[gentle music]
- Andrew Carlson: All right, welcome, everyone.
We're so excited to have you here watching this episode
of University Place.
It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Katrina Phillips
for us this evening as she talks about treaties and tourism
in northern Wisconsin.
So Dr. Katrina Phillips is a proud citizen
of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe,
and she's an associate professor of history
at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota,
as well as a public historian and an award-winning author.
And with a focus on Native history,
her work has been published
and quoted in all sorts of publications,
from The Washington Post to NPR,
and she's even written an armful of children's books.
And her current book project, The Land Is the Only Thing,
focuses on about a century's worth
of Red Cliff Ojibwe history and activism,
environmentalism, and the tourism
that shaped northern Wisconsin.
So let's give a big, warm Wisconsin welcome
to Dr. Katrina Phillips.
[audience applauding]
- Dr. Katrina Phillips: Boozhoo niijiiwag.
Hello, my friends.
Niminwendam eyaawan omaa noongom.
I am glad to be here today.
Katrina Phillips nindizhinakaaz.
My name is Katrina Phillips.
Makwa nindoodem minawaa
Miskwaabikang nimbiindige-bii'igaaz.
I am from the Bear Clan, and I am enrolled at Red Cliff.
As Andrew so graciously noted,
I am an associate professor in the history department
at Macalester College, and I'd like to thank you all
for joining us for this event tonight.
And I also want to take a moment
to thank everyone who's come together
to make both this live event and the live stream happen.
I grew up outside Superior
and spent hours scouring the shelves
of the Superior Public Library with my mom as a kid,
and it feels like a very full-circle moment
to be able to simultaneously give this talk
in Madison and in Superior,
and I'm just very grateful for this opportunity.
And so, I want to begin by situating myself,
literally, in this work.
And so as I mentioned, I grew up in rural northern Wisconsin,
about half an hour southeast of Superior.
Not too far from Pattison Park,
if that rings a bell for folks.
There we go, I knew I'd find something.
And so I am the daughter of an avid outdoorsman,
and those hours in the library
with my mom were offset by the hours spent in duck blinds
and deer stands, or standing knee-deep in rivers,
trying to mimic my dad's effortless cast.
And so my dad's affinity for the outdoors, though,
is matched only by his deeply rooted belief in conservation.
He's a catch-and-release fisherman.
It doesn't matter how big the fish is,
it is going back in the river.
And he's also a longtime supporter of organizations
that aim to help maintain and protect wildlife and waterfowl
and their habitats.
And so, as it turned out,
I inherited more of his love of history and writing
than his love of hunting and fishing.
But I ended up marrying a pheasant hunter
who's now dabbling in turkey hunting.
He actually bought our nine-year-old a turkey call,
and the nine-year-old loves to practice it in the living room,
so I guess the joke's on me.
[audience laughing]
So I've been thinking a lot about this lately.
And as a kid, it never felt contradictory
to go from fishing in the Brule River
to a Ducks Unlimited banquet.
And now, as an adult,
it doesn't feel out of the ordinary for my husband,
pictured here, to slam on the brakes
if he sees a rooster in a hay field
on the same day he gets another magazine
from Pheasants Forever in the mail.
He's actually wearing
a Pheasants Forever hat in this picture.
I promise this isn't, like, sponsored by Pheasants Forever,
but it was just too good of an image to pass up.
And so I see these two pieces as part of a larger puzzle.
Neither can exist without the other.
And they serve as complements to one another.
If there are no pheasants to hunt or fish to catch,
people's livelihoods and hobbies disappear.
And so this presentation then offers a glimpse
into my current research,
which turns to activism, environmentalism, and tourism
on and around the Red Cliff Reservation
in northern Wisconsin.
As I'm sure many of you know,
the region's rich forests and plentiful lakes
have been a marker of pride for decades.
They have served as the foundation
of Native livelihoods,
as the backbone of multiple economies and industries,
and as a key piece of the state's conservation movement.
In this talk, I'll be tracing the parallel growth of tourism
and treaty rights advocacy in the 20th and 21st centuries,
highlighting the questions, contestations,
and outcomes of these movements.
So the reservation of the Red Cliff Band
of Lake Superior Ojibwe, which is my reservation,
sits in the northernmost part of Wisconsin
along the south shore of Gichigami,
or what we as Ojibwe people call Lake Superior.
Our reservation is one of several
that were established in the state
through the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe.
Like Native nations across what's now the United States,
Ojibwe people have advocated for their lands,
their livelihoods, and their sovereignty for centuries.
For my purposes here today,
I'm going to start in the early decades of the 19th century.
I am a historian; you were all warned about this,
okay, so don't say you didn't see this coming.
So in the summer of 1837,
more than a thousand Ojibwe people traveled
to Fort Snelling,
a military outpost built at the confluence
of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers.
