Janet McCloud, also known as Yet-Si-Blue, (March 30, 1934 – November 25, 2003) was a prominent Native American and indigenous rights activist.
Her activism helped lead to the 1974 Boldt Decision, which earned her the title of "The Rosa Parks of the American Indian Movement."
She often took refuge in churches and foster homes, spending much of her formative years in the city—mainly out of touch with tribal customs and traditions.
She married and divorced young before meeting a Nisqually tribal fisherman and electrical lineman named Don McCloud in the early 1950s.
On January 6, 1962, dozens of Washington State game wardens stormed a group of Native Americans fishing the Nisqually River.
"When the raid ended after more than eight hours of sorties in wet brush and on the muddy, swollen stream, five Indians had been arrested and charged with `operating set nets capable of taking game fish.'"
In defiance of court orders, members began staging demonstrations dubbed "fish-ins", the beginning of what would come to be known as the Fish Wars.
Actor Marlon Brando and rights activist Dick Gregory went to Western Washington, joined fish-ins and lent their celebrity to the cause.
All the while, Janet McCloud documented the struggle as editor of Survival News, a newsletter that presented the natives' side of the fish wars.
She found an old mimeograph machine at a local thrift store, brought it home and recruited her children to help.
During one famous on October 13, 1965, a boat carrying several native fishermen, including Janet's husband and two sons, set a tribal net in the river as game wardens lay in waiting.
While McCloud was a practicing Catholic, the Fish Wars, along her status as a civil rights leader catapulted her to become more in touch with her native spirituality.
In the late 1960s, Janet met with Thomas Banyacya, an internationally known Hopi spiritual interpreter, who taught her to search for answers in peace.
[4] McCloud's social justice work also led her to serve as a delegate to a national conference on corrections, urging prisons to adopt native spirituality traditions for Indian inmates.
our people can come back to the center to find the calming effect; to reconnect with their spiritual self," McCloud, an Indian elder herself, wrote in 1999.
In August 1985, 300 Indigenous women gathered at Sapa Dawn to discuss social and economic issues faced by native families throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Leaders of the American Indian Movement, such as Dennis Banks and Russell Means, came to Sapa Dawn, as well as its sweat lodge, before launching their 1973 at Wounded Knee Occupation in South Dakota.