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 of Red Lake in 2004, he saw the plight of the fisheries and what it meant for Red Lake—for its economic health and its sovereignty—as the biggest challenge facing the tribe. Instead of pulling in and protecting the reservation from outside scrutiny, the Red Lake Band launched an aggressive program, along with the state of Minnesota, the federal government, and local resources, to restock the lake. It was a long process. The participants assessed water quality, breeding habitat, and genetically tested fish to find which strains were best suited to Red Lake’s waters. They had to enforce a strict ban against fishing on Upper and Lower Red Lake. Between 1999 and 2004 Red Lake and the state of Minnesota dumped more than 105.2 million walleye fry into Red Lake. By 2004 the fish were reproducing on their own. And hook-and-line fishing (not commercial netting) reopened on Red Lake in 2005.
It was in these troubled waters that Jerry Mueller and his son-in-law crossed onto Red Lake Reservation. After Jerry Mueller’s boat was confiscated in May, Citizens for Truth in Government threatened a blockade of Red Lake unless the tribe effectively gave up its sovereignty. Many people, from Republican hopefuls to white anglers and resort owners, were still upset at what they saw as Red Lake’s mismanagement of its waters. Michael Barrett and Doug Lindgren leaned on the federal government to intervene—clearly trying to make Red Lake a campaign issue in the elections during the fall of 2006. The situation came to a head on August 14, 2006, when Michael Barrett, the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the 7th District, scheduled a speech at a fund-raiser in Bemidji. The fund-raiser was held at the Rotary Pavilion on the Bemidji waterfront, where Indian burial mounds had been razed in the 1920s to make room for a fairground. About forty-five people sat on folding chairs in the pavilion while forty more, mostly Indian, stood outside, ready to question Barrett about Red Lake. Barrett—a pharmacy manager—didn’t show up. He had planned to announce his desire for the federal government to enforce a 1926 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that the state of Minnesota had jurisdiction over a drained lake bed within the ceded territories but not on the Red Lake Reservation itself. It was an obscure ruling that in no way spoke to the sovereignty of Red Lake. Barrett, Lindgren, and Citizens for Truth in Government had been using this case as ammunition to shoot down Red Lake’s sovereignty despite the response by the state and federal government that it didn’t apply.
Although Barrett didn’t show up, Doug Lindgren did. He raised the issue and got into a shouting match with the Red Lake Nation tribal historian and tribal secretary Kathryn “Jodi” Beaulieu, who called Lindgren and his position racist.
Other Republicans present tried to backpedal and distance themselves from Barrett and Lindgren. “He went about it in the same way Mike is going about everything—head down and head first, like a bull in a china shop,” said the chairwoman of the Beltrami County Republicans, Kath Molitor. Mark Kennedy of the U.S. House of Representatives was surprised by the hubbub and didn’t know how to answer questions about Red Lake’s sovereignty. He said he’d never been to Red Lake but would love to visit. This gave the fiery Red Lake treasurer, Darrell Seki, the opening he needed. Seki is from Ponemah, is a fluent speaker of both English and Ojibwe, and is not known, generally, for holding his tongue or for keeping his opinions to himself. He’s a fighter, not a diplomat—and with his severe face, shaded glasses, and glossy hair, he cuts an imposing figure. “Any non-members are welcome to come to our lake,” he said in response to Kennedy, “and I hope they bring their equipment, because our DNR [Department of Natural Resources] needs equipment. Tell the non-members to come to our lake—we’ll arrest them. We’ll take their equipment, too.” He concluded by saying, “It’s our lake, it will stay our lake. We, as a Tribal Council, will protect our lake and our people. All the lands are ours and we are going to protect them.” One got the feeling that Seki had stopped just short of saying “by any means necessary.” What was clear was that Lindgren and Barrett, under the mask of favoring “fairness” and opposing “special rights,” were trying to turn Red Lake into a campaign issue. Red Lake Reservation, with nearly 10,000 members, is a huge voting bloc in the region and has the highest voter turnout in the entire county: according to some statistics, more than 90 percent of Red Lakers go to the polls. Of these, 90 percent vote Democratic. Reservations, after all, are covered by congressional districts, county districts, and sometimes local government as well. And while enrolled band members of tribes can vote in tribal elections, they are also U.S. citizens and can vote in the same elections as their non-Indian neighbors.
As these campaign issues raged, there were other elections under way that summer. Buck Jourdain was running for a second term as tribal chairman against the tribal secretary Judy Roy. On July 19, 2006, Jourdain defeated Roy by a margin of seventy-one votes. Shortly thereafter, a Red Lake tribal member, Archie King, filed a complaint with the General Election Board alleging that Jourdain had bought votes and had used tribal funds for his campaign. The board agreed and ruled that a new runoff between the candidates was in order. Jourdain not only denied the allegations but said that the General Election Board did not have the right to call a new election. As for the complaint, Jourdain said that the “election was fair and my campaign was conducted in accordance with all election laws.” Furthermore, he argued, “According to the Red Lake election code . . . all challenges must be submitted and received within five days of the public posting [of election results] by the General Election Board.” The election issue was covered in the local paper, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune,
