Indian activist Sohappy dies at 79
TOPPENISH, Wash. – Myra Sohappy, who with her late husband helped launch the battle for Indian fishing rights, died Friday after surgery for an injury suffered in a recent fall, one of the couple’s nine children said.
Sohappy, 79, suffered a dislocated hip in a fall last weekend, said her son David Sohappy Jr. in a telephone interview from the town of Harrah on the Yakama Indian Reservation. She died at Toppenish Regional Hospital.
“She was a strong advocate, even though she couldn’t read or write,” David Jr. said of his mother’s role in regional tribes’ fight for fishing rights.
She had been in good spirits, Sohappy said, joining him in song at the hospital Thursday. “She just wanted to go home,” he said.
“It’s the end of an era,” said attorney Tom Keefe, who represented the family in their fishing rights battle. David Sohappy died in May 1991 at age 66.
In the 1960s, the Sohappys lived at Cook’s Landing, on an isolated stretch of the Columbia River, where their subsistence lifestyle brought them into conflict with state and federal fishing authorities. Federal charges against David Sohappy in 1969 helped set the stage for the historic 1974 decision in which U.S. District Judge George Boldt allocated half the state’s harvestable salmon to tribes under 19th century treaties.
The ruling has been called the most significant on Indian treaty law in the past century.
David Sohappy – a leader of the Wanapum, or River People, band of the Yakama Indian Nation – never resorted to violence but claimed the right to fish at will.
In 1983, after their arrests in a federal sting operation dubbed “Salmonscam” and designed to test tribal oversight of fisheries, the Sohappys – David Sr., Myra and David Jr. – were tried on charges of selling fish to undercover agents out of season.
“It was like arresting Martin Luther King Jr. after he won all his civil-rights battles,” Keefe said Friday in a telephone interview.
David Sr. was convicted of selling 317 fish out of season, David Jr. was convicted of selling 29 and both were sentenced to five years in prison, Keefe said, adding they were acquitted on a conspiracy count.
The jury refused to convict Myra. “She was described as the most dangerous member of the conspiracy,” Keefe said, his voice breaking.
“They went through living hell for 20 years, up to and including the government trying to evict them from their own home,” said Keefe, who went on to work for U.S. Sen. Brock Adams, D-Wash. “They won every battle and they never gave up.”
Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, former Sen. Daniel Evans, R-Wash., and Adams all worked for the Sohappys’ early release and both David Sr. and David Jr. were sent home in May 1988, after serving 18 months.
Myra Sohappy was sought after as a speaker about the case, Keefe said.
“The only time she got in an airplane in her life was to fly to Geneva and testify before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights about the abuse of federal treaty rights in the Northwest” in 1987, he said.
Services for Myra Sohappy were planned throughout the weekend at the Toppenish longhouse, David Jr. said, with burial “before the sun comes up” Monday at the Toppenish Creek Cemetery.