The Walleye Wars: Treaty Rights and the Boat Landing

In nineteen eighty-three, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in a case called Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa Indians versus Voigt. The ruling affirmed that the treaties of eighteen thirty-seven and eighteen forty-two had not simply transferred land to the United States. It had also reserved specific rights for the Ojibwe signatories, rights that had existed continuously since the treaty was signed: the right to hunt, fish, and gather in the ceded territories off-reservation.

The treaty right had never been extinguished. The courts enforced it. The Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes could spearfish walleye in the waters their ancestors had fished for generations.

The response from non-Native recreational fishermen and resort owners was organized and immediate. At boat landings across Wisconsin and Michigan, people showed up to confront tribal members exercising the rights the court had affirmed. They brought racial slurs. They brought physical confrontations. They brought death threats. They sank boats. They threw rocks. A campaign of harassment that ran through the late nineteen eighties before law enforcement intervention and court injunctions brought the violence at the landings under control.

The spearfishing rights remain in effect. The treaty territories have not changed. The treaties said what they said, and a century and a half of pretending otherwise did not make them say something different.

The process by which the courts reached the final enforcement framework took the better part of a decade, from the initial Voigt ruling through subsequent decisions into the late nineteen eighties. The treaty right was not in question. Only the willingness to enforce it.