Rez Life

by David Treuer

  One of the most serious misconceptions about reservations is that they were a kind of moral payment: that the U.S. government, motivated by pity and guilt, “gave” reservations to Indians along with treaty rights, which functioned as a kind of proto-welfare program. This is not the case. Reservations and treaty rights were concessions negotiated for the right to settle and develop new land. People like Jerry Mueller and Citizens for Truth in Government don’t like this arrangement. I think most Indians would be glad to abrogate our treaties. We will “give up” our reservations and our treaty rights, and all the non-Natives can move east of the Appalachians. Or if they don’t want to move they can pay rent. It would be useful for most Americans to keep in mind that after they pass those mountains they are living, driving, eating, breathing, and walking on land that at one time or another was negotiated for, not fought for. More so than wars, agreements opened the part of America from the Appalachia to the Pacific to non-Indians. Reservations and their sovereignty are the remaining small result of those agreements.

  All of this explains and yet does not quite explain Red Lake and why a white trespasser was arrested and fined by Red Lake Reservation conservation officers. Unlike most other reservations in the United States, Red Lake was not created by treaty. The government officially stopped making treaties with Indians in 1871. Red Lake Reservation was established in 1889 by a congressional act. In the years before—as tribes were encouraged and sometimes forced to the treaty table, reservations were established, and communities were moved—the Red Lake Ojibwe watched. They witnessed the treaties of 1825 (Prairie du Chien); 1836 (Michigan); 1837, 1842, and 1854 (Wisconsin and Minnesota); and 1855, 1863, and 1864 (Mississippi and Pillager Bands in Minnesota)—and they watched as the provisions of those treaties were ignored. They watched as faith was broken. Red Lake was forced to the treaty table in 1863 but was in a position of relative strength. The Red Lake people ceded some territory but retained their land around both Upper and Lower Red Lake. The treaty of 1863 did not create the Red Lake Reservation. What it did was reduce the size of the Red Lake Band’s territory. When the U.S. government quit making treaties with Indians in 1871, Red Lake still retained title to more than 3 million acres in northern Minnesota, and when the “allotment” provided by the Nelson Act was pressed on tribes to the south in 1889, Red Lake knew better than to agree to it. The Red Lake leaders rejected the proposition (though they ceded some acreage) and maintained that all land on the reservation should be held in common. One story has it that the old war chief Medwe-ganoonind (aptly, “He Who Is Heard Talking”) was firmly against allotment. As the story goes, during a council meeting he slammed his war club (a club that he had used to kill not a few of his enemies) on the table and said, If you think this is such a good idea, fine. If you want to vote for it, fine. But you’ve got to fight me first. If you win, you can vote yes. No one wanted to fight him. Red Lake voted against allotment. This may be a legend, but what is not legend is that during the days when the federal commissioners were at Red Lake to push for allotment, the council ended up voting against the provision three times. Each time the council voted it down, the commissioners begged for a recess, during which time they threatened, cajoled, baited, and bribed the council members. Each time the issue came to a vote the council turned it down again.

  In the early twentieth century, when the federal government once again tried to dissolve and diminish Indian control of Indian land, this time through a law that gave states criminal and civil jurisdiction on the reservation, Red Lake said no—even though that meant they could lose much of their funding for schools, hospitals, roads, and police protection. The reservation then built its own schools, paved its own roads, and built its own court, police station, and hospitals without state or county support and with little help from the BIA.

