be honored for eternity, including the protection of our natural resources. We are all accountable.”

This story was originally published January 3, 2021 at 5:45 AM.