They came from across the lands
that would become Minnesota and Wisconsin
because government officials,
including Wisconsin Territorial Governor Henry Dodge,
wanted Ojibwe lands,
especially the vast pine forests on 13 million acres
in what's now east-central Minnesota
and northern Wisconsin.
He told the Ojibwe who had gathered at the fort
that these lands were not worth much for agriculture
or for settlement or for hunting.
The forests, he claimed,
were the focus of the negotiations.
During the treaty negotiations, though,
Ojibwe leaders insisted
that the treaty include an explicit retention
of their rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the ceded lands.
As a leader named Eshkibagikoonzhe,
also known to French fur traders as Flat Mouth, told Dodge,
"You know that without the land and the rivers and lakes,
we could not live."
Eshkibagikoonzhe reminded the treaty negotiators
that the Ojibwe wanted to preserve their right of, quote,
"Making sugar from the trees
and getting a living from the lakes and rivers."
End quote.
Article five of the Treaty of Saint Peter's,
also known as the Pine Tree Treaty,
guaranteed that the Ojibwe had the privilege of, quote,
"hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice upon the lands,
"the rivers, and the lakes
included in the territory ceded."
Five years later,
Ojibwe leaders ceded an additional 10 million acres,
including what would eventually become
the Red Cliff Reservation.
This time, though, treaty negotiators did not want timber.
The discovery of minerals in northern Michigan
drove this round of treaty negotiations.
And so Ojibwe representatives traveled to La Pointe
on Madeline Island in the summer and fall of 1842.
Here, as in the previous negotiations,
the Ojibwe negotiators were adamant
that they would reserve their use of fructuary rights.
Colloquially known as the Copper Treaty,
article two of the Treaty of La Pointe
echoed the Treaty of St. Peter's in recognizing
that Ojibwe people reserved, quote,
"the right of hunting on the ceded territory."
End quote.
A subsequent Treaty of La Pointe, signed in 1854,
in the wake of what we as Ojibwe people
call the Sandy Lake Tragedy,
created a number of reservations across the upper Great Lakes,
and as they had done for decades,
the Ojibwe insisted on retaining the right to hunt,
fish, and gather on the ceded lands.
The foresight of our ancestors kept Ojibwe people alive
throughout the rest of the century.
Ojibwe people hunted, fished,
and gathered to provide for their communities,
and they continually recognized and understood
the importance of these three treaties.
The treaties, meanwhile, cleared the path for speculators
and the development of resource extraction industries.
Settlers followed speculators,
and Wisconsin became a state in 1848.
As fellow Red Cliff Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen argues,
the lands that had seemed, quote,
"unfavorable for U.S. settlements," end quote,
had transformed into hospitable places for resource extraction.
And so this photo here, this is the Bayfield Wharf in 1936.
And so the lands and the lakes of northern Wisconsin
were an early target for these resource extraction industries.
Even the lake itself was not immune
from the siren song of extraction,
and Chantal Norrgard's work reminds us
that the Great Lakes fishing industry
was one of the earliest endeavors.
The American Fur Company started the first
commercial fishing venture in the 1830s,
and, again, this is before the treaty cessions
of 1837 and 1842,
and it would be one of the region's
most dominant industries for more than a century.
The 1855 opening of the canal at Sault Ste. Marie
allowed for the export of whitefish,
and the expansion of fishing operations
in the 1870s and 1880s
led the Bayfield County Press to proclaim that,
quote, "The fishing industry has given a name and fame
to Bayfield all over the United States."
End quote.
I can neither confirm nor deny that that was actually the case,
but it's a good quote, right?
The overfishing of whitefish in the 1890s forced fishermen
to switch to lake trout and herring,
but the whitefish population rebounded
by the early 20th century.
Commercial fishing may have been
the first resource extraction industry in the region,
but it operated alongside logging, quarrying, and tourism.
And so the cession of those vast timber holdings
opened the floodgates of the logging industry,
and the first logging boom ran from 1850 to 1856.
According to Jerry Apps,
lumber was the driving factor in the development
of central and northern Wisconsin.
Towns around Red Cliff,
including Bayfield, Ashland, and Washburn, all followed suit.
The American Fur Company built the first sawmill
in the Chequamegon region, just south of Bayfield in 1845.
So this is just three years after the Treaty of La Pointe
that was signed in 1842.
Other sawmills sprang up throughout the region,
and, according to Jane C. Bush,
seven sawmills spread across Ashland, Washburn,
and Bayfield logged more than 67 million board feet of lumber
in 1885 alone.
And in 1892, sawmills in Bayfield and Ashland counties
cut more than 285 million board feet.
So we have the development of these industries
throughout the 19th century.
And again, as promised in the title,
there's another one I want to turn to as well.
Tourism.