  This is why Red Lake can and does retain complete control over its lands and its rights, and why officers Grolla and Nelson were within their rights and acting in accordance with the spirit of tough independence particular to Red Lake when they uncased their assault rifles, confiscated Jerry Mueller’s boat, and fined Mueller. This wasn’t the first time the Red Lake Nation had fined a trespasser. In winter of 2002 a man landed his floatplane on Lower Red Lake, within the reservation boundary, and began fishing. The tribe confiscated the plane, and the pilot had to pay more than $4,000 in fines and fees to get it back. When Officer Grolla cited Jerry Mueller, Mueller was cooperative at first, as Grolla remembers it. But later, when he appeared in Red Lake tribal court to argue his case, he was belligerent and hostile. “If a Red Lake boat crossed the line and wasn’t licensed through the state, it would be the same thing,” remembers Grolla. “Just the other way around. But they act like we’re terrorizing them. What they don’t understand is that the reservation is the only place Indians feel safe. There’s a story that my grandma Fannie Johns used to tell. That story still makes me mad. She used to tell this story how they were coming from Thief River in a wagon. It was Fanny and her grandma and her uncle. Her grandma was alive during the Dakota Wars, that’s how old her grandma was. She didn’t have an English name. Her Ojibwe name was Ikwezens. And her uncle’s name was Me’asewab. They were coming from Thief River; they went over there by wagon to get supplies. They couldn’t make it back to the rez. There was kind of a rule that Indians couldn’t be off the reservation after dark. They went every month to buy stuff like flour and whatnot, to sell blueberries. They were coming back and they couldn’t make the reservation. They ended up parking alongside this trail, this wagon trail. They made a fire and made some soup. They saw these lights coming from far away. They watched those lights for hours as they got closer. They kept watching and these three white guys show up in a Model A Ford. And these white guys started in giving them shit. ‘Hey, you want to sell your women,’ saying things like that. Giving them shit about being off the reservation. Her uncle started getting pissed. He pulled out a lever-action rifle and said if they didn’t leave he’d kill them all. These guys took off. Fannie and her grandpa tried to sleep but her uncle stayed up all night, keeping watch, on the lookout for the white guys. I just hated that. I hated it that my grandma got terrorized just for being Indian and being off the reservation. When it got light they packed up and drove the wagon as fast as they could back to the rez. And guys like Mueller and other guys like that are telling me that Indians are terrorizing them. It pisses me off that they cry around about stuff like that.”

  There still exists a lot of hostility between Indians and whites in northern Minnesota—especially between Red Lake and its white neighbors. But the waters Mueller was fishing on were troubled for other reasons, too—related to Red Lake’s sovereignty. Sovereignty means that you can determine your own lives, but it has a downside: you also have the latitude to destroy them. The one industry that Red Lake could claim in an otherwise economically depressed region was the commercial fishing of walleye pike. The walleye pike is unique to North American waters. It is the Minnesota state fish, and by the 1990s Red Lake was the last remaining natural fishery for walleye in the United States. The Red Lake Band had overfished the lake, and the effect was catastrophic, both economically and culturally. Until that point, the walleye was the principal resource of Red Lake and its dominant cultural icon. Much of Red Lake’s material and social culture was based on the harvesting and use of walleye. This continued slowly until the fishery collapsed and was shut down in 1997.

  A distinctly New World species, walleye are found throughout Canadian and northern American waters. They can be found in lakes and rivers in cold northern areas and get the name “walleye” because of the way their eyes reflect light, like the eyes of cat. They school during the spring spawning, which usually occurs in late April or early May in Minnesota, and a little later in colder waters farther north in Canada. The rest of the year they hunt alone, though groups of walleye will congregate in productive habitat like sandbars, rock piles, and the edges of weed beds: places where small bait f
ish congregate. Their eyes allow them to see in cloudy or disturbed water, giving them an advantage over their prey. They are not fussy fish, like brook trout or brown trout. You don’t need to be an analyst to catch them, worrying over presentation, lure color, or insect. They are, however, excellent fighters and are considered by many to be the best-tasting freshwater fish on the continent. Moreover, they don’t grow to an impressive size and aren’t even really a “pike.” Walleye belong to the Percidae ­family—technically, this makes them perch. They live, on average, nine years and grow to a weight of about five to seven pounds and a length of twenty-four to twenty-eight inches. The largest walleye ever caught was forty-two inches long and weighed twenty-five pounds. The oldest walleye on record (age is determined by measuring the layers of bone—like the layers of a pearl—on a special bone in their head called an otolith) was twenty-nine years old at the time of its capture.

