Voltaire wrote: “To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
I was in my early 20’s when Boldt first made his ruling and the focus of my attentions was only peripherally on fishing rights. But we lived at the time on a huge lake and fishing had always been a part of growing up. All of a sudden the rules changed - drastically. The indians got to net fish the shyt out of every fishing hole and whitey got to sit on shore and watch. After, if anything was left, whitey got their chance, punishing rules applied. We used to sit on shore and watch them rake in every ever-living thing - legal or otherwise - until there wasn’t a damned thing left. They would string their nets and interfere with every other water-borne activity and had several official forces standing at the ready to intervene (on their behalf) if anyone complained.
IMO the indians wrangled the Most Favored Victim status of the day - not unlike today’s BLM. Not earned but rather leveraged and orchestrated. They misbehaved and broke things and got violent and then whined about racism when caught. No one challenged the ruling because no one had the balls to stand up to the virtue-signalers, even then.
My dad had a berth on the Hood Canal for his small boat. He and mom set crab pots after work in the evening, then picked them up and reset them. They fished for salmon EVERY DAY, there was not even a season the fish were so plentiful. Soon after the Boldt decision you would often see dead salmon floating as fish were rejected as being too small to keep. They would catch every one, and throw back the shakers. Truck beds filled with salmon sat in tavern parking lots, rotting in the sun because they made so much money sometimes they forgot what was in the back of their pickup. River mouths blocked, and the fish population plummeted. In the early 70’s my mom caught a 62lb salmon not far from the Dosewallips-Hoodsport area on Hood Canal to win a derby. You cannot catch a fish that big even in the Ocean now, but back then it was part of a bounty that seemed endless. With the Boldt decision, the runs were destroyed. Instead of natural spawning, they began farming fish, and the fish became smaller and less hardy. It isn’t that the rivers are incapable of serving as breeding grounds, it is that the schools of fish are raped into near extinction by netting. They simply should have bought the so called rights of the Natives for a price, and kept the sports fishery solid for as long as the “sun shines and the wind blows”.