So tourism was a flourishing industry
in the eastern United States by the 1820s,
emerging at a pivotal moment in U.S. society
when Americans were working to define their national identity
in opposition to Europe.
In Wisconsin and elsewhere,
the tourist industry initially sought to capitalize
on America's fascination with the nation's landscape
and its original inhabitants.
Kilbourn City in south-central Wisconsin
eventually renamed itself Wisconsin Dells
to capitalize on the popularity
of the Dells on the Wisconsin River.
The Dells were known as the region's greatest natural wonder
as early as the mid-1840s
and quickly became one of the state's
first tourist destinations.
By 1849, when Wisconsin naturalists toured the region,
the area already boasted an exciting history
to draw tourists in,
a hotel, and residents eager to entertain visitors.
While, you know, these somewhat dry,
geologically-centered descriptions
of the many fantastic shapes in the cliffs
may not have been thrilling entries
in a tourist's guidebook,
the early fascination with the area
soon turned into a booming business.
These early tourist manuals and promotional materials
emphasized the area's natural landscape
and natural beauty.
Lakes and rivers held bountiful fish to catch,
and the woods hid game animals for hunting.
Those not inclined toward hunting and fishing
could tour breathtaking sites
whose innate splendor had clearly been preserved.
Tourists started inching into what's now the Midwest
and the Great Lakes region
by the middle of the 19th century.
By the late 1860s,
lakes in southern Wisconsin were fashionable vacation spots,
attracting tourists from Milwaukee, Chicago,
Memphis, and even New Orleans.
By the 1870s,
railroad companies and local entrepreneurs
led concerted efforts to attract tourists to Wisconsin.
An 1875 "Tourist's Guide to the Wisconsin Dells"
embraced what they called the "prose, romance, and poetry
of this wonderful region,"
teasing the general public with stories
of the natural wonders and beauties
of the scenery surrounding it,
and more especially, the notable Dells of the Wisconsin River
and the strange, wild glens and canyons
which enter the Dells from either side.
Encouraged by the early success at the Dells,
business owners and entrepreneurs
quickly began building cabins, cottages, and resorts,
and contracting with railroad and steamship companies.
Soon after,
wealthy urban tourists began traveling to Wisconsin
to avail themselves of the numerous opportunities
for outdoor recreation and relaxation.
Newspaper writers swooned over the clean air,
breathtaking sunsets,
and wondrous meetings of soaring red bluffs
and deep blue water that held even more allure for visitors.
Another 1875 "Guide to Summer Resorts in Wisconsin,
Minnesota, and Michigan,"
which was published as a supplement
to a railroad routes and rates book,
listed more than a dozen Wisconsin destinations.
The guide, for instance,
extolled sailing, rowing, and fishing near Milwaukee,
which also had the full benefit
of the cool and refreshing lake breeze.
The water cure at the Bidwell House
promised to offer speedy
and permanent relief for diseases
that had, quote, "baffled the skill of man
and have been pronounced incurable."
End quote.
But tourists came to Wisconsin
for more than just the promised health benefits.
In 1880, Chicago attorney John Lyle King boasted
that the northern wildernesses offered a grateful reprieve
and a speedy reparation from what he called, oh, God,
the, quote, "exhaustion that comes of the inordinate
"and exacting frets and activities of business,
"the languor and inertia of summer fervors,
"the ennui and satiety
that followed the dissipations of social life."
End quote.
We get it, right? [audience laughing]
But Chicago lawyers and capitalists like King
and his companions had come to Wisconsin
for outdoor adventures
that freed them from the restraints and stress
of the city and civilization,
proferring instead the imagined freedom and simplicity
of a rural paradise.
In many instances,
the Native people who still lived throughout Wisconsin
became part of the tourist experience.
King's sojourn was only possible because of two Menominee guides.
And so in his narrative, King calls them natural foresters.
He calls them skilled canoeists.
He calls them men with acute senses,
whom he deems, quote, "the navigator of the birchbark,
"the carrier of the luggage,
"the tent builder, the log heap fireman,
"the cook, the baker, the scullion,
"in fact, the indispensable
general utility man and brother."
End quote.
Aren't you glad I read this and you didn't have to read that?
[audience laughing]
At other times, Native people were the draw for tourists.
An 1897 bicycling guide encouraged cyclists
to visit what they called the Chippewa Indian Reservation
in Odanah in the northern part of the state,
calling it, quote, "an enjoyable trip for wheelmen
who desire to see the red man at home."
End quote.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention
the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial pictured here,
which capitalized both on the touristic desire
to see both Native performers
and the increasing popularity of the Wisconsin Dells.
So railroads, hotels, and resorts
started making arrangements for and promoting performances
that featured Native participants
in order to offer their guests the wilderness experiences
that urban tourists craved.
In one of the most...
