Davis "Yellowash" Washines stood at the Columbia River and called the toxic sediments pooling near Bonneville Dam what a police chief sees when he arrives at a scene of harm: a crime. The water was a victim. The salmon were victims. The people who depended on them were victims. It was not a metaphor. It was law enforcement language applied to a river he had known all his life, and it revealed how Washines moved between worlds—law and ceremony, policy and memory, the responsibilities of office and the deeper obligations of kinship to a place.
Washines, a Yakama elder who died on May 1st at his home in White Swan, Washington, at 74, spent five decades in roles that, taken individually, sound like a résumé: Yakama Tribal Police chief (1986 onwards), Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission police chief, Yakama Nation General Council chairman, counselor, language instructor, museum and university board trustee. But those titles sketch only the outline of a life spent defending treaty rights and the health of Nch'i-Wána—the Columbia River, known by that name to the Yakama people since time immemorial. He was a man, colleagues said, who did not need force to command a room. His authority was steady. He spoke calmly, often with a smile, and people listened.
He began his public service in 1973 with the Yakama Tribal Police Department at a time when much of the river's harm was treated as history or settled policy. The dams had been built. Salmon still had to pass through polluted water. Washines insisted these were not historical matters—they were continuing harms, obligations unfulfilled. He was a descendant of the Klickitat Tribe, one of the 14 original signers of the 1855 treaty, and he carried that inheritance with care. The salmon were among the First Foods, served first at ceremonial meals in recognition of their sacrifice. Safe fish required safe water. Treaty rights, in his telling, included the right to fish without poison.
His work wove together law, culture, and education. In the 1990s, when gang violence troubled tribal lands, he looked beyond enforcement to the deeper loss—the disconnection from rites and identity that had left some young people without firm ground. He worked in schools as a counselor and language instructor. He conducted traditional ceremonies across the region, drawing on his knowledge of language, culture, and oral history. He even helped restore the original spelling of "Yakama" to the Yakama Nation, as recorded in the treaty itself, a quiet act of restoration that honored the ancestors' words.
Bradford Island, near Bonneville Dam, became a focal point of his persistence. The 2022 designation as a Superfund site marked years of advocacy, but Washines did not treat it as an endpoint. The work, he said, was for clean, healthy fish that were safe to eat. It was for the children and grandchildren who would inherit the river, and for those who could not speak for themselves. "We don't own this," he once said. "It belongs to our children. It belongs to our grandchildren. And we're just taking care of it for them." That was not ceremonial language. It was the way he lived.