- Today, we are pleased to introduce Professor Larry Nesper
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are
not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
Larry Nesper is a professor of
Anthropology and American Indian Studies
at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
He received his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1994
and has worked as a consultant for several of the Ojibwe bands
and the Great Lakes Indian and Fish and Wildlife Commission.
His current research is on
the tribal courts in the state of Wisconsin
and their relationships with the state courts.
And he is interested in extending the Wisconsin Idea to
Native nations and developing collaborative research
relationships between the tribes of the state and the university.
Here, today, to discuss the Walleye War and its aftermath,
please join me in welcoming Larry Nesper.
[applause]
- Thank you, Katie.
And thank you all for coming out at this hour
on such a beautiful day.
So it's a pleasure to be here, and I'm going to talk about
something that, from the looks of this audience,
that a number of people probably have memories of.
So if I just say real quick, how many people have memory
of the Walleye Conflict?
All right, about half or so.
So I'll go into it.
I'll talk a little bit about what this conflict was about,
how it was resolved, and the effects that it has had both in
the tribal communities in the state as well as in the
relationship between the state and the tribes in Wisconsin.
So it's the topic of a book that I wrote.
It was actually written out of my dissertation,
which was the sort of first take on this thing,
and then it became a book in 2002.
And I've subsequently been sort of working in this area
ever since that time.
So probably an iconic image of this would be
someone spearing a walleyed pike.
Walleyed pike were speared when the water gets to be about
43 degrees and the fish start coming into spawn,
and the tribes get out there and harvest mostly males.
About 80% or 90% of the fish that are taken are males
and put in big tins like this, brought back.
I'll say more about this.
A highly regulated fishery.
That's something that was not well known by a lot of people
who were protesting this because you probably remember
there was quite a bit of protest.
There's not a great shot of it, but the boat landings where
Indian people came out for, oh, about a two- or three-week
period in April or early May.
They'd come out to spear in early evening,
and they were met by hundreds of protesters who contested the
right, this treaty right to be able to do this.
So I'm going to talk a little bit
about what this treaties rights.
There's another iconic image.
Some of you might remember "Save a walleye, spear Indian."
So we had very strong racial epithets being slung.
And this is another rather iconic image, I think.
Somebody had created that image of an Indian person
on the end of a spear.
And this the kind of image that you see repeated
in lots of different venues.
At the time, there was an attempt,
the treaty beer was being produced,
which was an anti-Indian, anti-treaty fundraising effort
that would get people out of jail who were being arrested for
violating the civil rights of Indian people while they were
exercising their treaty rights.
And so you had this advertised
at a number of locations in Minocqua.
This is all about, oh, 25 years ago.
The war, really, I would put the dates on this somewhere between
about 1985 an about 1991.
And we'll say a little about this and what this originates
with.
There's a map that shows our state,
in some ways before it was a state, 1837 and 1842.
These are the lands that were ceded by the tribes
to the federal government starting in 1836
and running all the way across to 1854.
These are called cessions.
Each one of these would be called a land cession.
And they're effectively real estate transactions
between sovereign entities.
That's really what a treaty often is.
It's some sort of exchange, some sort of agreement.
But what's important about it
is that it's between sovereign entities.
I asked my students, is the word "tribe", does the word "tribe"
appear in the Constitution of the United States?
They're not sure.
I don't know that that's a credit
to our high school system, but they are not always sure.
The word tribe does, in fact, appear.
The word tribes appears
in the Constitution of the United States.
And it appears in the Commerce Clause
under the powers of Congress.
And for our purposes, the significant of this is
that tribes are antecedent sovereigns.
They are sovereigns that the United States recognized
that existed before the United States existed that
the United States would have to deal with and contend with.
Okay?
So if you, in your mind, imagine the Constitutional Convention,
it's a bunch of representatives from states,
and what they're doing, they're creating a federal government,
they're recognizing the political landscape,
they're basically saying there are states in the world,
there are foreign nations in the world,
and there are tribes in the world,
and we're going to become another sovereign nation
like those foreign nations.
So it's explicitly recognized
in the Constitution of the United States as different
from what we're creating as the United States.
And the mechanism by which you deal with other sovereigns
is the treaty power.
You can't legislate over other national entities.