I should probably call it infamous example,
Indian agent William Mercer
and William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody--
yes, the man, the myth, the legend himself--
brought Bad River Ojibwe leaders together
with Cody's Lakota performers for a publicity stunt in 1896.
Mercer and Cody believed
that a dramatic signing of a peace treaty
on the grounds of Ashland's grand Hotel Chequamegon
would thrill and delight non-Natives
in the surrounding region.
Nearly 900 Bad River and Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe
came to Ashland for this event.
And according to Eric Olmanson,
the sheer number of Ojibwe people at the hotel
also became something of a tourist attraction,
because then hundreds of Ashland residents
went down to Front Street
to see what was called, quote, "the dusky men and women
"whose presence had converted the Chequamegon
into a veritable Indian reserve."
End quote.
Not to mention the fact that Red Cliff
and Bad River are still pretty close here, right?
But again, this is what we're dealing with here.
So for most of the 19th century, though,
tourism in Wisconsin
was a parallel industry, operating alongside,
again, fishing, logging, and quarrying,
among other industries,
especially in the northern part of the state.
As the 19th century barreled toward the 20th
and extractive resource industries declined,
the state needed to find a new direction
toward economic prosperity.
An infrastructure for tourism already existed
throughout most of the state
thanks to the proliferation of railroad lines
that crisscrossed the state, and the growing automobile industry.
Abandoning these pathways was not an option
after all of the time and money spent building railway lines,
locks and docks for steamships, and roads.
So rather than exporting resources out of the state,
tourism aimed to import people,
primarily people from larger cities such as Chicago,
Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul,
and even from cities as far south as St. Louis
who hoped to escape, quote,
"the noise, congestion, and pace of urban life."
End quote.
In an effort to appeal to more potential visitors,
the state promoted palliative cures for city living,
such as the Wisconsin Dells, and the restorative resorts
that capitalized on painting their land,
water, and air as pristine,
while outdoor recreation endeavors offered tourists
the chance to fish, swim, dive, surf, trap shoot,
play golf, play tennis,
and take motorboat trips and automobile excursions.
So I'm gonna take a moment here,
because every time I use this picture,
I like to point out the lady dressed in all black
because she really seems like she's enjoying herself.
[audience laughing]
This is an image of a picnic on Basswood Island,
up in the Apostle Islands, from 1916.
But tourism started to take a stronger foothold
in the region, again,
as these extractive resource industries start to decline.
And so the tourism industry starts marketing
the state's lakes, rivers, and forests
to a traveling American public
that had both become disillusioned
with the urban environment
and had the time and the money to travel.
So as large cities become more and more crowded,
the country life comes to be more appealing
to urban dwellers.
City folks hopped in their cars, boarded a steamship,
or bought a train ticket to a destination
that promised fresh air
and a respite from the daily toils of city life.
Increasing numbers of city folks
throughout the industrialized United States
fled what Michael McNally calls their, quote,
"bureaucratized lives in steamy, hot cities
"for the northern edges of civilization,
"where they hoped to brush up against something
refreshing and authentic."
End quote.
But early 20th century tourists also brushed up
against something they might not have anticipated,
and that would be Native people exercising their treaty rights.
In fact, state conservation officers
had been arresting Ojibwe people
and other Native people throughout the state
for hunting and fishing on and off the reservations
well before the end of the 19th century.
A Lac Courte Oreilles leader known as Joe White
was shot and killed by a game warden in 1894
for hunting deer out of season.
Two elderly men from Lac du Flambeau
were arrested in 1897
and charged with being in possession of venison
off the reservation.
And a man named John Blackbird was arrested
and convicted in 1901
for setting fishnets on the Bad River Reservation.
A few years later,
an Ojibwe man named Michael Morrin was arrested
for using gill nets to fish in Lake Superior.
Morrin argued that his right to fish in Lake Superior
was protected by the Treaty of 1854,
but the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 1908
that Wisconsin statehood had abrogated treaty rights.
And so I want to pause here for a moment,
because it probably feels like I'm telling a couple parallel
or even unrelated stories: a story about tourism,
a story about industry and the economy,
and a story about treaties and treaty rights.
But I find that these connections,
both among and across these stories,
is exactly what makes this history so fascinating,
especially as we keep moving through the 20th century
and as these contestations continue to occur.
Because the treaties that Native people signed
in what is now the state of Wisconsin
and across the country
are considered the supreme law of the land.
Our ancestors could not have foreseen the development
of a tourism industry,
but they recognized the importance of protecting
the right to hunt and fish in the ceded territories.
So Ojibwe people across the state
continued exercising their treaty rights,
and they started asserting their status as tribal citizens
and therefore not subject to state law on reservations
as early as the 1920s, which is phenomenal.
Lac du Flambeau attorney Thomas St. Germain,
who was the first Native lawyer
admitted to the bar in the state of Wisconsin,
was arguing for treaty rights in court as early as the 1930s.
