NISQUALLY INDIAN COMMUNITY, Wash. — The U.S. Navy is honoring one of the Nisqually Tribe’s most well-known activists, Billy Frank Jr.
Last week, the Navy announced that it would be naming a Navajo-class ship in his honor.
His son, Nisqually Tribe Chairman William Frank III, couldn’t be more proud.
“This is just almost completing the whole circle of respecting our Native people, our Indigenous people who go and serve this great country,” he said.
Billy Frank Jr’s career as an activist began in 1945 when he was arrested for fishing in the Nisqually River. Since then, he began to engage in and organize “fish-ins”, and emerged as a key figure in the Fish Wars of the 1960s and 70s.
Frank was arrested more than 50 times for violating Washington state laws.
But in 1975, the Federal District Court in Tacoma ruled that Frank and other tribal members have the right to fish in their usual and accustomed places.
Now nearly 50 years later, Frank III says he’s thankful for the work his father and other elders put in to ensure that his tribe has a place to call home, and works to provide the same for future generations.
“We are the ones who are taking care of business when no one else wants to do it,” Frank said. “We’re the ones out here pulling trees out of the river, we’re the ones making sure our fish have clean, healthy, cold water to swim in, and we’re also the ones making sure that the federal, state, and local government, they’re being accountable, not to us, not to themselves, but to Mother Earth.”