Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian

11. The Politics of Cultural Revitalization and Intertribal Resource Management: The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission and the States of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota

Introduction In multiplying current examples of putatively anti-ecological practice among American Indian peoples in The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech (1999, 216) included the Wisconsin Ojibwes, who “reportedly let thousands of fish spoil in warm weather,” a cryptic reference to a legal, social, and political conflict between the bands of Lake Superior Ojibwe Indians in northern Wisconsin that spanned the last quarter of the twentieth century . Krech was making a general point: Indians have “a mixed relationship to the environment,” and the practice of regarding them as conservationists strips real people “of all agency in their lives except when their actions fit the image of the Ecological Indian” (216). It is nonetheless unfortunate that he chose to make his point at the expense of the Wisconsin Ojibwes, partially owing to the nature of the evidence he drew upon (though admittedly signaled by the use of the qualifier “reportedly”), but also because they are deeply, effectively, and legally involved in the management of the natural resources of the northern third of Wisconsin, by virtue which they are critiquing the image of the ecological Indian in the region’s shared collective consciousness. In 1983, after nearly ten years of litigation, the bands of Lake Superior Ojibwes had their treaty-based off-reservation hunting, fishing, and gath11 . The Politics of Cultural Revitalization and Intertribal Resource Management The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission and the States of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota Larry Nesper and James H. Schlender 278 | larry nesper and james h. schlender ering rights of use and self-regulation upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The bands are regarded implicitly as sovereign entities in the U.S. Constitution (see the commerce clause, art. 1, §8, and the supremacy clause, art. 6, cl. 2), and these rights were inherent aspects of their internal sovereignty and had been explicitly reserved at the time the treaties were signed. Well before, at Greenville in 1795, the tribes had forgone their external sovereignty—that is, their unencumbered right and historic practice to treat with any other sovereign—in favor of the protection of the United States, thus giving rise to a political and moral relationship of trust fraught with honor and promise. With their usufructuary rights affirmed by the federal judiciary after a lapse of more than a century, the next eight years entailed a process of negotiating the exercise of these rights with the state of Wisconsin, orchestrated by a non-Indian protest movement and shaped by an Ojibwe cultural renaissance (Nesper 2002). A similar process would later take place in Minnesota. In northern Wisconsin, as well as earlier in Washington State (Cohen, La France, et al. 1986) and in Michigan (Doherty 1990), when Indian people became viable political actors in a particular context—that is, when they have been able to establish their right to manage a resource that is not perceived by the dominant society as diminishing (Sider 1987, 16)—whatever ambient image of the ecological Indian might have been previously lurking in the consciousness of local non-Indians quickly gave way to the alternative of the rampaging savage. Given what little political power Indian and non-Indian people in the northern tier of Wisconsin counties really had in the early 1980s, threats to the perpetuation of a lucrative image of the North Woods that cannot be ignored or suppressed are genuinely frightening . The state’s natural resource policy in the north for the last century has been to seek to reclaim “the cutover”—a wasteland left by the logging companies between 1880 and 1920 when they logged off more than sixty billion board feet of timber (Gough 1997)—and maintain it as a forest crop land for use as a source for timber and as a recreational playground for midwestern metropolitans. As a result, the reality of local political weakness had not worked to the locals’ disadvantage. However, when the federal gov- the politics of cultural revitalization | 279 ernment recognized the right of the bands whose forebears signed the land cessions to not only hunt, fish, and gather on these lands but also to regulate themselves in so doing, northern Wisconsin generated some memorable reactionary images. Within a week of the Seventh Circuit Court’s decision, a local semiweekly, the Lakeland Times (published in Minocqua, a prominent North Woods tourist destination just outside the Lac du Flambeau reservation), headlined, “Ruling Allows...