Once again, we have parallel developments happening here.
We have the ongoing developments of the tourism industry
on one hand, and we have Native people
across the state arguing for their treaty-guaranteed rights
to hunt and fish on the other.
And so as part of, you know, these kind of,
these mixing of these industries and of Native sovereignty,
you have boosters, for instance,
who start pushing for the creation of a national park
in the Apostle Islands in the 1920s.
But the National Park Service investigator
who comes out refused to endorse it,
because in that moment, all he saw were the scars
in the wake of decades of logging.
But interest in conservation and tourism
in northern Wisconsin keeps rising
after World War II.
A postwar tourism boom filled state parks and campgrounds
to the brim, and beaches and hiking trails
were increasingly popular.
And as you can see here,
visits to national parks jumped 86% between 1950 and 1960,
and visits to recreational areas jumped 143%.
Attendance at Wisconsin state parks
grew 250% from 1927 to 1954.
The number of state park visitors
swelled from 750,000 in 1944
to more than 5 million in 1956.
And in this moment,
Congress calls the added pressure on state parks,
campgrounds, and recreational areas
a crisis in outdoor recreation.
James Feldman contends
that Wisconsin's recreation crisis was especially acute
because there were a lot of people
who believed Wisconsin didn't even have enough
public recreational lands and facilities
before this tourism boom in the 1950s.
So some folks turned to one of the state's gems,
the Apostle Islands, to try and solve this problem.
Supporters, like Wisconsin's governor turned senator
Gaylord Nelson.
I don't think you can do a talk in Wisconsin
if you don't at least mention Gaylord Nelson.
So there you go.
And so people like Nelson believed
that a national lakeshore in the region would increase tourism
and boost the economy through the protection and enhancement
of the existing environment
for recreational and aesthetic purposes
rather than the protection of natural areas
in a pristine condition.
So the key thing here is that they're not advocating for,
necessarily, preservation, right?
They don't want to leave it exactly the way it is.
They're turning towards conservation and recreation.
So the conditions of a lakeshore,
though, also had the potential
to affect both Ojibwe livelihoods
and the lands that provided food
for those who hunted and fished
to support their families and communities.
And so here, again, using the Apostle Islands as an example,
tourism was intended to use and consume nature
without the destructive forces of resource extraction.
And so outdoor recreation becomes a critical piece
of Wisconsin's mid-20th century tourism industry.
And by the 1960s, as Chantal Norrgard argues,
in the interests of promoting tourism,
state governments focused on restoring the environment
and implementing conservation laws that favored recreation
and discouraged commercial or subsistence land use.
All right, so that's the big key here
because this is a huge shift from the previous economic focus
on logging, quarrying, and commercial fishing.
And it's a really important moment in Wisconsin history
because we have all of these movements, right?
We have tourism, treaty rights,
conservation, and economic interests
coming together simultaneously.
But there's another crisis in the state as well.
And so commercial fishing, again,
that bastion of regional industry
reached what Jane Bush calls its golden years in the 1940s,
generating half a million dollars in revenue
in 1946 alone.
The industry collapsed in the 1950s
as sea lamprey targeted whitefish and lake trout,
and the last regional fish dealer closed down in 1958.
The demise of commercial fishing
parallels the rise of regional tourism,
and tourism also relied heavily on the sportsmen
who came north to fish.
State attempts to protect fish populations for sportsmen,
though, often painted both commercial fishing
and Ojibwe treaty fishing as a threat to the environment
and the fish populations.
And so the questions that swirled around tourism,
treaty rights, and industry were connected to land use,
land preservation and conservation,
and the protection of natural resources.
Because if tourists were to come north to hunt and fish,
what would happen if there weren't
any animals in the woods or fish in the lakes and rivers?
Where would tourists go?
What would tourists do?
Would they even have a reason to come north in the first place?
And so for Native people in northern Wisconsin,
these questions around tourism and conservation
are colliding with both federal Indian policy
and their treaty-guaranteed rights.
So in the 1960s,
northern Wisconsin essentially becomes a battleground
for local residents,
wilderness advocates, state and federal officials,
tourism proponents, and Native nations,
as Nelson, who, again, every Wisconsinite knows
as the founder of Earth Day,
aimed to turn the Apostle Islands
into a national recreation area
in order to both protect the environment
and diversify the tourism economy.
What's key here, though,
is that proponents wanted to draw tourists to the area
by designating the Apostle Islands
as a recreational area, right,
not as a national park or a wilderness area
because outdoor recreation is seen as a way
to boost Wisconsin's economy.
For Ojibwe people, though,
the development of a national lakeshore
had the potential to threaten their use of the land
and undermine their treaty-guaranteed rights.
As early as 1962, The Milwaukee Journal noted
that the lakeshore proposal was, quote,
"bound to raised mixed feelings in one familiar with the place."
