Political Quotes

“I am glad to join my colleague, the senior Senator, to commemorate a great Washingtonian whom we lost last week, Billy Frank, Jr. Senator Murray and I were able to attend his memorial service yesterday in the South Puget Sound area with 6,000 other Washingtonians. That is what happens when a great leader is lost; a community shows up to commemorate him and his spirit. Everybody who knew Billy Frank across the United States of America--and there are many people from all over Indian Country who do know or knew of Billy Frank--will want us to remember he was a legend who walked among us because what he did was champion environmental rights and the rights of Native American people to fish and in some ways championed the salmon to make sure we had good habitat. Sometimes I wonder how a boy from the Nisqually River turned into being such a big Northwest Pacific hero, but for him, he started when he was a very young man listening to fishing stories of his father and many members of the Nisqually tribe. In a book about his life, his father Willie Frank, Sr., recalled a warden telling him, ``Your treaty isn't worth the paper it's printed on.'' So while Billy's family faced beatings and incarcerations and explicit and inexplicit racism, he decided he was going to defend those rights all the way to the Supreme Court. As he grew into an adolescent, his father said to him: Keep fishing even if they arrest you. Keep fishing even if they beat you.…”