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 fish 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