End quote.
Those mixed feelings, which, let's be real,
that's about as good of a Wisconsin euphemism
as you're ever gonna get,
led to years of plans and protests,
congressional hearings, newspaper editorials,
and even parade floats at the Bayfield Applefest.
The lakeshore debates came at a critical juncture
in state tourism initiatives,
mounting concerns about environmental degradation
and the rise of Native activism and advocacy movements,
because you have conservationists who,
on one hand, are rallying to,
quote, unquote, "save the Apostle Islands,"
and you have tourism advocates
who are pointing to the economic potential
of a national recreation area in the northern Wisconsin.
There was a study by a Wisconsin economist
that said over 900,000 annual visitors would spend
$7 million a year in the region.
But a project of this size, though,
couldn't just happen overnight.
Congressional hearings on this proposed lakeshore
started in 1967,
and this was the first of what would be
four total hearings on the lakeshore.
And as you can see here,
the first was held in Ashland in 1967.
The second was in D.C. in March of 1969.
The third came back to Ashland in August of 1969.
And the fourth and final was in D.C.
in the spring of 1970.
The first hearing in Ashland drew politicians,
professors, newspapermen, summer residents,
non-Native homeowners, attorneys,
the presidents of
the Minnesota-Wisconsin Fisheries Association--
yes, that was a thing--
famed naturalist author Sigurd Olson,
and Ojibwe people from Bad River and Red Cliff.
The Wilderness Society urged conservationists
to attend the hearings or voice their support through letters
to government representatives,
calling it, quote, "one of the most unique
"and valuable units
in the National Wilderness Preservation System."
End quote.
And so I first learned about the contestations over the lakeshore
when I was in graduate school.
I have some friends here from grad school
who are now professors at the University of Wisconsin,
who have heard me talk about this
probably ad nauseam by this point,
so I apologize, but it fits pretty well here.
And so my mom's brother had sent me some photocopies
of newspaper articles from the 1960s,
and there were a couple pages
of congressional testimony in there too.
And so my grandma,
Margaret Newago-Pascale, was mentioned in the articles,
and she was quoted in the testimony as well.
And I eventually figured out that the testimony
my uncle sent me came from the March 1969 hearing,
where my grandma and the tribal chairman had flown to D.C.
to speak out against the proposal for the lakeshore.
And so, there she is.
She's right there in the middle.
That's my grandma.
And so as I pored over
the thousand-plus pages of testimony--
in case you're wondering what historians do for fun
in the summer, that's not it--
a few names caught my eye from the 1967 hearing.
Mrs. Walter Newago and Caroline Newago.
And so they shared my grandma's maiden name,
which is somewhat common at Red Cliff,
but I didn't know who they were.
And so as I always do when I find a Newago in the archives,
I called my mom.
And she goes, "Oh, that's Sis."
And I was, as you might expect, not exactly following.
It was a name I recognized,
but I had no idea where my mom was going with this.
And so, as my mother explained, Sis,
whose given name was Myrtle,
had married my grandma's brother, Sammy.
And so I remembered, you know,
hearing stories about Sammy and Sis.
But who the hell was Walter?
"Oh," my mom said,
"his given name was Walter Samuel,
but everybody called him Sammy."
Fair enough, that was one.
All right, I had one down.
And my mom couldn't quite figure out who Caroline was,
so she said she'd call her sister,
she'd call my Aunt Janet, and get back to me.
And so I got a call from my mom a few days later, and she goes,
"I cannot believe I didn't think of this.
"But when I asked Janet who Caroline Newago was,
Janet said, 'Karen, that's Aunt Carrie.'"
And so Carrie had married my grandma's brother, Vincent.
So Sis and Carrie were my grandma's sisters-in-law.
And I could hear my mom, you know,
kind of trying to contain her excitement
as she asked if there were any other names she might recognize.
So I went, you know, through the table of contents,
looking for more Red Cliff folks,
and I found Idile Duffy listed in the names of people
who offered testimony in 1967.
And so that was Sis's sister, my mom said.
And so I called her back a few days later.
By now, you are all feeling sorry for her.
I'm well aware of that, okay?
And I asked her if she had any idea why my grandma,
why Sis and Carrie and Idile would have gone to Ashland
or flown to D.C. to give their testimony.
And she thought about it for a minute,
and then she said, "These were the women who would do that.
This is what they had to do, so they went and did it."
And I've thought about that conversation with my mom
countless times over the years as I'm doing this research,
because all four of these women have walked on,
but their testimony lives on as a powerful reminder
of their role as advocates for our people.
And as an Ojibwe woman,
and as someone who studies Native histories,
I think a lot about what I've come to consider as,
you know, kind of quiet activism or the many ways
in which people advocate for themselves,
their communities, their resources, their lands,
their languages, and their cultures.
