Yakama Nation Treaty Rights: 1917 illegal-fishing conviction is finally overturned

Justice can come slowly. In this case it has taken nearly a century. It is the story of treaty rights, Washington’s belated efforts to correct wrongs and an 81-year-old Yakama man who sought for years to vacate his great-uncle’s 1917 conviction for illegally fishing. George Meninock was 77 when he told a court it’s his right to fish his family’s traditional site near the just-built Prosser Dam. That right, he argued through a translator, was protected by the Yakama Nation’s 1855 treaty that he had watched 14 chiefs, including his father, sign with Washington Territory Gov. Issac Stevens. Read the rest here 11:24

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