Like many tribes in the Pacific Northwest, the Yurok had to fight hard to gain the fishing rights granted to them by government treaties generations ago. The so-called “fish wars” or “fish-ins” (in the style of Civil Rights lunch counter protests) pitted the tribes against police, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (UFWS), and other government agencies, until the courts finally decreed during the 1970s that Native Americans be allowed to fish the rivers as they had for thousands of years. Yet within a few decades, people began to realize that just because they had the right to fish didn’t mean there would be fish in the river. Decades of mismanagement, damming, and over-allocation of water had decimated the fish stocks.