Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

In May 2006, Red Lake tribal conservation Officers Tyson Nelson and Charley Grolla were on their routine patrol when they spotted two white men fishing in reservation waters. The reservation boundary was clearly marked with plastic buoys, which sport fishermen often disregarded and destroyed. The fishermen were Jerry Mueller and his son-in-law. When Mueller saw Officers Nelson and Grolla approaching, he tried to speed away but stopped when he noticed that the officers had the faster boat. Officer Grolla said that Mueller “was cooperative at first,” then “[h]e played stupid” (25). They then confiscated Mueller’s son-in-law’s boat and fishing gear. Mueller denied that he had any intention of fishing in reservation waters. Officer Grolla was indifferent to his apology. Mueller’s son-in-law had also been apologetic and polite; he later paid his fine. The officers returned his boat and trailer. Mueller, on the other hand, refused to obey the summons to appear at Red Lake Reservation tribal court and would not pay the $250 dollar fine for illegal fishing. Many other white people supported his refusal. Mueller obtained pro bono representation to fight the fine in tribal court. Citizens for Truth in Government, an action group based in Bagley, Minnesota, claimed that Red Lake Reservation did not deserve “sole jurisdiction over the waterways inside the reservation” and should not have the “right to fine non-band members or confiscate their property” (25). Its secretary-treasurer, Terry Maddy, insisted that he was not anti-Indian and even had “a lot of Indian friends” (25). Maddy said that he was actually “anti-reservation, because reservations are keeping people down,” due to the “special treatment [and] special rights” that Indigenous Americans get there (25).

That same year, Doug Lindgren, a Republican candidate for the Minnesota state legislature, made the issue of fishing rights at Red Lake his primary campaign issue. He claimed that because the US Supreme Court declared that all navigable waters in Minnesota belong to the state, Minnesota should have control over Red Lake. Michael Barrett, a Republican running for office in the US House of Representatives, insisted that the issue was about unifying everyone as Minnesotans with the same opportunities and rights as everyone else—“not special privileges for a few” (26). Treuer counters this by writing that, without tribal concessions made during the treaty process, the state of Minnesota wouldn’t exist at all.

Arguments over Red Lake inhabitants’ supposedly special rights are really about sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty existed early in American history, and the first reservations go back to the early 1700s when the Delaware were promised land in Chester County, Pennsylvania.  At that time, Indigenous American tribes commanded “the natural resources, the routes of travel, and the technology to effectively control large areas of North America” (30). They were key players in the French and Indian War—referred to in Europe as “the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War” (30)—which was largely fought between the British and the French, alongside their Indigenous American allies. Most Indigenous tribes allied with the French, who were better “neighbors and trading partners” (30). Some tribes, particularly most of the Iroquois Confederacy, allied with the British. The Seven Years’ War lasted from 1754 to 1763 and ended only when France gave up most of its land holdings in North America at the Treaty of Paris. The British then took hold of the formerly French territories that surrounded the Great Lakes. The leader of this transition, General Jeffrey Amherst, had a low opinion of Indigenous peoples, believing them to be “disorganized, weak, and worthless” (31). He cut rations to tribes and told traders not to sell Indigenous peoples gunpowder. While few French colonialists entered I­­ndigenous tribes’ territories, the British came in like a flood, causing the tribes in the region to fight back. The conflict, which became known as Pontiac’s War, started at Fort Detroit in the spring of 1763 and persisted until late 1764. Hundreds of British civilians and soldiers were tortured, burned alive, and scalped. At least one “was ritually cannibalized” (31). General Amherst then got the idea to infect the tribes with smallpox intentionally. His colleague, General Bouquet, worked with him to infect the tribes with contaminated blankets. At the end of the conflict, “500 British troops were dead and 2,000 British colonists had been captured or killed,” while it is unclear how many Indigenous people died from smallpox (32).

With the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the British reorganized their commercial and social relations with Indigenous tribes. Their new arrangement was similar to the one established by the French. They also drew a border that separated British and Indigenous lands. All land west of the Appalachian Mountains was regarded as Indigenous territory. The new settlers understood that Indigenous peoples had “individual and collective rights to their lands” (32). Meanwhile, Indigenous nations came to believe that tribal alliances were the best means to handle colonial outsiders.

When the Revolutionary War started, Indigenous nations on the East coast and in the Ohio River Valley were courted by the British and the colonists. Some tribes aligned with one side, while others worked with both sides. None of the tribes who worked with either side “fared well in the end” (32).

Until the government passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851, the federal government’s policy toward Indigenous nations involved only assimilation and removal. With the new act, the policy shifted to removal and containment. Instead of giving tribes large pieces of land, which disrupted western expansion, the government offered smaller parcels. In Ojibwe, the word for “reservation” is “ishkonigan,” which means “leftovers.” In addition to receiving land, the tribes also had the right “to live unmolested and on their own terms,” which included their rights “to hunt, fish, gather, [and] harvest timber” (35). These rights were also extended to territories that were once under the tribe’s control, defined as ceded territories.