And what you do, therefore, is you use the treaty power.
And for our purposes, what's important about this
is that the treaties are the supreme law of the land,
they supersede what happens at the state level.
The state can make the laws that it makes.
If there is a treaty that deals with the same subject matter
area, it's the treaty law that supersedes the state law,
and that's important for understanding the nature
of the conflict that took place between the tribes,
the Ojibwe tribes and the state of Wisconsin and others
in the late '80s and into the early '90s.
So if we back this up and go back to the early treaty period,
once the United States has won the right from Great Britain
through the war to this northwestern area,
we're going to get the attempt to,
from America's point of view, to stop the intertribal warfare,
which they saw as interfering with the fur trade,
and do that because we misunderstood.
We thought that this was all about territorial war.
It really wasn't territorial.
Those weren't the motivations for the warfare.
But nonetheless, we said we're going got get
the border straightened out, and we would do that with
the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825,
and it's going to establish whose land is whose,
which is to say who the United States government
is going to negotiate with for purposes of land cessions
that are to come.
So then we get a map of Wisconsin
that you probably have never seen before.
But this is a map of the treaty cessions, the land cessions.
They're also called rice areas.
And these are basically chunks of land that were identified,
delineated in the treaty process,
and effectively ceded to the federal government,
always in exchange for something.
Money, services, various different kinds of guarantees.
And we're going to focus on the ones that are significant here:
the Ojibwe land cessions.
So those are the two Ojibwe land cessions that these treaties
that make a difference in terms of the whole thing.
They have numbers.
So there's 242 and 261.
All of these chunks of real estate are identified
by a number.
I tell my students those are suitable for tattoos, right?
Because if you're born up in this area,
you will always have been born in, you know,
treat cession number 242.
That's never going to change, so you can do that.
It won't be like having Max on your arm that says, you know,
you may not love Max in 10 years.
You know? [laughter]
So anyway, 242 was ceded in the 1837 treaty.
261 was ceded in the 1842 treaty.
And we look at this thing, and what was the deal?
Basically, the United States wanted to purchase this land to
get access to the pine trees.
That was the intent.
No one, no really, on the non-Indian side,
had any expectation, particularly
of settling in this region.
They didn't think it was good for much
other than the pine trees.
So the tribes, what they said, "Well, we live here, and yes,
we will sell this to you, but we want to continue to live here
and we want," expressed in a very poetic way by one of these
leaders, and says, "we wish to hold on to the tree where we get
our living," which is the maple trees,
"the streams where we drink, and the waters that give us life."
So they had no expectation about leaving it
and leaving this area.
Though this was nationally a period where many of the
treaties were removal treaties where the tribes were being
removed to west of the Mississippi River,
this is not a removal treaty.
People have the expectation that they're going to continue to
live here, and you can see it by the terms of the treaty in 1837.
Every year, $9500 in money, $19,000 in goods,
$3,000 to establish blacksmith shops
and furnishing them with iron and steel.
You don't agree to give the tribes,
in exchange for the land, blacksmith shops unless
everybody knows that everybody's going to stay in place,
that the tribes are going to continue to stay there.
13 million acres.
$1,000 for farmers.
We're going to supply them with laborers, grain, seeds.
$2,000 in provisions.
$500 in tobacco.
And then we get to the really important article,
which is to say that privilege of hunting, fishing,
and gathering in the wild rice upon the lands, the rivers,
the lakes, including the ceded territory,
is guaranteed to the Indians during the pleasure of the
President.
Indian people said we're going to stay.
The United States government said fine.
Indian people said we're going to hunt, fish,
and gather on this land.
And the United States government said fine.
Regulate yourself.
You know what you're doing. You've been living here forever.
You have an investment and sustainability or whatever they
said at that time in terms of the permanence of an Indian
presence here.
This is an interesting phrase.
This sounds like the President can change his mind
at any time he wants.
From what we know now, that phrase was not translated
and told to the Indian people at the time to talk,
to explain to them that the President
can change his mind at any time.
That was not something--
They would have never agreed to that.
They had full expectation from the treaty language
that was written in their language
that they would continue to be able to stay.
All right, I want to introduce an idea here that when you
interpret treaties, you have to understand treaties are not--
That's a white idea.
