The Walleye Wars in Chequamegon: Spearfishing, Boat Ramps, and the 1842 Treaty

The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest covers about one and a half million acres across northern Wisconsin, making it the largest national forest in Wisconsin and one of the largest national forests in the eastern United States by acreage. It is also the land that sits at the center of one of the most bitter legal and cultural conflicts in twentieth-century Wisconsin history: the Ojibwe spearfishing rights dispute, which Wisconsinites called the Walleye Wars.

The conflict had a legal foundation that was not seriously in dispute. The eighteen forty-two Treaty of La Pointe, signed at the trading post on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, ceded a vast tract of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota to the United States. The Ojibwe signatories negotiated explicit off-reservation rights to hunt, fish, and gather in the ceded territory, rights they had exercised continuously for decades after the treaty. Then, over the following century, Wisconsin and Minnesota state governments progressively restricted those rights through game and fishing regulations that applied equally to tribal and non-tribal fishermen, effectively ignoring the treaty guarantees.

In nineteen eighty-three, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the Voigt Decision that the off-reservation rights had never been extinguished. The Ojibwe could spearfish walleye at night during spring spawning season in the ceded territory, which included hundreds of lakes within and adjacent to the Chequamegon-Nicolet.

The reaction was immediate and violent in character. At boat landings across northern Wisconsin, organized groups of non-Native fishermen met Ojibwe spearfishing parties with slurs, rocks, and death threats. Protesters sank boats. They displayed signs. The confrontations ran through the late nineteen eighties and into the nineteen nineties, documented by the Witness for Non-Violence organization that deployed observers to the landings.

The spearfishing rights were upheld by subsequent federal court decisions. The Ojibwe exercise them today under a co-management framework with the state. The conflict over who owns the fish in the ceded-territory lakes has not vanished, but the legal answer has not changed since nineteen eighty-three.