IN COMMON WITH

Former attorney Wilkerson, with novelist Pugnetti, offers a nonfiction overview of the long conflict between Native American communities and Washington state officials over fishing rights.

In the decades of turmoil that followed a landmark federal court decision involving fishing rights in Puget Sound, Wilkerson played a role in settling tensions between Native tribes and Washington state lawmakers. The Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854 laid out a trade: In exchange for ceding most of their land, nine Native Washington tribes were promised the right to hunt, gather, and fish for steelhead and salmon around Puget Sound—a practice that remains a vital symbol of cultural identity for Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. It didn’t take long for the state of Washington officials to violate that agreement by ignoring Native rights in favor of commercial fishing; nearly a century later, protests broke out in the form of off-season “fish-ins,” sparking the Washington Fish Wars. A scene from one such protest opens this book, but the story doesn’t end with U.S. District Court Judge George H. Boldt’s 1974 decision to uphold the treaty, which, he said, “gave Native Americans a right to an equal share of salmon as non-Indians”; the book effectively shows how tensions remained high long after the settlement of U.S. v. Washington. Wilkerson, a former government worker who worked closely with Washington state salmon fisheries, played a central role in fostering a working relationship between the two parties. Over the course of this book, the author, who helped protect dwindling salmon populations in the process, offers a lucid first-hand account of those years’ highlights. He does so in occasionally dense detail, but along the way illuminates a notion that can be applied to countless situations in today’s polarized political climate: To get things done, even the most starkly opposed parties must work together to find common ground.

An edifying breakdown of a fraught political saga and a paean to allyship and Native history.