A relic of institutionalized racism has lived in a corner of Washington State law for over 40 years. As House Bill 2554 moves through the 2026 legislative session, that language is finally on the verge of being wiped clean.
The bill seeks to remove the statutory leftovers of Initiative 456. It was a ballot measure passed in 1984 during a time of intense anger toward tribal sovereignty. Similar repeal efforts made very little headway in 2010 and 2021, but the persistent work of Representative Debra Lekanoff has finally pushed the bill onto the governor’s desk. I wrote about this history five years ago, but I want to revisit it again.
It did receive a strange amount of opposition in the House. Most of that dissent focused on the technicality of repealing a voter-approved initiative rather than a defense of the words themselves.
To understand why this repeal matters, we have to look back at the concerted efforts to dismantle tribal treaty rights that followed the Boldt Decision.
The roots of Initiative 456 go back to the immediate aftermath of 1974’s U.S. v. Washington (the Boldt Decision). When the Supreme Court finally upheld Judge Boldt’s ruling in 1979, it did so against a backdrop of defiance. It is important to remember that the Supreme Court did not just uphold the Boldt Decision itself. It ruled on a group of cases that were actively trying to overturn it. These cases started in local courts and wound their way through the State Supreme Court and finally into federal courts. They were an effort by private actors (like fishing charter owners) to force the state of Washington to stop recognizing the sovereignty of treaty tribes in salmon management.
This era of resistance is best captured through the words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote the appeals-level decision in the “Passenger Vessel” case. He did not hold back regarding the state’s behavior. Goodwin was born in Bellingham and spent his youth in the Pacific Northwest. He eventually became one of the most respected judges in the country.
He observed that the resistance to tribal rights was uniquely aggressive. He wrote: “Except for some desegregation cases …, the district court has faced the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”
This comparison to the Jim Crow era South was not an exaggeration. He was writing in the 1970s when the comparison to the legal opposition to school desegregation was fresh and real. It was a direct reflection of the legal and physical blocks put in place to prevent tribes from using their court-affirmed right to half of the harvestable salmon.
In our own backyard, the Thurston County Courthouse was a stage for this resistance. Local judges, including Gerry Alexander, found themselves in a jurisdictional tug of war. Groups like the Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association sued state agencies in local courts. Judges like Alexander would rule in their favor, leaning on state law. The groups wanted the state to stop complying with federal orders. They argued that the fifty percent allocation violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. They were essentially trying to use state law to override federal treaty obligations.
When the U.S. Supreme Court finally used the Supremacy Clause to cancel these state judgments, the opposition did not give up. It just moved from the courtroom to the ballot box.
Initiative 456 was born from this shift in tactics. It was organized by a group called S/SPAWN, which stood for Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action for Washington Now. The measure was a masterclass in mom and apple pie political framing. Supporters admitted to writing the ballot title to sound deceptively wholesome. They wanted to avoid any immediate association with the controversial Boldt Decision. By focusing on the decommercialization of steelhead and claiming that state natural resource management should not consider special rights based on race, they confused a lot of voters. Polling at the time showed that half of the voters were undecided. Many were simply confused by the technical language.
This confusion is born out in the results. Initiative 456 had the third largest voter drop-off of any statewide election on the 1984 ballot. Only insurance and lands commmissioner races drew fewer voters. Initiative 464 (which dealt with sales tax on cars) had the most voters. Initiatives show up at the top of the ballot, so for over 28 percent of voters to drop off between one initiative and the next, and then to turn back around and vote in other races, it means something. If 75 percent of the voters who didn’t vote on 456 had voted against it, the initiative would have failed.
Despite a massive coalition of opposition, the initiative passed in all but four counties. This opposition coalition included Senator Dan Evans, church leaders, environmentalists, and even major timber companies. They argued the initiative was racist and illegal under the Supremacy Clause. They also warned that it threatened international fishing treaties with Canada.
The opposition campaign did not do its job to turn the undecided votes into no votes. Looking back at last week’s essay on pragmatism, I could see a simpler argument was possible, focusing on “we’re a serious state, we need to focus on bigger things and not let opposition to treaty rights define us” being an easy reason to vote no. But the populist appeal of “equal rights” carried the day. It was framed as the removal of special tribal privileges.
