And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Puget Sound shellfish growers ask High Court to settle
access issues
http://www.indiancountry.com/NW31.html
By Cate Montana
Today correspondent
SHELTON, Wash. - Commercial shellfish growers and concerned
private
landowners hope the U.S. Supreme Court will decide to hear
their appeal of
September's 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing
Puget Sound
tribes access to private tidelands to harvest shellfish.
In an interpretation of the 1855 Steven's treaty fishing
clause, the lower court
ruled tribes may enter private tidelands and property to
harvest half the
shellfish from uncultivated beds. Commercial growers say the
decision will
have a devastating economic impact on business and are
appealing to the
highest court in the land.
Tribal reaction to the Supreme Court appeal has been matter
of fact. "This
appeal was not unexpected," said Nooksak Fisheries director,
Bob Kelly.
According to Bill Dewey, spokesman for the Puget Sound
Shellfish Growers
Association, the appeal is a last-ditch effort to save, what
is for the most part,
small family-owned businesses that have been run in the
tidelands for
generations.
Ramifications
One of the main arguments of the appeal that would have
enormous
repercussions in Indian country if ruled upon, is the
application of the legal
principle of laches to treaties.
Laches is the historic equivalent of a property-rights
statute of limitations: If
someone waits too long to bring suit, they lose their claim
or right to sue,
especially when the other party knows nothing about the
claim and has
improved the property in question.
The growers are asking the court to decide if it is fair to
wait 135 years to
bring this claim, when no other citizen has such a right and
growers built these
farms from scratch without any notice of a claim in all of
that time.
The U.S Supreme Court declined 5 to 4, to rule on the
applicability of laches
to treaty claims in a 1985 decision between the County of
Oneida vs. the
Oneida Nation, because it opens up the huge issue of whether
tribes can
legally continue to file suits to implement treaty rights in
areas where their
rights are still being denied. <<END EXCERPT
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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