That's a western idea.
That's not an indigenous concept.
So that what has evolved legally in the United States is that
when we interpret treaties, we have to interpret them according
to some canons, some agreed upon protocols,
and that is that when an expression is ambiguous
it must be resolved in favor of the Indian parties,
they should be interpreted the way
Indians would have understood them and
they must be liberally construed in favor of the Indians.
So those are basically three different ways of saying
pretty much the same thing, by my reading.
But if people said we want to continue to hunt, fish,
and gather, that must be understood in a very expansive
sense in terms of treaty construction of what Indian
people understood when they were agreeing to do that.
1842 we're going to get another treaty. Okay?
And notice there's no reservations at this point.
We don't have reservations.
There's almost no reservations anywhere in the United States
at this time.
People are not thinking in terms of reservations quite yet.
They are thinking in terms of removal because by now,
as you may know, the Cherokees are out of the southeast,
a lot of the tribes in the east have now been pushed out to
Oklahoma territory, or Indian territory as they called it.
So this is a similar kind of treaty.
This is for the copper.
For 20 years, 12-and-a-half thousand in money,
10.5 in goods, 2,000 in provisions and tobacco.
2,000, again, blacksmith shops, salaries, iron in steel.
These are institutional structures,
presuming Indian people are going to stay in place.
Indian people want these shops here for tools.
20 years, 1,000, two more farmers, carpenters,
school support for Indian people, agricultural fund,
big payment to the traders who our Indian people are in debt to
them, and they're going to get paid off through this treaty.
And then we get the same thing.
Another provision in the treaty that says
the right to hunt on the ceded territory,
all the other usual privileges of occupancy are,
until required to remove by the President of the United States.
They were told you're never going to have to remove.
We put this in all the treaties.
Behave yourselves, don't cause any trouble,
don't kill any white people,
and we will never have to exercise this clause.
And Indian people effectively agreed to this and were very
peaceful and would stay very peaceful for a long time.
So, what we've got built into these treaties, then,
is the presumption that Indian people are going to continue to
live in the land they ceded.
They've basically sold the right to say no.
That's basically what they've said.
They've basically said, yes, you can now decide who's going to
come in here, cut the trees, do the mining, etc.
We're going to get another treaty when iron ore
is discovered up in this area, as some of you may know.
Up in 332 you can find the Mesabi Iron Range.
We're going to get another treaty in this area we get,
from the treaty documents itself, the most strenuous,
they most strenuously insist upon then the privilege of
remaining in the country which they reside.
They don't want to move.
They know that other tribes have been moved out,
and they know they don't want to do that.
So article 11, same thing.
They should have the right to hunt and fish in that area until
otherwise ordered by the President.
We're going to get the reservations out of this treaty.
There had been an attempt to move Indian people from northern
Wisconsin in 1850, and so what the Indian people said is that
we don't want to ever be moved out of here.
We want land that is especially designated for us.
We're going to continue to hunt, fish,
and gather throughout the ceded territory,
but we know we want to stay.
Keep us here, and we designate reservations at that time.
So we get that.
And we can tell from photographs from the period,
Indian people continue to live off the land.
This photograph is about 1900, and I think of it as a kind of
postcard for purposes of advertising Indian competence.
This man is effectively saying, "I can hunt.
Hire me, I'll be your guide."
Here are these crafts that people want and such.
We've got other items in here to suggest a permanent presence.
This is off the reservation.
This is not on the reservation.
At the same time, Wisconsin is beginning to apply its laws to
Indian people in violation of federal law.
Because, as you might remember,
treaty law supersedes state law, right?
The treaty said they can hunt, fish, and gather on these lands.
Wisconsin is beginning to say we're going to
take jurisdiction, we're going to write the rules
for hunting, fishing, and gathering,
and we get deer seasons and we get fish seasons.
We get all kinds of laws regulating.
We get licensing and all that kind of stuff.
Indian people saying no, you can't do this to us.
We have a treaty right.
But they're saying it in their own language.
They're poor.
They don't have the kinds of representation they can have.
1908, the Wisconsin Supreme Court says we have jurisdiction
over Indian hunting and fishing.
The federal government is not stepping up at this point.
The federal government has a trust obligation to the tribes
that it is not acting upon at this time.
