New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

5. Ironies of Articulating Continuity at Lac du Flambeau

KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 98 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [98], (1) Lines: 0 to 51 ——— 0.03001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [98], (1) 5. Ironies of Articulating Continuity at Lac du Flambeau larry nesper Introduction To account for the “Walleye War” between the Lac du Flambeau band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and organized groups of non-Indians opposed to treaties in northern Wisconsin in the 1980s we must undertake a certain kind of archaeology of cultural dispositions. I will argue here that although the reservation moved rapidly from obscurity to the front pages of the nation’s newspapers during that decade there are far more sociocultural and historical continuities than discontinuities. In 1983 the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal in Chicago surprised everyone when it reversed a district court decision and found all of the Chippewa bands’ off-reservation hunting, fishing, and gathering rights (originally reserved in the mid-1900s in treaties ceding lands to the federal government) to be good law. Those lands had become northern Wisconsin , the upper peninsula of Michigan, and northeastern Minnesota. The three states had been infringing on the Indians’ rights for more than a century by undertaking projects of self-definition that marginalized the Indian communities legally, politically, economically, and socially. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, off-reservation usufruct rights did not exist de jure, though they were surreptitiously exercised, often nocturnally , and were justified by ongoing Indian legal resistance projects that had significant consequences. Spearfishing, Culture, and Conflict The Lac du Flambeau people have deeply identified with night hunting and fishing for about two and a half centuries. François Mahliot traded at “Lac au Flambeau” in 1805–6, as he recorded it in the journal required by KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 99 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [99], (2) Lines: 51 to 77 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [99], (2) his employers, the Northwest Company. His is the first published reference to what would subsequently be translated “Torch Lake” (Mahliot 1910). In William Whipple Warren’s history, written in the winter of 1852–53 based on conversations he had in the late 1840s, the bilingual, mixedblood historian offers 1745 as the approximate date for the establishment of permanent villages in the region of Wisconsin that had formerly been Dakota and Fox territory. Furthermore, he adds: The French early designated that portion of the tribe who occupied the head-waters of the Wisconsin, as the Lac du Flambeau band, from the circumstance of their locating their central village or summer residence, at the lake known by this name. The Ojibways term it Waus-wag-im-ing (Lake of Torches), from the custom of spearing fish by torch-light, early practiced by the hunters of their tribe who first took possession of it. [1985(1885):190] Though the practice of spearing fish was widespread (the only areas of the continent where fish were not speared were the Great Plains and the Great Basin [Rostlund 1952:293]), the practice of spearing at night may have been coterminus with the Algonquians’ residence in the area. The first description of this practice in the published North American literature is by Paul Le Jeune (1897:311) in his “Relation of What Occurred in New France in the Year 1634.” He writes about Algonquian people in the area of Quebec. David Thompson’s Narrative of His Exploration in Western America, 1784–1812 gives an account of spearing at Red Lake in midApril in what would become Minnesota (1916:267–268). Johann Georg Kohl (1860:328), the German ethnographer, geographer, and travel writer, visited the Lake Superior country in the mid-1850s and described both spearing fish and hunting at night by torchlight. In the early twentieth century Frances Densmore notes that “the larger fish were speared and were best secured at night” (1929...