Wisconsin Walleye War
Civil unrest erupted in Wisconsin after U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crabb handed down a ruling on August 21, 1987 that affirmed the treaty right of six Ojibwe or Chippewa tribal governments to regulate their members' hunting and fishing outside of the reservation boundaries, based on the treaties of 1837 and 1842. The events were chronicled in at least two books, the film "Lighting the Seventh Fire," and in a Mother Jones cover story as Wisconsin's Walleye War.
Background
The conflict started almost two decades earlier when two members of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of the Ojibwe Nation crossed a reservation boundary that divided Big Round Lake, cut a hole in the ice and harvested fish with spears, contrary to Wisconsin state laws. In a class taught by attorney Larry Leventhal, the members had learned their band held by treaty an unresolved claim to off-reservation hunting and fishing rights in the northern part of the state. The members were arrested and a Sawyer County judge convicted them of poaching.
Lac Courte Oreilles joined the legal fight on behalf of the two tribal members. The case made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the state's argument that a lower court ruling upholding the treaty rights should be reversed. After the highest court refused to reverse the Seventh Court of Appeals' decision upholding the rights, five other Chippewa bands joined Lac Courte Oreilles' legal action. The Seventh Circuit sent the case back to U.S. District Court with instructions to determine the scope of the treaty rights and to resolve conflicts surrounding how the off-reservation resource harvests should be regulated.
In settling questions about regulation of off-reservation hunting and fishing, Crabb ruled the state could intervene to protect natural resources, but that tribes first had the right to establish their own regulatory system, if they showed the court their system was as protective of the resource as was the state's system. After detailed scientific testimony, Crabb approved a natural resource code adopted by the six tribal governments, which allowed members to harvest walleye and other fish using traditional methods during the spawning season, when lakes are closed to state-licensed anglers.
Conflict
The spring spearfishing season started somewhat peacefully in 1988, but in late April, residents and visitors of Park Falls, Wisconsin rallied at Butternut Lake, where a band of fishers led by former Lac du Flambeau judge and council member Tom Maulson (later pictured on the cover of Mother Jones) led a fishing expedition. The crowd pressed against the fishers, the tribal wardens and the few state game wardens who were there, pushing them toward the water. Local police declined to render mutual aid and the standoff lasted until a convoy of more neutral officers raced from Superior, Wisconsin, almost 100 miles (160 km) distant, and fought their way through the crowd to rescue the fishers and game wardens.
The 1989 fishing season started with the vivid memory of April, 1988 fresh in the minds of fishers, public officials, anti-treaty protesters and residents of northern Wisconsin in general. Thompson, a Republican governor, ordered the emergency government task force to keep the peace, but a Republican Party leader encouraged party members to support or even join the protests. Dressed in riot gear, police more accustomed to breaking up fights at Milwaukee sporting events stood shoulder to shoulder, often three deep, with sticks and shields ready to stop the crowd if they pressed past snow fences hastily erected for crowd control.
The unrest after Crabb's 1987 decision escalated enough that Governor Tommy Thompson mobilized the state's Division of Emergency Government to form a Treaty Rights Task Force. During the spring walleye spawning seasons of 1989, 1990 and 1991 the task force deployed hundreds of police officers from around the state to help local sheriffs maintain order at lakes where Chippewa members began exercising their newly-recognized rights. Hundreds of protesters lined boat landings to make their case that tribal members enjoyed "special rights" under Crabb's decision. Shouting slogans such as "timber niggers" and sometimes throwing rocks at tribal fishers and at the officials assigned to protect them, many of the protesters attempted to physically stop the tribal fishing. Protesters launched boats and circled the tribal fishers at high speed on the water, attempting to upend the tribal fishers who stood in their boats to spear fish under lamp-light. Others participated in mass arrests, at least one of which degraded into a melee when police moved to seize sound amplification devices from protest leaders.
Pro-treaty groups organized as the Midwest Treaty Network in 1989 in support of the Ojibwe fishing families. Local whites who questioned the anti-Indian groups' activities were often silenced. Activists from southern Wisconsin cities and from the Twin Cities of Minnesota trained witnesses to document the anti-Indian harassment and violnce at the boat landings, and issued Witness for Nonviolence Reports in 1990 and 1991. Convoys of activists from the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis also joined the protests, bringing Native drums to sound above the din of emergency power generators and protesters' chants.
Resolution
Protests subsided in 1991 as a result of developments on several fronts. Judge Crabb issued an injunction against the "Stop Treaty Abuse" group for physically harassing and blocking the exercise of treaty rights by the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe. (Lac Courte Oreilles had not been the target of any protests, primarily because of long-standing social relationships between tribal leaders and local resort owners.) Biological data from the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission had shown that the Ojibwe speared only 3 percent of the walleye in treaty-ceded territory. Protest leaders had lost considerable prestige by reports of racially motivated chants, gunshots, an occasional pipe bomb and frequent rock throwing and slingshot attacks. Also, in 1991, newly-elected Attorney General James Doyle (now Wisconsin governor) reached an agreement with the six tribes in which neither the state nor the Chippewa would further appeal the federal court rulings. The state legislature also passed a hunters' protection law, and a law requiring schools statewide to include information about local tribes in history and geography curricula. Later in the 1990s, some of the white sportfishing groups that had opposed Native American fishing rights came together with northern Wisconsin tribes to protect the fish from plans for metallic sulfide mining, particularly the Crandon mine.
References
- New Resource Wars by Al Gedicks
- Walleye Warriors by Walt Bresette and Rick Whaley
See also
External links
* Midwest Treaty Network http://www.alphacdc.com/treaty/content.html