"Antone Lucier story …story of the military coming to drive them off of Peacock Spit for our traditional fishing ground, our place to fish. I think it was in the 1920's. I think maybe it was in 1928. The Chinook fishermen drove the military off with fists and oars. They pushed them back up towards Chinook and kept fishing.

"Basically, the military knew they were going to have to kill this 120 Chinook men before they'd leave that spot. So those guys did fish. They fished for that season, but that was pretty much the end of it. After that, they made sure the military got there before the Indians did" (Tony Johnson interview: 2002).

"My grandpa and everyone before him, of course, were fishermen, so, fishing rights are really important to me. That's where Federal recognition is essential to us because there are plenty of Chinooks who should and want to make a living fishing. They want to be able to fish and sell that fish. Me, myself, if I caught enough fish to sell it, that's fine, pay for the gas in a boat or whatever, but my interest is the food. We can't be Chinook Indians unless we're eating fish, you know. We need that fish -- sturgeon, salmon, smelt, and flounder. Those are food must have to be Chinook Indians. How do we raise a kid up to be a Chinook Indian if we don't have fish?

Tony Johnson and son; Sam. K. Lugthart photo

"We've had a lot more time adjusting to English that we have adjusting to not having fish.

"We've spoke English, at least, bilingually for generations, and a lot of our cultural knowledge has been able to come across that shift of language, but our ability to fish as Indians got taken away in the 1980's. You know, this is new history to us. People my age or before me could learn how to gillnet fish and know how to mend a net or run a boat. But, young kids, the age of my son, don't have that chance. Until we fix it, until the government restores our recognition as an Indian tribe, we are in that predicament.

"This is new history, this isn't old history. You know, they were taking just our grandparent's generation to Indian school. They gave that same generation allotments on the Quinault Reservation, you know. Their parents were going to Indian hospitals to have their babies, so why is it, even at that time, the Federal Government denied that we were Indians" (Tony Johnson interview: 2002)?

"I got on the council in 1990; I was the only woman on it. Now we have three.

"What matters most to me as a Chinook person is that our tribe gets recognition. We need fishing rights. We need health care, a community center, maybe, office for our tribe. We need land and economic development.

"A few years back, a Lewis and Clark foundation had a meeting down at Fort Clatsop with a salmon dinner and salmon ceremony. The men of tribe were there and when the people asked them to speak, they all said they didn't have anything to say. Then we got connected with Fort Clatsop and those people kept asking us questions and you could hardly shut the Chinook men up. We all brought things that we had to display for them.

"Our whole story was communicated there. Those people are very supportive of our recognition effort. The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, I think, will be beneficial to our tribe" (Darlene Calhoun Breuher).