The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights

Introduction

† Introduction 1. Tribal member Scott Smith sharpens the tines of his fishing spear. Photo courtesy of the author. On October 25, 1989, the adult membership of the Lac du Flambeau band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians voted down tribal council Resolution 369 (89), a proposition that would have leased federally guaranteed treaty rights for off-reservation hunting, fishing, and gathering to the state of Wisconsin for a ten-year period, pending state and federal approval. The community, numbering some twenty-four hundred , would have received a package of social and economic programs , employment opportunities, and per capita cash payments collectively valued at fifty million dollars. The vote came toward the end of an intense six-year period of con- flict between the Flambeau band, its neighboring non-Indian communities , and the state. It was the culmination of a series of events and interactions between the six Wisconsin Chippewa bands that both reorganized their cultural identities and reconfigured the relationships among them, the latter through the emergence of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (glifwc), a consortium of eleven tribal governments from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In 1983, after nine years of litigation, the U.S. Court of Appeals had upheld the Wisconsin bands’ rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands and lakes of the northern third of the state—the area ceded in the treaties of 1837 and 1842. The court decision upheld the Indian right to use traditional methods to harvest fish. No one had been permitted to spear game fish in Wisconsin for over a century before that decision. The conflict focused on the Lac du Flambeau band’s harvesting of spawning walleyed pike, a species of game fish that the state had been cultivating in the northern lakes for over a century. Many non-Indians in the politically conservative north-central area of Wisconsin saw themselves as dependent on tourism and feared that spearfishing would destroy the economy over time. They were concerned that Ojibwe spearfishing would deplete the fish population and leave little for tourists. Non-Indian groups such as Equal Rights 4 Introduction for Everyone, Protect America’s Rights and Resources (parr), and Stop Treaty Abuse/Wisconsin (sta/w) emerged and became allied with national anti-Indian organizations in order to oppose the local Indian exercise of treaty rights. Basing their opposition on the principle that such rights represented a violation of equal justice under the law—as similar groups had done in the Northwest (Cohen et al. 1986) and Michigan (Doherty 1990)—hundreds of non-Indians protested at the lakes where Indian people spearfished. Between 1985 and 1991, hundreds of protesters were arrested for acts of civil disobedience. The state spent millions of dollars on law enforcement, and the social fabric of northern Wisconsin became torn along racial lines through numerous acts of overt hostility and violence between tribal members and non-Indians. Some Anishinaabe people at the Lac du Flambeau reservation attempted to mold this conflict into a political and social movement, drawing on the local cultural capital they had inherited as well as their relationships with other Indians in the region and beyond. Tribal members helped revive the community’s memory of a relationship with the federal government that had been ratified a century and a half earlier and evoked culturally specific and long-contested subsistence practices such as spearfishing and ‘‘violating’’ (hunting out of the state’s season). Cultural practices that had retreated to the relative privacy of extended family gatherings over the course of the century became realized once again at the community level. Large feasts and ceremonies bolstered and hardened the resolve of those who were taking the risk of reimagining Lac du Flambeau. Prophecy reemerged and played a key role in this unfolding drama. In an attempt to buy out the Lac du Flambeau band, the state offered its members effectively the equivalent of over three hundred dollars per fish speared. The offer was meant to quell the social unrest brought about by the bands’ spearing of 2 percent of the annual 670,000 walleyed pike taken from the lakes by sportfishers in the ceded territories. The value of the exercise of these rights in monetary terms would have been more than compensated by the proposed per capita payments alone. More interesting still, only a small proportion of tribal members—no more...