  These statistics don’t really compare to those of true pike—known as northern pike and muskellunge—which are found in northern waters across America, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia. These monsters can grow up to six feet long and weigh well over thirty pounds. The largest pike on record weighed seventy-seven pounds. They are ferocious fish that will attack and try to eat just about anything—from their own young to frogs, mice, and ducklings. They have teeth, like walleye, but bigger. One friend of mine describes them as being 50 percent teeth and 50 percent appetite. They are also, unlike the walleye, a storied fish. The hero of the Finnish epic the Kalevala made a musical instrument out of the jawbone of a pike. The U.S. Navy named a total of five submarines after the pike, and an entire class of Russian submarines from the Soviet era, the Victor III Class, was nicknamed “Shchuka,” Russian for “pike.”

  Nor does the walleye measure up to the sturgeon, which still surfaces from time to time in our larger and deeper lakes. This prehistoric fish is found throughout America, Europe, and Asia and can grow up to eight feet long. Some sturgeons caught in America are estimated to be more than 200 years old. Frederick the Great released a great number of sturgeons in Lake Gardno in Pomerania in 1780. Some of them were still alive in 1866. John Tanner, during his travels in the 1790s, was canoeing up the Mississippi with a party of Ojibwe warriors when they all leaped out of the canoe and charged through the shallow water. He thought they were under attack. Rather, they had spied a sturgeon grounded on a sandbar. The warriors beat it to death with their clubs. It took four men to lift it into the canoe. Once back in the village they cut it up and fed an entire village of over 200 Ojibwe for a week.

  But Minnesota loves its walleye. Minnesotans and nonresidents came together in 2006 to buy 1,371,106 fishing licenses and used them in Minnesota’s 5,493 fishing lakes and 15,000 miles of streams. Although panfish like bluegill, crappie, perch, and sunfish are the most commonly caught fish (with an annual harvest of 64 million pounds), most people come to Minnesota for walleye. Sport anglers take 35 million pounds of walleye annually. And the state of Minnesota restocks its 3.8 million acres of fishable waters with 250 million walleye fry (newly hatched fish), 2.5 million walleye fingerlings (infant fish), and 50,000 walleye yearlings every year. The financial statistics are staggering: more than $1.58 billion is spent every year by anglers, most of them trying to land a walleye or two.

  Walleye also appears on most menus in the state, usually fried, sometimes herbed, rarely baked or poached. It is delicious, even if you don’t like fried fish. It has a clean taste, and firm, white, flaky flesh that comes off the spine in thick, moist shingles. The meat near the tail, where the rib bones and other substructures disappear, is the best part—the firmest, sweetest, most delicious freshwater fish this side of trout you will ever taste. It is difficult to buy the fish anywhere outside the state, and expats often order it from online retailers just for a taste of home.

  The walleye has also been implicated in a high-level culinary intrigue that some have called “Walleyegate.” In 2004, Minneapolis-based KARE 11 News went “undercover” to expose a “walleye scam” being perpetrated in restaurants near Minneapolis and St. Paul. Evidently, the news program had been tipped off that many of the restaurants advertising walleye on their menus weren’t serving walleye at all.

  Walleye retails at about five dollars a pound, but a European fish called zander—which has the same texture, size, and flavor—sells for two dollars less per pound. For a restaurant like, say, the swanky Tavern on Grand in St. Paul, which sells 50,000 pounds of walleye a year, the switch could mean more than $100,000 in savings. KARE’s reporter ordered “walleye” at about twenty restaurants in the area and sent samples to a laboratory in New York that specializes in testing fish and animal DNA. In half the cases, the results came back as zander, not walleye. One wonders if the switch is important enough to merit such careful undercover work; after all, no one could tell the difference. But according to their DNA, zander and walleye went their separate ways at least 12 million years ago, and “species substitution” is illegal under U.S. law. Restaurant managers mostly refused to talk on film, saying only, “No comment.” One manager, however, did say that he had been assured by his vendor that what he purchased was walleye. Zander, he was told, is a different name for walleye. He went on the record as saying that his company was “embarrassed” but had been “led astray.” Even the Ojibwe community of St. Croix was selling zander as walleye in its casino in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin.