So two years later, in 1969,
my grandma and the tribal chairman at the time,
Philip Gordon, flew to Washington, D.C.,
to testify in the second hearing.
And my grandma also spoke at the third hearing
in Ashland later that year.
While her time at the mic was shorter than it was in D.C.,
her words still live on in that transcript.
"The land," she told the committee,
"is the only thing we can associate our heritage with."
So I love this quote, and not just because my grandma said it.
That's part of it, but not the whole thing.
Because as a historian, I see it as a beautiful reminder
of the historic, the contemporary,
and future presence of Ojibwe people
in northern Wisconsin.
And so the questions around tourism and conservation
in northern Wisconsin paralleled the rise
of Native activism and advocacy
both in the state and across the country.
The Native activism and advocacy movements
in the 1960s and '70s
are often characterized by the Red Power movement,
the takeover of Alcatraz, the creations of organizations
like the National Indian Youth Council
and the American Indian Movement's
growing national presence.
But the roots of Red Power,
as Paul Rosier contends, go much deeper than that.
In northern Wisconsin,
contestations over lands and resources
often spilled onto reservation lands.
In the summer of 1969,
Ron DePerry had just come home to Red Cliff
after a three-year stint in the Army.
There was a lot of talk on the rez
about the ongoing arrests of Native people
by state game wardens
for off-reservation hunting and fishing.
Game wardens even came onto the reservations,
arresting and jailing Ojibwe people for small offenses
like having old deer hides in their sheds.
Another time, DePerry and two other men
were harassed by a game warden
when they left the reservation to hunt deer.
After about 20 minutes, DePerry lit up his pipe.
The men told the game warden
to either arrest them or let them go.
The game warden went chest to chest
with DePerry, telling him to, quote,
"Keep your mouth shut, DePerry,
or I'll take that pipe of yours and shove it down your"--
word I cannot say on PBS Wisconsin-- "throat."
End quote.
But Ojibwe people in Wisconsin continued to hunt and fish
under the terms of the treaties I outlined earlier.
Our ancestors claimed these rights for us,
and I think the continued exercise of those rights
is an incredible testament to their strength
and their foresight.
The contestations over these rights
also underscore the importance of understanding
not only treaty rights, but the importance of conservation.
The back-and-forth with state officials
culminated in a 1969 protest in Lake Superior.
For reasons I haven't yet uncovered,
I haven't quite figured this out yet,
Wisconsin DNR officials announced that Red Cliff
and Bad River could no longer fish in Lake Superior.
They could fish in the inland rivers and lakes,
but their off-reservation rights
no longer extended to Lake Superior.
And so people at Red Cliff, Bad River,
and the other four Wisconsin Ojibwe reservations,
Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac du Flambeau,
St. Croix, and Mole Lake,
decided on a dual show of protest.
And so St. Croix men would go out one night
to be arrested for hunting off the reservation,
and Red Cliff men would set a net in Lake Superior
the next day to be arrested for fishing.
They called the local TV stations.
They called the local newspapers to let them know
that Red Cliff and St. Croix citizens
were going out to test
the hunting and fishing rights of the treaties.
And so a Red Cliff elder named Franklin Basina
lent the Red Cliff fishers two flat-bottom boats
to bring in the catch.
And so DePerry, Roger Basina, and Allen Bear
were in one boat.
Red Cliff tribal chairman Philip Gordon,
Red Cliff vice chairman Richard Gurnoe,
everybody knew him as Dick,
and Louis Peterson were in the second boat.
And so they hear a boat motor running
as they went out to set the net.
And so the boat did not have its running lights on,
but they could tell from the sound of the motor
that it was a game warden's boat.
And so what they did is they called
the Coast Guard station in Bayfield
to let them know that a boat anchored off the shore
of Red Cliff was in distress.
And so they watched as the boat turned its running lights on
and headed back toward Bayfield.
And so it was time to set the net.
And so the next day, a crowd gathers
when it's time to take the net out of the water.
There were lots of folks from Red Cliff there,
including women, including elders,
who held signs and banners
that proclaimed "Protect Treaty Rights" and "Indian Power."
DePerry remembered seeing representatives
from TV stations and newspapers,
local fishermen who came to lend support to Red Cliff's cause,
and a group of students from the University of Wisconsin-Superior
who had heard about the fish-in.
And so the game warden's boat was there to meet them.
The men lifted the net, and Gordon pulled out the only fish
they had caught, which was a sucker.
Cheers rang out from the shoreline,
and the cheers continued
as the wardens placed the six men under arrest.
The men were taken to the Bayfield County Courthouse,
which was filled to the brim with their supporters.
The men pleaded not guilty.
The case wound its way through the courts
until the Wisconsin Supreme Court
handed down its ruling in 1972.