The new reservations were usually run by an Indian agent commissioned by the Department of War. These agents were often corrupt. By the early 1880s, the consensus was that reservations were a failure. The tribes were not permitted to live on their own terms, and the Dawes Act sought to break up tribes altogether. On Leech Lake, as on many other reservations, the tribe owns only about 4% of the land within its boundaries. The rest “is divided among county, state, federal, corporate, and private owners” (36).

Officer Grolla tells Treuer that the reservation is where many Indigenous people feel safe. In recent history, Indigenous peoples were often terrorized for being off the reservation, including Grolla’s grandmother, Fannie Johns. There remains a great deal of hostility between Indigenous tribes and white citizens in northern Minnesota. This hostility came to a head over commercial fishing rights to walleye pike, Minnesota’s state fish. The pike is also unique to North America. By the 1990s, Red Lake was the only natural walleye fishery left in existence, and the Red Lake Band had overfished the lake. Ultimately, the fishery was terminated in 1997. Treuer notes that it may seem ironic that Native Americans, often regarded as the protectors of the land, were largely responsible for destroying the ecosystem at Red Lake. On the other hand, the overfishing was the result of there being no development on Red Lake.

When the Ojibwe arrived at Red Lake in the 1600s, they found a territory with “abundant wild rice beds, diverse forests […], easily navigable water, [and] the walleye” (41). Walleye are excellent fish to harvest because they spawn regularly in shallow waters and don’t live at great depths. The abundance of walleye may have been part of the reason why the Ojibwe drove the Sioux off the land and to the West. For 400 years, the Ojibwe speared the fish “from a canoe by torchlight,” either netting them or lifting them out with their hands (41). By 1917, with the advent of motorized boats, Red Lake opened its first commercial fishery.

At the end of World War I, the federal government responded to a national food shortage by setting up a state-run commercial fishery in Red Lake, in violation of the Red Lake Band’s sovereignty (42). The fishery caught hundreds of thousands of pounds of walleye and shipped them south by train. In 1930, the government turned the fishery over to the Red Lake tribe, which led to the development of the Red Lake Fisheries Association (RLFA), a collective formed by Red Lake Band members. It was the RLFA that issued licenses and fishing quotas.

By the 1970s, the lake operated on a boom-and-bust cycle. In some years, the fish were abundant, while in others there were hardly any. Other lakes were similarly overfished. By the 1990s, the annual harvest of walleye was one million pounds, while an additional million were sold on the black market. According to one fisherman, the Hmong were ideal customers because they took the whole fish and paid three times what the RLFA gave fishermen. By 1996, fishermen only managed to get 15,000 pounds per year. The following year, Red Lake ended commercial fishing, and by the late 1990s there was a moratorium on fishing until the state and the Red Lake Band could revive the fish supply.

Treuer concludes that Red Lake’s sovereignty was partly to blame for the overfishing. The band’s ability to determine on its own how much fish could be taken and by whom led to greed. Floyd “Buck” Jourdain, who had been voted chairman of Red Lake in 2004, saw the fisheries as the tribe’s biggest challenge. Under his leadership, the Red Lake Band, with the support of the state and federal government, worked to bring the fish back to the lake. Between 1999 and 2004, they put over 105.2 million walleye back into Red Lake. Individual fishermen were allowed back on the lake in 2005, but commercial netting was still forbidden. It was around this time that Jerry Mueller and his son-in-law entered Red Lake Reservation.

Citizens for Truth in Government claimed that they would blockade Red Lake “unless the tribe effectively gave up its sovereignty” (44). Michael Barrett, the Republican candidate for House of Representatives from the seventh District, planned to give a speech advocating for the enforcement of a 1926 US Supreme Court decision acknowledging the state’s jurisdiction “over a drained lake bed within the ceded territories” (45). However, this decision had nothing to do with Red Lake sovereignty. Moreover, Barrett never showed up. Instead, a man named Doug Lindgren did. He raised the issue, which resulted in a screaming match with Red Lake Nation tribal historian and tribal secretary Kathryn “Jodi” Beaulieu, who called Lindgren racist. Red Lake treasurer Darrell Seki invited non-members to go to Red Lake, where their equipment was promptly confiscated and seized by the band.

Red Lake Reservation has nearly 10,000 members and is an important voting bloc. They have the county’s highest level of voter turnout, and 90% of those who vote are Democrats. They vote in tribal elections, as well as local, state, and federal elections. Citizens for Truth in Government has made no headway in getting either the state or the federal government to review its acknowledgement of Red Lake’s sovereignty. When Jerry Mueller went to Red Lake Tribal Court in October 2006, he may have felt the way Indigenous people feel all the time: “surrounded, outnumbered, and unloved by people different from himself” (47). Mueller lost his case and paid his fine.