It's not stepping up and saying,
"Wait a minute, Wisconsin. There's a treaty in place
that allows these people to regulate themselves."
They're not doing that, and the result is a lot of bitter,
strong feeling is developing And that develops over the course of
the late 19th century, into the 20th century.
It gets so bad that by the 1950s the Bad River tribe declares a
state of cold war against the DNR.
They're constantly being harassed.
Their rifles are being confiscated.
Their nets are being confiscated.
Their spears, their fish, their deer that they're hunting.
People are being put in jail, and they constantly are saying,
"We have a treaty right to this.
We have a treaty right to this."
And the state government keeps on harassing them with this.
So, there's a lot of stuff to say about the early 20th
century, but I'm going to speed this up to get to the war itself
and its aftermath.
We get a big decision in 1974 in the state of Washington that
upholds Indian fishing rights in their usual and accustom places.
That was the language in the treaty
with the Washington tribes.
Within weeks of that decision in Washington,
two brothers from the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation up in near
Hayward go off reservation with a fishing spear and they tell
the warden, "We're going to do this."
The warden says, "Don't do this.
I'll arrest you."
They pull out this treaty and says,
"I've got a treaty that says I can do this."
And, you know, the rest, really, is history,
as we're going to find out.
They're going to be arrested.
It goes to the federal court.
They lose in 1978 just down the street, around the corner here.
They lose in a case called Lac Courte Oreilles v.
Voigt in the federal district court.
The tribes then, instead of walking away from this,
they go down the 7th Circuit Court in 1983.
It's reversed and treaty rights are upheld.
And from what I've been told, the phones in the DNR were
flying off the hook because Indian people just went out and
they began hunting and fishing as they had been doing in
decades long before.
And we got the beginnings of what I would call and others
would call the Walleye War.
1984, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission
is formed.
That is a kind of Ojibwe DNR.
It is a multi-band natural resource agency.
And I would say in 1989, the conflict over the walleye spear
fishing peaks with hundreds of arrests of non-Indian people
who are harassing Indian people.
They're shooting slingshots at them.
Guns are being fired.
Tires are being slashed.
All kinds of conflict is happening.
The court in Chicago, the appeals court basically
looks at these off-reservations use rights,
these usufructuary rights.
They say these were not extinguished in 1850.
We don't have to get into all the legal aspects of this.
Maybe there'll be a question about this afterward.
But for our purpose, I think we could say that
what the court found, that these treaty rights are good,
they've always been good, and they basically told
the state of Wisconsin and the tribes
sit down together and work it out.
Work out a treaty harvest.
And we had a number of court decisions that would go on.
We had trials over walleye.
We had trials over deer.
We had trials over other fur bearers.
We had trials over wild rice and that to figure out
what's the scope of this right, that the tribes have,
and how are we going to make sure that
the resources aren't destroyed by over-hunting
or over-fishing or over-gathering.
And that all gets worked out
between the state of Wisconsin and the tribes
through the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
As I said, it's formed in '84.
Basically the tribe said,
there are six Ojibwe tribes in the state, they basically said,
"We're not going to negotiate with the state one on one.
Let's negotiate as a group."
So they create this entity.
It turns out to be a total of 11 Ojibwe tribes because the treaty
areas are also in Michigan and they are also in Minnesota.
And there is the language.
"The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission
provides natural resource management expertise,
conservation enforcement, legal and policy analysis,
public information services in support of the exercise
of treaty rights during well-regulated,
off-reservation seasons throughout the ceded territory."
Then we have the war, right?
And ugly images like this were common up north.
And you saw some of these images that I showed you earlier.
And it goes for a period of about five or six years.
It would end when the tribes took the sheriffs and the
leaders of the protest to court for violating their civil rights
for racial reasons.
You can violate people's civil rights,
but if you do it for racial reasons,
you are now in a federal situation.
So instead of getting a slap on the wrist for screaming really
ugly things at Indian people and preventing them, physically,
from exercising their federally guaranteed right,
it now became a federal issue, and that really chilled out the
protest that went on.
It's extremely regulated fisher for hunting walleye.
Extremely regulated for wild rice and for all of the other
things that the tribes are doing in the state of Wisconsin.
