Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)
YAKIMA — Justice can come slowly. In this case it has taken nearly a century.
It is the story of treaty rights, Washington state’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.
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