  It seems ironic that Indians, long imagined (by ourselves and by others) as “stewards of the land”—that is, as possessing, by virtue of culture or blood, a unique and wholesome relationship with the natural world—are, in numerous cases, primarily responsible for the destruction of the ecosystem that gave us life.

  When Ojibwe first came to Red Lake in the 1600s—­encouraged by the fur trade to expand and control new trapping grounds, and engaged in wars to the east, north, and west—the lake was a paradise. There were certain requirements that a place needed to meet in order to be suitable for settlement, and Red Lake met them all. It had abundant wild rice beds, diverse forests (a mixture of pine and hardwood excellent for building), easily navigable water, and a recurring and stable source of protein: the walleye. There are many kinds of fish in the world, and all contain protein, but not all are easy to harvest with primitive methods. Some, such as northern pike, are so widely dispersed throughout a lake that it is impossible to catch them in large enough numbers to feed a village. Others, like trout and eelpout, run and live so deep that retrieving them with nets or traps is difficult. Walleye are the perfect fish for surviving on medium-size inland lakes. They don’t live deep in the water. They spawn at regular intervals in very shallow water. They are big enough to satisfy. They school up rather than spread out. Other large Ojibwe settlements were supported by other fish; the settlement at Sault Sainte Marie on the narrows between Upper and Lower Peninsula, Michigan, is one example. This community lived off the whitefish that ran in the cold current. Some explorers wrote that during the spawn (which occurs in the fall) it was possible to walk from one side of the Sault to the other on the backs of the fish. The Indians of the northwest coast have salmon. The plains tribes have buffalo. The Ojibwe have fish. Red Lake, in particular, has, or had, walleye. Like the buffalo for the Blackfeet, the Dakota, Nakota, Arikara, Cheyenne, and Nez Perce, the walleye gave the Ojibwe of Red Lake life. And so, after a series of bloody wars, the Ojibwe drove the Sioux west and took control of Red Lake.

  Fishing at Red Lake occurred at a subsistence level for about 400 years with little change in the technology used to harvest the fish. They were speared from a canoe by torchlight in the shallows and netted and noodled (lifted out with the hands) in small streams during the spring spawn. Spears were made of pliable, sharpened deer and porcupine bones. Nets were woven out of twine made from the fibrous innards of stinging nettle stalks. The canoes were made of birch bark. In the 1800s iron replaced bone. Commercial twine replaced nettle. In the 1900s canvas and
wood canoes replaced birch bark. By 1917 fishing was done from the decks of motorized boats. Nets were remarkably strong and much lighter. It was at this time that the first commercial fishery opened at Red Lake.

  During the final years of World War I, there was a food shortage in the United States. The federal government saw that fish, such as the walleye at Red Lake, could be an easily harvested and renewable food source. In violation of Red Lake’s sovereignty, which the band was not in a position to enforce very well at the time, the federal government established a state-run commercial fishery in the village of Red Lake. It was one of the largest commercial fisheries in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of walleye were caught in Red Lake, dried, and shipped south by railcar. In 1930, as a result of some hard lobbying by Red Lake leaders, the fishery was turned over to the Red Lake tribe, and the Red Lake Fisheries Association (RLFA), a fishing collective made up of Red Lake Band members, was founded. The RLFA issued licenses and quotas from the fishery, to whom members would sell their fish. Everyone would receive money for poundage sold as well as a dividend of profits from the export of the fish to wholesalers in the region. Whenever fishers exceeded their quota, all they had to do was apply for a supplement, which was never denied. Then they could go out and get more fish.