This is just an example about exercising your treaty rights.
It's telling people about the permitting process.
These are tribal members.
All the tagging that's required,
all of the regulations that are required.
The other thing that emerged at this time were tribal courts for
the Ojibwe people, and the courts were really created for a
number of the tribes for purposes of adjudicating
disputes between tribal members who were accused of violating
tribal law in terms of how many walleye they took,
how many musky, deer, etc.
So you'd wind up in a place
like the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Court,
being charged by the tribe for violating some aspect of the law
Very highly regulated.
The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission puts out
a quarterly newspaper publication called Mazina'igan,
and it runs all these articles about the fish biology,
the management of all of the different species in the area
and deer, on lamprey, on various invasive species.
It's basically the Ojibwe tribal view of the northern third of
the state's natural resource condition as they implicate
the exercise of hunting, fishing, and gathering rights.
So they're concerned.
It's really a scientific group, the Great Lakes Indian Fish
and Wildlife and policy, as they say,
policy and law enforcement and all of that bundled up together.
You get tremendous amount of scientific production.
There are a couple hundred or more scientific reports that are
on the website right now that you could look at and you can
see ways in which science and traditional Ojibwe values
are being brought together to manage these resources
and facilitate this stuff.
There's an example from their web page.
And this I took a few years ago.
There were over 200 technical reports in there.
I mean they have titles like this, you know,
talking about the Minnesota area during the 2008-2009 quota year.
So these things-- If you have trouble sleeping at night,
download some of these and start reading them and you'll wake up
in the morning and it'll be sitting on your chest
because you'll be reading these, you know,
average walleye taken per hour by these people in April
and it's that kind of very detailed stuff.
The tribes have created a whole number of fish hatcheries.
Those are the fish hatcheries in
the ceded territory area because
the tribes are very active in wanting to create
the sustainability here.
Tribal people who live in this region know
they can't go anywhere else.
They're going to be here.
They have a big investment in the permanence of the resources.
They're quite concerned about climate change for that reason,
for example, because that has implications for the species
that they use and that.
But we have all these, 44 million fish released.
This was in 2012.
I don't have more updated numbers,
but it's probably something along these lines
where you're getting this.
And these are being reported in the Mazina'igan,
the quarterly newspaper, which is available free.
It's online.
You could get it mailed to your house if you like.
This-- I'm just showing you this for purposes that the
relationship between the state and the tribes has changed now.
Before 1983, the state unilaterally governed
and managed the resources.
Now, there's a cooperative management that is in place
between the tribes, and you get things like this.
This is about the deer stipulations that they're going
to talk about the deer hunt in the northern third of the state
and we're going to watch this process together in terms of how
this whole thing unfolds.
Who's going to do what when.
Same thing with wild rice stipulations.
They consultant with the task force before issuing permits,
etc. any kind of change in the way in which the state is going
to manage Indian stuff is going to be worked through, etc.
But these were all the stipulations that were in place.
And these were put in place by the federal court and bind both
the tribes and the state to a cooperative relationship
for purposes of managing this whole, these two treaty areas.
And you saw from the map,
this is basically the northern third of the state.
It's got to be managed for purposes of safety.
It's also got to be managed for purposes of
the species have to be there for everybody.
So a lot of science and a lot of negotiation
goes through this thing.
Just some changes that have happened.
I'll talk for just a few more minutes maybe.
Maybe another 10 minutes or so
on some of the things that happened.
Some of you are familiar with the chronic wasting,
the night hunting case.
One of the things that happened in the deer trial when
the tribes said, in 1989, 1990, "We want to hunt deer at night.
We've always hunted deer at night.
We hunt deer on the reservation, and we've been doing this
for hundreds of years in this region.
We want to be able to do that in the ceded territory as well."
And that state said absolutely not.
Nobody can hunt deer at night.
Nobody can shoot rifles at night at this kind of thing
and they made a very strong case for it and they won.
And then we had a few developments take place.
One was the chronic wasting disease.
We had sharpshooters now, in the state of Wisconsin,
between 2002 and 2011, who are shooting deer.
Some of these deer are being shot at night.
So the state is now sort of rolling back its position
and saying, "Well,
sometimes we have to have people shoot deer at night."
