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.
Beginning in the 1970s the lake started on a boom-and-bust cycle, which should have been seen as a warning sign that the lake was trembling under the pressure of fishing. Some years the fish were caught by the hundreds of thousands, as they had been for centuries. In other years the fishing wasn’t so good. No one listened to the lake—not the Red Lakers netting fish in the south and not the sport anglers catching them with hook and line in the north. No one listened to other lakes where the same thing had happened.
There are two other large, shallow sandy lakes in Minnesota that once supported huge fisheries—Lake Winnibigoshish on the Leech Lake Reservation and Lake Mille Lacs, closer to Minneapolis. Both lakes were overfished and eventually collapsed; they yielded next to no walleye—but not before the same erratic pulse, the same boom-and-bust cycle, was evident. Neither lake has ever come back to the levels of fish and fishing it once supported.
Fishing continued on Red Lake in the 1970s and 1980s as before. There seemed to be no end to the fish. By the early 1990s the RLFA membership had swelled from 200 to 700. The annual harvest stood at 1 million pounds, with an estimated additional 1 million pounds of walleye sold on the black market. Gary and Jane Bymark own a resort on the northern shore of Red Lake, off the reservation. Gary said in an interview that he watched pickup trucks drive past with walleye mounded up in the back so high he could see them from behind the bar. He also remembered Red Lakers coming into the white-owned resort to sell fish: “Like when you’re sitting at the bar here, and any one of them Indians come in and say we got walleye for a dollar a walleye, cleaned and everything, they’re going to buy them. Two or three guys would come in here and walk out with a hundred walleyes.”
A few hundred walleye were small change. One former fisherman told me he would gut his fish, pack them in the trunk of his car, and drive the five hours to Minneapolis, where he sold the fish to the Asian markets. The Hmong were the best customers, he said. They wanted the whole fish—head, fins, tail—not just fillets. So it was easier and you got more poundage. He’d dicker with them and threaten to cross from north St. Paul over to Minneapolis and sell them to the Chinese and Koreans instead. The Hmong would hurriedly buy the entire load at three dollars a pound: three times what he was paid by the RLFA.
Fish came to function as a kind of currency. In the early 1980s my mother, a lawyer then in private practice, was paid in fish; one client gave her 500 walleye fillets and his JVC stereo to settle his bill. “If you didn’t have a job, set nets, sell fish,” says Greg Kingbird, a spiritual leader and lifelong resident of Ponemah. “Make enough money, sit back for a few days. Run out of money, go set again. That was a way of life. You could go out there any day, get something to eat.” Also, the sport fishing on the north end of the lake was out of control. Ed Hudec, a resort owner near the town of Washkish on the north shore of Red Lake, remembers seeing 10,000 boats on Upper Red Lake during the fishing opener in mid-May.
All this came to an end in 1996. That was when the last mature and healthy year-class of fish was taken from the lake. Instead of millions of pounds, fishermen were able to take only 15,000 pounds in total. It was a disaster. The fish were gone. In 1997 Red Lake stopped commercial fishing, and a year later it closed subsistence fishing as well. In 1999 the state of Minnesota followed suit and closed state waters in Upper Red Lake to sport fishing. A moratorium was in effect. The band and the state would try to bring the fish back.
Red Lake’s sovereignty had, in some ways, led to this. The band could determine—without consulting the state or anyone else—how much fish could be taken and in what ways and by whom. And, as many Red Lakers admit, greed was allowed to run its course.
So there is sovereignty, but of a special kind. Tribes can’t keep standing armies (though some have done so). They can’t issue their own currency (though some have done this, too). Most can’t have border patrols and can’t require passports (though some, including Red Lake, do or did). In July 2010, the Iroquois national lacrosse team—which has been traveling to lacrosse tournaments around the world on Iroquois Confederacy passports for thirty years—was barred from traveling to Britain on these passports because of newer restrictions stemming from the Patriot Act. The team refused to use U.S. passports and in the end missed competing in the championship of the sport the Iroquois invented.
When Floyd “Buck” Jourdain was voted in as chairman