The court ruled that while Ojibwe people
did not have the exclusive right to fish in Lake Superior,
the state had to prove
that any regulations it sought to enforce
against Ojibwe fishers
had to be reasonable and/or necessary
to prevent a significant drop in the fish population.
And so, after the state's decision came down,
Ojibwe treaty rights advocacy in northern Wisconsin
expanded to both the regulation of tribal fisheries
and collaboration with the state.
Red Cliff and Bad River
joined the Grand Portage and Fond du Lac bands
of Minnesota Ojibwe
and Michigan's Bay Mills community
to collectively manage their 1854 treaty rights
to fish in Lake Superior under the umbrella
of the Great Lakes Indian Fisheries Commission in 1982.
Okay, so that's one organization.
And then the six Ojibwe bands in Wisconsin
also came together
as the Voigt Intertribal Task Force
in the wake of another Ojibwe fishing rights case
that wound its way through the system.
The two organizations, all right,
so we've got the fisheries commission here,
and we've got the task force over here.
They started holding joint meetings in the spring of 1983,
and the two nations, some of which overlapped.
Okay, I finally figured it out, but I got there, okay,
came together in June of 1984
to create the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission,
also known as GLIFWC.
And so, since its inception,
GLIFWC has been tasked with conducting
basic scientific research on individual species
to determine an annual harvesting limit.
It helps its member nations
develop conservation enforcement capabilities.
It supports tribal attorneys if there is any ongoing litigation.
It helps explain the history and practice
of Ojibwe treaty rights to the public.
And it works to secure funds for all of these tasks.
And so GLIFWC continues to undertake intensive studies.
They publish multiple reports every year
on everything from hunting summaries
and species assessments to more recent studies
on the cumulative environmental risk of pipelines
in the ceded territories
and revitalizing conceptions of climate knowledge.
And so this photo,
this is from Frog Bay Tribal National Park
on the Red Cliff Reservation.
It's a picture I took, oh, gosh, not many years ago.
Some years ago by this point, okay,
when my mom and I went up there.
And so as a historian,
I love the stories that we find
in our individual and collective pasts.
And I love how they offer us a deeper appreciation
and understanding of the places that mean so much to us.
Scholar Keith Basso has, perhaps somewhat rhetorically,
asked, "What do people make of places?"
This question he wrote in 1996, is, quote,
"as old as people and places themselves,
as old as human attachments to portions of the Earth."
End quote.
And I hope that the stories I've shared here today
have demonstrated not only the importance
of treaty rights and tourism,
but the ways in which they've come to be mostly complementary
and not entirely oppositional.
If you head to northern Wisconsin today,
you'll still see the legacy
of these historical moments and movements.
The Apostle Islands region
is still a renowned destination for tourists,
drawing thousands of people each year
for everything from the Bayfield Applefest,
pictured here, to the sea caves, hiking, kayaking, and camping.
Some of my best childhood memories
come out of Applefest weekend.
Whether it's, you know, tagging along with my mom and grandma
as they picked apples at Erickson's Orchard,
or taking notes of all of the stands
selling caramel apples before making my final decision.
I'm definitely a purist when it comes to caramel apples,
but I appreciate the ingenuity, okay?
And so the Ojibwe presence in the region
still reminds us of our past, present, and future.
Red Cliff now hosts an annual language camp,
and I was fortunate enough to bring my family back
for this a few years ago.
Our kids got to participate in all kinds of activities.
That's my little one painting right there,
my other one playing a game over there.
And I'll never forget watching them play
under the pines
on the reservation's Raspberry Campgrounds.
We also played tourist and took our kids on the ferry
over to Madeline Island, which I always wanted to do as a kid,
and my grandma always said no, so I finally got to do it.
And so we toured the museum on the island,
which is really well done,
and it's really a testament to the work
that the historical society does throughout the state.
And one of the volunteers turned out to be the son
of one of my grandma's dearest friends.
And so our kids and I are suckers
for any kind of museum store, all right?
And both of our kids conned me.
My husband wasn't there, all right,
because they knew I was the weak link.
And both kids conned me into buying them a rock.
It was, you know, they were probably about like this big.
And it has a bear paw carved into it.
And so it was one of those moments
where the things you teach your kids come back to bite you.
Especially because our older one looked at me
and he was like, "Aren't we Bear Clan?
Why wouldn't you want us to have this?"
So I considered that my additional donation
to the Wisconsin Historical Society for the year.
But it's moments like that,
that really emphasize the importance of these histories
and these stories.
And I actually found
that bear paw rock in our younger son's desk
the other day, and I couldn't help but smile.
You know, I don't know how much he remembers from this trip.
It was a couple of years ago by this point.
But it reminded me that the work we do as historians,
as scholars and as activists, always has a purpose.
And with that, I will say Miigwech bizindawiyeg noongom.
Thank you for listening to me today.
[audience applauding]
[gentle music]