We got a wolf law come in.
And the same kind of thing.
Notably, the tribes had wanted no part of this,
of hunting wolves because of the way they feel about wolves,
which is this.
For Ojibwe, as well as other American Indian tribes,
the wolf is a brother.
"Ma'iingan" is a teacher, a companion.
Members of the Wolf Clan are guardians and providers, etc.
So there's a strong identification between humans
and wolves, and they wanted no part of this.
But what it did was it,
and especially when the laws and regulations came through,
night hunting of wolves was going to be permitted.
Okay, now here we have two things going.
Chronic wasting disease, we can have some deer shot at night.
We can also shoot wolves at night now.
This is non-Indian people.
So the tribe said, "We want to revisit this business
about night hunting of deer off the reservation."
So they did.
And they issued an order.
They said to the DNR, "We're going to go ahead and do this."
And the DNR, well, you'll see what's going to happen.
The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, in 2012,
said, "We're going to create an exception to the ban
on nighttime hunters, and we're going to permit tribal members
to do this."
And the DNR went to court and stopped them.
And the Judge Crabb said, no, that's right,
we can't have this go.
And so the tribes then had a full trial over this thing
in July of 2013,
putting forth their new safety protocols
for a night deer hunting.
And then Barbara Crabb said no.
It went down to the 7th Circuit again,
and back there in sweet home Chicago they said,
they came back and they said to the state,
"You're not giving us evidence of why it is that these people
can't hunt deer off the reservation at night,
especially given how safe they propose to do it."
And here's the safety stipulations on this.
You have to be able to--
You have to be able to
put eight of 10 bullets into a target at 100 yards
that's this big around at night.
Six-and-a-half inches at night.
A very high standard to be able to do this.
Hunter safety class has to be taken.
You have to file a shooting plan.
You have to designate a safe zone of fire.
Shoot from a stationary position.
It's highly, highly regulated.
Very difficult to do this.
I asked how many deer were shot because we now have this in
place, how many deer were taken in the last season,
and it's about 10 deer.
Ojibwe tribes shot about 10 deer in that
because of how difficult it is
to pass through this and then also be successful
and hunt deer at night.
So all of our fears about tribal people in possession of guns on
public land under these kinds of circumstances have not been met.
The other thing that happened in this state for a while was that
the tribes declare on March 15th
how many walleye they're going to take.
And they are setting their numbers of walleye
under a certain limit to make sure
they're under what's called safe harvest.
But they're doing this because for the reasons that the
chairman here says, to provide food for their communities.
More and more tribal citizens relying upon Mother Earth's
gifts as an integral part of healthier diet,
holistic lifestyle, and all that.
We know that it's better to eat, especially in these lakes
up north, better to eat that kind of food
than it is other kinds of food.
So those are the reasons why it is
that the numbers appear to be high
from at least some people's position.
And we can take a look at this.
Throughout the ceded territory, about a quarter of a million
sports fisherpeople.
Quarter of a million fish are taken out of
the lakes up in that region.
But notice, it's an estimated number because you go out and
you get your walleye and you bring them in and you go home.
Nobody's there.
You might run into a warden.
Most likely you won't.
Whereas, we know exactly how many fish are speared by
Indian people, by Ojibwe people, because every one of them
has got to be counted, because you have to have a permit
to go do it, because it's only certain lakes,
because it's only certain days, and because when you come off
that boat landing, because it's only certain boat landings,
you are met by wardens who sit there and count and sex
and measure every single fish.
So you can know things like how many, you know,
walleye in the 15- to 18-inch age class did Gibby Chapman,
a Lac du Flambeau tribal member,
take on the night of April 21, 1993.
You can ask a question like that, and you can get an answer.
We know.
We know that because that's how carefully this stuff is taken.
What you'll see with this chart is that on the 15th of March the
tribes declared they're going to take this many.
By the end of the season, they have actually harvested about
half of what they said they're going to take.
What has happened is a number of-- There's been politics
around this where the bag limits for sportspeople get cut back,
and then they're set up again.
They're dropped down from five to two or one,
and then they're set back up again when it turns out that
the tribes don't take as many fish
as they said they're going to take.
I'm going to skip over this new rule.
This is a new rule about this, about doing this.
