this excerpt explains how the POTLATCH Economy actually worked including the built-in OVERSIGHT
Living within nature’s laws
Salmon, and good salmon management, rest atop a couple of apolitical paradoxes. These great fish are extremely hardy seafarers, migrating across thousands of miles of ocean in their lifetimes. But they are also exceedingly vulnerable, especially when traveling inland: at the start and end of their lives they must navigate a bewildering network of tiny tributaries that feed the Pacific Northwest’s great rivers.
Salmon are rugged, agile carnivores as adults, but, much like humans, are fragile when young, needing precise, nurturing conditions to survive. A salmon that leaves, say, the Skeena watershed as a fry will cross many jurisdictional boundaries, and a great ocean, before returning to the stream where it was born to spawn. Via this complex lifecycle, the salmon of the past have fed many mouths, along with US, Canadian and Tribal communities, which all depend on the reliable yearly return of the fish.
This mix of sprawling international migration and hyperlocal maturation make multilateral salmon management both a nightmare and a necessity.
That was true even before Europeans arrived. The pre-contact Tsimshian and their neighbors built an entire social system with the purpose of managing this crucial fishery — establishing a fantastically complicated network of overlapping rights to the salmon run, administered by elected chiefs from noble families put in place by the “feast hall,” a sort of parliament by roving dinner party which oversaw fishing territories. At the feasts, the clan chiefs assigned responsibilities for managing and protecting territories; they negotiated resource disputes; sometimes they stripped rights from chiefs who were abusing their power.
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/as-northwest-salmon-economy-teeters-on-brink-trump-gives-it-a-push/