The Chippewas Want Their Rights

Retort some whites: "Save a fish--spear an Indian"

The whites who live on the White Earth reservation in northwestern Minnesota are increasingly apprehensive about their Indian neighbors. Says Jane Reish, co-owner of the Jolly Fisherman Resort: "We're not just a little bit nervous, we're scared to death. We seem to be caught in a time warp. All this talk about the Treaty of 1867. This is 1979!"

It is indeed 1979, but Indians all over the U.S. are on the warpath against whites--and winning. Brandishing legal briefs, the Indians are asserting their rights under old treaties and insisting on control over activities on their reservations.

This push marks still another turn in Indian militancy. The celebrated cases in which Indian tribes claimed ownership of huge tracts of land now seem headed for compromises. In Maine the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies, who once demanded 12 million acres, or two-thirds of the state, have come down to 300,000 acres, and may well settle for less. Meanwhile, cases arising out of how land and resources are used have multiplied startlingly; there now are an estimated 7,000 claims in 30 states.

The bitterest disputes have turned out to be over hunting and fishing. Two precedent-setting battles are taking place on reservations in Michigan and Minnesota that were visited by TIME Correspondent Madeleine Nash. Her report:

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which separates Lake Superior from lakes Michigan and Huron, there are bumper stickers that exhort: SAVE A FISH--SPEAR AN INDIAN. Whites have fired shots at Chippewa fishermen, smashed their boats and slashed their tires. The confrontation intensified last spring after Federal Judge Noel Fox ruled that, under treaties signed in 1836 and 1855, the state could not regulate fishing by Indians. Said Fox: "The fish belong to the Indians as a matter of right." Since then, many Chippewas on the poverty-battered Bay Mills reservation have become full-time commercial fishermen. At 6 on a late autumn evening, during the prime fishing season, almost all of them are on the move to fishing spots that may be 100 miles or more away; by morning a successful fisherman will have hauled up to half a ton of silvery whitefish, worth about $800, into his 25-ft. boat. On other nights, of course, the catch is much less. The average Indian fisherman earns about $10,000 a year.

What infuriates the whites is that the Chippewas use gill nets, which are wide-mesh devices that also trap and kill lake trout and coho salmon. Both are among the game fish that Michigan spends $1.6 million a year to stock in its waters. Whites fear that Chippewa gill netters will clean out the trout and cohos, and destroy the state's $350 million-a-year sport-fishing industry. Myrl Keller, a state fish biologist, calls the Indians' use of the nets a "malicious, wasteful mode of fishing."

The state, which has appealed Fox's decision, wants the Indians to use cage-like trap nets, which do not kill the fish, and to return the game fish to the water.

But the Indians say they cannot afford trap nets. They would require an initial investment of $20,000, about 20 times the cost of using a gill net. In the Chippewa view, the dispute is plain enough: it is between poor Indians who fish for a living and rich whites who fish for fun. Says Chippewa Elmer LeBlanc: "Our forefathers gave us the right to hunt and fish. I want it to be a livelihood."

In northern Minnesota, the fight between whites and Indians also started with a court ruling. In August, the state supreme court held that Minnesota had no jurisdiction over hunting and fishing by Chippewas on the White Earth reservation, where white residents actually outnumber the Indians, 5,500 to 4,500, and own 42% of the land. Shortly afterward, the tribe announced that it would enforce its own regulations on anyone, Indian or white, hunting or fishing on the reservation. After threats of violence between whites and Indians, Minnesota authorities secured a temporary injunction restraining the Chippewas from regulating white activities. But the state went along with the tribe's opening move: shortening the deer-hunting season on the reservation to three days in early November. In most of the surrounding area, the season lasted nine days.

A month after the court decision, whites on the reservation received a more serious setback. Many of them got notices from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that the titles to the land on which they have lived for generations may be invalid: the land may actually belong to the Indians. The whites probably face no real threat of eviction because many Chippewas seem willing to accept a compromise under which they might be given an equivalent amount of Government-owned land. But whites say that their property values have been depressed by uncertainty.

White resort owners now fear that the Chippewas will attempt to reserve some types of hunting and fishing for Indians alone. If they succeed, hardly any white sportsmen would drive up from Minneapolis-St. Paul. Over dinner in his kitchen, Bob Bruns, owner of Whaley's Resort, gloomily reports that last year he had 46 reservations for deer season; this year he had only three. Says Bruns, who quit his job as a welding supervisor in the Twin Cities eight years ago to move to the reservation: "We figured we had the world by the tail until this thing came up. Now it looks like we're furnishing the tail."

However the fights in Michigan and Minnesota come out, a flood of additional Indian-rights claims may soon engulf courts across the country. Congress has set a deadline of April 1 for the Federal Government, which legally is the protector of the Indians, to file suits on their behalf. Pushed by this deadline, many tribal councils that have been attempting to negotiate solutions of their problems with whites may demand that Washington take the cases to court.

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