the water wearing heavy boots. If you go over you could drown,” says Charley.
Grolla and Tyson had been watching as the boat with the two white fishermen neared the reservation boundary, marked onshore with a sign and on the water with white plastic buoys. Sport fishermen often ripped down the signs and cut the buoys. Only a road remains as a reminder of where the reservation boundary lies. Even though Jerry Mueller and his son-in-law were close to shore and could see the sign, they did not turn around; they continued fishing on Red Lake waters until they were a mile inside the reservation. When Mueller saw the conservation officers approaching he started his boat, gunned it, and then stopped—clearly the officers had the faster boat. “He knew where he was,” recalled Grolla. “We took him in and he was cooperative at first. He played stupid. ‘We didn’t know,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know.’ But we were really respectful, professional. Even though they saw the signs down everyone knows where the boundary is. You can see it on the shore. And it was totally calm. How could you drift a mile over the boundary when there’s no wind at all?”
Grolla and Nelson powered up alongside Mueller and his son-in-law (the case is referred to as the Mueller case although the boat actually belonged to the son-in-law), took hold of the 1984 Forester seventeen-foot fiberglass boat, and said that they were fishing on Red Lake Reservation waters and that the boat, motor, and fishing gear were being confiscated.
“If I’m on the reservation, I’m real sorry for this,” Mueller recalled saying. “I had no intention of fishing on your side of the lake.”
Mueller claimed later that Grolla said, “Your apology don’t hold no weight with me.”
The officers moved their assault rifles to the stern and commanded Mueller and his son-in-law to get into the bow. With the boat in tow they proceeded back to the boat landing. The son-in-law was polite, even contrite. He paid his fine and got his boat and trailer back without complaint. Mueller was a different story. When he returned home he received a summons to appear in Red Lake Reservation tribal court or to pay a fine of $250 for fishing illegally in Red Lake waters. He said that he would not obey the summons, and that the fine was unfair. Many other whites agreed with him. He received pro bono legal representation to help him fight the fine in tribal court. A nonprofit citizen action group called Citizens for Truth in Government, based in Bagley, Minnesota, was formed in part because of the issues of water rights and fishing rights stirred up by the Mueller case. The action group argued, among other things, that Red Lake Reservation shouldn’t have sole jurisdiction over the waterways inside the reservation, that it had no right to fine non–band members or confiscate their property, and that the reservation shouldn’t receive any money from the state for schools on its land. “The reservation is set up to fail,” says Terry Maddy, the secretary-treasurer for Citizens for Truth in Government. “I want to be clear: I’m not anti-Indian. I’m pro-Indian. I’ve got a lot of Indian friends. And let me tell you—when they come visit me they don’t want to park out front. They’re scared to be seen with me because Buck Jourdain [the chairman of the Red Lake Tribe] has got spies. They’re scared to death of him. He gets a cut of everything up there,” contends Maddy. “Like a kingpin. If people speak out publicly, they’ll die. We’re not anti-Indian, we’re anti-reservation, because reservations are keeping people down. No one’s happy up there. And it’s because people feel entitled. They get special treatment, special rights.” A coalition of sport fishermen vowed to form a floating blockade of Red Lake waters with their fishing boats. What might have been an instance of willful trespass or simply a navigational blunder looked as if it would become a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Red Lake Reservation.
Doug Lindgren, a Republican candidate for the state legislature in 2006, made Red Lake his main campaign issue. “It’s been upheld in the highest court in the nation,” said Lindgren, “that Red Lake belongs—and this is from the U.S. Supreme Court—is that they are saying that the navigable waters belong to the state of Minnesota. If Minnesota has the right, through the laws, then yes, Minnesota should step in and have all control over what goes on on the Red Lakes.” Michael Barrett, a Republican running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, said, “This is not meant to be racist in any manner. In fact, the opposite is true. This is a statement that identifies that we’re all Minnesotans, that we should all have the same opportunities and we should all live by the same rules. We have to have a state and a nation that embraces equal rights and equal access for all, not special privileges for a few.”
It’s the idea of “special privileges” that upsets people so much. But what Barrett, Lindgren, and Maddy don’t realize is that tribes and tribal sovereignty allowed there to be a state of Minnesota in the first place. Without the concessions made by tribes during the treaty process there wouldn’t be anyplace for white people to settle. Be that as it may, Terry Maddy, the treasurer for Citizens for Truth in Government, summed up Red Lake’s position by saying they’ve “long had a tradition up there of having their cake and eating it, too.”
Red Lake Reservation is mostly water. It is a beautiful place, unlike any other in America. For starters, Upper and Lower Red Lake are almost completely undeveloped. Elm, ash, and maple march down to the water’s edge. In a time when lakeshore property on sandy lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin with good fishing has been almost completely divided and developed, sand beaches stretch for miles on Red Lake without interruption. Red Lake is actually two lakes—Upper and Lower Red Lake—connected by a narrow channel. The southern Lower Red Lake is sandy and shallow, and its 152,000 acres sit completely inside the reservation. Upper Red Lake is divided more or less in half—the 48,000 acres of the northern portion of Upper Red Lake are off the reservation; 60,000 acres of the southern half are within the boundaries of Red Lake.
There aren’t really any farms on Red Lake Reservation, and there are only a few backwoods businesses advertising welding, small-engine repair, or logging. There are only four convenience stores I know of on the rez—one each in Little Rock, Red Lake Village, Redby, and Ponemah. The village of Red Lake has a grocery store and a Laundromat. Other than these small convenience stores, there is no place to buy gas or food. There were no hotels until the spring of 2010, when Red Lake opened a casino on the southern boundary, far from the lake. There are no hair salons, Starbucks, Einstein Brothers Bagels, cell phone stores, RadioShacks, Jiffy Lubes, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Rent-A-Centers, car dealerships, Gaps or Old Navy Stores. There aren’t even any real billboards. What signs do exist are often small, hand-painted on plywood, and as often as not propped against a tree rather than planted in the ground. The first sign you see upon driving into the village of Red Lake on Highway 89 is nicely painted and reads “Don’s West-End Video,” in red block letters written freehand on whitewashed half-inch plywood. All of this . . . this nothing, on a reservation the same size as Rhode Island. Until the new casino was built in 2010, the biggest building on the rez (except for the hospital) was the BIA jail.
The reasons for this apparent nothing are varied. Red Lake suffers from some of the most crippling economic conditions of any community in the country. Unemployment stands at 60 percent. The average income at Red Lake is well below the poverty level. High school graduation rates are the lowest in the state.
The village of Red Lake, arguably the capital of the rez, since that’s where the high school and government offices are, doesn’t offer much to look at. There is the former Red Lake Trading Post, which is now called Red Lake Foods. It is a combination grocery store, gas station, convenience store, Laundromat, and check-cashing place. There are government buildings, a few houses, a small casino, the grade school, the high school, and the powwow grounds next to the old casino. All in all, the village has a meanly municipal feel to it.
All land is held in common by the Red Lake Band, so no non–band member can own or rent out any house on tribal land. Charley Grolla, the officer who arrested Jerry Mueller, is an enrolled member of a different reservation, the small backwoods community of Nett Lake in northeastern Minnesota. “When I was real little my ma was going to go to an AA meeting in the Cities. So she dropped me and my brother off with Dale and
