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Chapter Eleven. Fishing: Cultural Changes
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Chapter Eleven Fishing: Cultural Changes “We have limits on the number of trout and other fish you can take each day. Some of the people accept and follow them. Others say that it’s the white man’s way and that one should take what one needs and not waste. They say, `In the old days if you needed four trout for a nice meal you caught four. Now with the limit at ten, people may take ten even when they only need four.’” —A Menominee Conservation Commission member DOUGLAS MEDIN OF our research team grew up in Iowa and Minnesota in a typical midwestern hunting and fishing family. Here is his first-person perspective on that time: At least in northern Minnesota in the 1950s and ’60s, it seemed like everyone was fishing for food. Sure, there were lots of tales about “the big one that got away” (or even more about the big one that didn’t) and some people had trophy-sized fish mounted, but these events were incidental to, or a byproduct of, our primary orientation. Mind you, fishing was a lot of fun, especially when you had loon families to watch or a grandmother to tell you stories during the quiet periods . Every part of it was fun. In the morning we’d seine for minnows to use for bait fish. As a teenager I remember pulling the seine with my grandmother or my great aunt, often with middle-aged male relatives watching us from the dock. They paid for their share of the bait fish we gave them with a lot of kidding about why they were so afraid to get wet. Fishing itself was intrinsically enjoyable. There were white pine and birches along Woman Lake’s shoreline, and sometimes we would enjoy the sight of a porcupine climbing in the trees. Fishing was an absorbing activity. It was a pleasure to be able to cast one’s lure or bait into a particular location (after many hours of practice from the dock). I liked watch120 Fishing 121 ing dragonflies land on my bobber. And it was a delight to be able to tell what kind of fish had hit the bait by the way the bobber responded: if it skimmed across the water it was a crappie; if it popped but without any intensity it was a perch; a northern would make it just disappear with a quiet intensity. Typically, we would go out about four o’clock, provisioned with peanut -butter sandwiches and cookies. We’d fish near drop-offs on the lake bottom, not far from shore. We didn’t have a depth locator, so my job was to lower the anchor until I could feel it touch bottom, then pull it up and down until we found the drop-off. For the first hour or so we’d catch a few northerns and perhaps a largemouth bass and the occasional crappie . Then toward sundown the walleyes would start to move into the shallows to feed, and things often got pretty busy. We were happy for what we caught and didn’t aim for just the large fish that some consider trophies. We’d try to time it so that we could leave just before the mosquitoes came out on the lake in search of our blood. The smelly lotion-form 6–12 brand repellent was not much of a deterrent, so we’d rush home just before dark. To complete the fishing activity, we would clean the fish in our six-foot-square fish house, equipped with pliers for holding fish, a scaler for panfish, a set of knives, and a grindstone used to keep those knives sharp. Even cleaning fish was interesting. You could open the stomach of a northern to see what it had been eating. Just learning how to clean different kinds of fish made me feel less of a novice. My grandmother showed me how to cut out the infamous Y-bones on a northern or what my great-aunt called the “stinkbone” on a crappie. I learned that you can age fish by the growth rings on their scales. I’m sure that when I regaled my parents with my newfound wisdom they were able to pretend they were hearing it for the first time. We never heard the term “catch-and-release.” Sure, we would release undersized fish, but larger fish were caught to be consumed by our family or the frequent visitors to...