And just say something about how things have changed
for how the tribes see themselves
and what they see as their responsibilities now.
There's been a much higher level of consciousness about taking
care of the ceded territories now that Indian Ojibwe people
are capable and are interested in harvesting from that area.
They feel responsible for this.
They feel themselves to be stewards for it in a way
in which they didn't while the state was preempting them
from taking that by making it illegal,
calling it violating or poaching
when they were exercising their treaty rights
from that period
from about the 1860s until about the 1980s.
So over a century period.
So we get one of the aspects of this was the tremendous anxiety
on the part of at least Bad River but at least
a number of the other tribes when this iron ore mine
was proposed for northern Wisconsin.
That frightened people up in Bad River a great deal for the
implications that this would have for the Bad River itself,
for the fish in the river, for the wild rice in the river,
for the waterfowl in the river, for the deer,
etc. because of the increased reliance upon these natural
sources of food and the effects that that would have.
And you can see this is the area that this--
This is the mining itself.
This was the area that's going to be affected,
and it all winds up getting into the Bad River,
which created this.
This may have been the image that wound up playing
a big role in why it is that project would fail.
An out-of-state security company was hired,
and it looked a little bit more like Ecuador or Guatemala
than northern Wisconsin.
And many of you may remember that rather troubling image
when armed people were protecting
this potential mine site
from these, basically, kids who were coming in there
to raise hell with them.
Like I said, there's a long-term increased awareness
of the tribal responsibility for
and the spirituality of their harvest.
There's increased communication between the bands now of Ojibwe
people regarding ceremonies, regarding feasting.
There's been a real renaissance of culture there.
A much deeper engagement with various state departments,
especially those but others as well,
where there's a lot of cooperation that obtains between
the tribes as governments as well as the state.
You're probably aware that every year we have a State of the
Tribes Address since 2004.
This has been an outcome of this treaty rights conflict where one
of the tribal chairmen addresses a joint session
of the Wisconsin Legislature and talks about issues
that are important to the tribes.
And again, the theme on this is cooperation,
and there's critique that goes back and forth, of course.
It becomes a stage for tribal chairmen, at times,
to say to the legislature, "We disagree with you on this."
It becomes a very public kind of thing.
There's also been international cooperation between the Ojibwe.
The Ojibwe go, you know, as you could tell from what I was
talking about with the Constitution.
The Ojibwe people are on the landscape before there is a
United States, before there is a Canada.
So we have cooperation now between the Ojibwe bands in the
northern Great Lakes area as well as the Ojibwe bands up in
Ontario and such.
And here's the Anishinaabe protocol is a cooperative
relationship between the tribes of the north,
north of the international border.
One of the educational aspects, outcomes,
of this is a recommitment to tribal languages
that's come out of this.
And this is the Waadookodaading Language Immersion School
up there at Lac Courte Oreilles.
That's been going for about 10 years.
So we now have children who are becoming conversant in the
tribal language that was endangered.
So this has been one of the outcomes in the aftermath
of the Walleye War.
Another one we can't even get into but as you probably well
know, all of the gaming stuff
comes up after this happens.
This ends in 1991.
The conflict ends actively in '91,
and we get the gaming contracts in '92.
And the political sophistication that came out of the treaty
rights negotiation plays a role in the tribe's capability in
getting good gaming contracts as a result,
and this had an effect for a lot of the tribes.
There's another image from this.
So we get this valorization of culture and appreciation.
And I think the last thing I want to say is the implications
this has had then for the rest of non-Indian Wisconsin,
and this is Act 31, which requires that instruction be
given about the indigenous tribes of the state to children
in grammar schools as well as high schools so that hopefully
we don't have another conflict like we had in the 1980s where
people were basically out there, they were ignorant.
I went out there on those boat landings,
and I asked people who were screaming at Indian people,
"What do you know about how many fish are being taken?
What do you know about treaty rights?
What do you know about the Constitution?"
And they said, "We don't have to know anything.
We don't like this."
Well, that kind of ignorance is a real formula for ugly
conflict, and some of you who remember this at the time,
and those of you who don't, there's plenty of images online
that you can look at.
I think we're going to leave a few minutes
for any questions that we have.
And so why don't we do that now.
[applause]