After the Storm: Ojibwe Treaty Rights Twenty-Five Years after the Voigt Decision

Abstract

After the Storm:Ojibwe Treaty Rights Twenty-Five Years after the Voigt Decision Patty Loew (bio) and James Thannum (bio) In April 2009, when Ojibwe tribal members Neil and Chris Peterson traveled to Trout Lake to spear walleye pike in a centuries-old tribal tradition, the boat landing was quiet.1 There were no rock-throwing crowds, no gauntlets of angry demonstrators to walk, and no television reporters to dodge. No one attempted to swamp their boat. Absent were signs that read "Save a Fish, Spear an Indian." Twenty-five years ago, when Ojibwe spearfishers, like the Peterson brothers, attempted to harvest their walleyes, northern Wisconsin boat landings were battlegrounds of chaos and violence. The struggle involved the exercise of hunting, fishing, and gathering rights reserved in three mid-nineteenth-century land cession treaties the Ojibwe negotiated with the federal government. In 1974 the Ojibwe initiated a successful lawsuit against the state of Wisconsin, arguing that the state had systematically suppressed those rights throughout the twentieth century. However, when the modern Ojibwe walleye harvest began in 1985, angry mobs attempted to prevent tribal spearers from exercising their treaty rights in what one tribal member described as a "war-like, siege-like occupation."2 It became clear to the Ojibwe that opposition to their court-affirmed treaty rights was not limited to the recent actions of treaty opponents in northern Wisconsin. It was part of an ongoing nationwide struggle typified by the "fish-ins" of the 1960s, when Indian nations in the Northwest reaffirmed their treaty fishing rights along the Columbia River. As in the Northwest, antitreaty groups in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota failed to understand that when tribes ceded land and retained off-reservation harvesting rights on those lands and waters, they had established [End Page 161] contractual obligations with the United States. This failure to acknowledge that the age of a contract does not impact its validity laid the foundation for ongoing conflict throughout the Great Lakes region in the coming decades. In 1999 the struggle culminated in the US Supreme Court's affirmation of Ojibwe treaty rights in its historic Minnesota v. Mille Lacs decision, a judgment legal observers described as a clear victory for proponents of Indian sovereignty. This article examines the socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the spearfishing crisis twenty-five years ago and the state of relations between Native and non-Native residents in the ceded territory today. It focuses on Wisconsin, where the most virulent protests occurred. Because most residents learned about the controversy through newspaper and television news accounts, the article pays special attention to media coverage of the boat landing struggles. It argues that the relative calm that exists today is attributable to increased public awareness about treaty rights and sovereignty, largely due to education efforts and better reporting by the media. It also argues that the contributions of the Ojibwe bands themselves over the past twenty-five years to maintain and improve the natural resources within the ceded territory has also had a positive effect. Today, few would describe Wisconsin as the "Mississippi of the North," as the national media did twenty-five years ago.3 The boat landings are silent. The walleye resource has remained stable. Tourism has not collapsed, as treaty opponents had predicted, and nearly all counties within the ceded territory have seen growth rates in per capita income that far exceed that of the state as a whole.4 Concepts like "treaty rights" and "Indian sovereignty" no longer elicit feelings of panic. Although some tribal members suggest that the bigotry that fueled the violent protests twenty-five years ago still lurks under the surface, most agree that overt racism is gone. The Treaties The contemporary struggles had their roots in four treaties signed in 1836, 1837, 1842, and 1854 in which the Ojibwe ceded millions of acres in the Great Lakes region. Historian David Wrone estimated that the treaties brought to the United States about 170 billion board feet of timber, 150 billion tons of iron ore, and 15,000 lakes as well as rivers, ports, and [End Page 162] power sites.5 In exchange, the Ojibwe insisted upon the right to hunt, fish...