The 456 longtail
While the initiative was largely a message to Congress with no immediate power to override federal law, it stayed a strong political tool for years. Senator Slade Gorton tried to implement the core goals by introducing a federal bill in 1985. He wanted to ban tribal commercial steelhead fishing. The effort failed and even created a rift among conservatives. Senator Dan Evans joined the Reagan administration in speaking out against it.
However, the spirit of I-456 was kept alive by later Republican candidates for governor like Bob Williams (1988) and Ken Eikenberry (1992). Both insisted they would enforce the initiative if they were elected. Eikenberry’s endorsement showed that anti-tribal sentiment stayed embedded in the state’s conservative platform for years after the initial vote.
Another reason why 456 mattered was that the tribes’ work wasn’t done in the 1980s. A year after Bob Williams lost in the governor’s race, the tribes went back to court to reaffirm their treaty rights to shellfish, just as they had done in the 1970s for salmon. The decision to expand the federal understanding of treaty rights was not firm, and the tribes did not understand where exactly this new fight would end. Eventually, spanning the time of the Eikenberry campaign, the tribes would win reaffirmation of 50 percent of the shellfish harvest in 1995. But it was a possibility that with shellfish and its corresponding issues of private shellfish companies and private property rights on beaches, the treaty rights structure would fall apart.
Also by the mid-1990s, I-456 began to lose its relevance. The state started to transition toward more stable co-management. Tribal political power grew significantly. Campaign donations increased from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the state and tribes moved further into what people called the “dawn of cooperation,” the aggressive tactics of the 1970s started to look outdated. Although the language of the initiative stayed in the Revised Code of Washington, it was seen as dead law. It was unenforceable because federal treaties are the supreme law of the land.
If you look at the actual text of RCW 77.110, you can see why it’s so problematic. It claims that the state should not recognize any rights to natural resources based on “ancestry” or “race.” This sounds fair on a very surface level, which is why the “Mom and apple pie” strategy worked so well. But in the context of Indian law, this is a direct attack on the political status of tribes. Treaties are not based on race. They are agreements between sovereign nations. By trying to redefine treaty rights as racial privileges, the writers of I-456 were trying to strip away the legal foundation of tribal sovereignty.
Our history can have a haunting presence.
There is a current lawsuit filed by Fish Northwest against the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife following the same pattern as the Passenger Vessel era lawsuits in the 1970s. Fish Northwest is an interesting group that has picked up anti-tribal sentiment that has found new energy over the past 10 years or so. Their litigation strategy echoes the past efforts by trying to cancel current fishing rules through state administrative law. It was filed in the same Thurston County Superior Court that hosted the original post-Boldt challenges. Currently, Fish Northwest is challenging salmon fishing seasons by claiming the state failed to follow procedures like the Regulatory Fairness Act.
The parallels are striking. The state describes the current lawsuit as a backdoor attempt to attack a federal agreement in state court. This happened after Fish Northwest was denied the right to join the federal U.S. v. Washington case directly. The underlying motive is still the same old “Fair Share” grievance. It is a long-standing belief that non-treaty fishers are not getting their due.
In July 2025, a Thurston County judge granted part of their petition. The judge found that the state’s rules were invalid because they failed to conduct a required Small Business Economic Impact Statement. This is a clever evolution of the 1970s and 1984 tactics. Instead of attacking treaties directly, they are using the language of “regulatory fairness” and “small business protection” to gum up the works.
This small business angle is particularly cynical. It frames the state’s cooperation with tribes as a burden on local economies. It ignores the fact that tribal fishing is also a massive economic driver for the region. While the state is currently appealing this ruling, the case represents a spirit that refuses to see tribes as partners. It is an attempt to run around decades of established case law.
As HB 2554 nears the governor’s desk in 2026, it serves as more than just a legislative cleanup. It is a formal rejection of the era of frustration described by Judge Goodwin. By removing the language of Initiative 456, the state is closing the book on an era that tried to turn Washington back into a battlefield of resistance.
Legal challenges like the one from Fish Northwest will probably keep happening. But they will no longer have the comfort of seeing their ideas reflected in our state laws. The meaningless words are finally being stripped away. This leaves room for a future defined by working together rather than constant conflict. We’ve spent forty years with these words on the books. It’s about time we stop letting the past dictate how we manage our future.
