A Tale of Two Lakes

Collapse of the Red Lake fishery led longtime antagonists to find a solution and rebuild a community.

By Brad Dokken. Photography by Eric Hylden
 

When Bill May talks about netting walleyes on Red Lake,he speaks as a man who grew up around fishing. He talks of honorable things such as family, tradition. In the years he spent growing up on the Red Lake reservation, he says, fishing didn't pay all the bills or buy all the food, but it did help out when times were tough.

Even on those days when fog would descend like an impenetrable shroud, May says he could find his nets on Miskwagami-wizaga-igoniyg--named by the Ojibwe for its beautiful sunsets. He'd look at the bulrushes along the shoreline. He'd check the wind and watch the direction it carried the waves.

"You'd know you had to keep your boat in line with those waves, and, if you got it right, you'd go straight to the nets," May says. "I did that many times and came right up on them."

But somewhere along the line, this knack for navigating the lake was lost among the younger tribal fishermen. May recalls heading out one foggy autumn evening to set his nets. Snow flurries filled the air. He didn't want to be on the water that day, but he kept his eyes on the shoreline, set his nets without incident, and returned to shore.

Back at the landing, May saw a pickup owned by two younger fishermen. It had been there when he launched his boat that evening. May knew the men had headed out to set their nets. They should have been back by now. Something wasn't right.

Later, May learned that many hours had passed before the pair got off the lake. They had lost track of the shoreline and eventually drifted to shore--wet and freezing--some 20 miles from their launching point.

The plight of the lost fishermen, in many ways, reflects what happened to the tradition of tribal fishing on Red Lake. The new generation, May says, got lost. They didn't respect the water. They didn't respect each other. Lured by banner prices, they converged on the lake to take fish and profits. They gave nothing in return.

Catches began to decline. In the end, May says, setting nets wasn't worth the effort. "The last year I fished was probably '95, and then we had it open the next year," he says. "I fished one week, but then I thought, 'I don't want to monkey with that.'"

A tradition, a way of life, had been driven to the point of collapse.

What happened to Red Lake's walleye population is no mystery. People took more fish than the lake could afford to give. Tribal netting. Sportfishing. Poaching. Greed. All played a role in the demise of Minnesota's largest inland lake.

Both the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and the sportfishing operators on Minnesota's share of the lake say they saw it coming for many years. When the bottom fell out of the walleye population in the early 1990s, people on both sides of the lake--separated not only by 20 miles of bog-stained water, but also by race, culture, and generations of mistrust--found themselves sharing a tragic legacy.

Picking up the pieces and moving ahead would require people who typically didn't have much to do with each other to put aside their differences and work together. That's the bad news. And the good news.

Understanding relations between residents of the Red Lake reservation and the non-Ojibwe on the east side of the lake requires a quick lesson in geography and history. Red Lake itself actually is two basins. All of Lower Red Lake's 152,000 acres and 60,000 acres of Upper Red Lake lie within reservation boundaries; 48,000 acres on the east side of Upper Red Lake fall within the state's jurisdiction.

Reservation waters in Red Lake are off-limits to everyone who's not an enrolled band member, thanks to a decision tribal leaders made in 1889 to reject the Dawes Land Allotment Act. The act would have replaced the band's communal way of living by giving individual band members their own little pieces of land. By rejecting the act, the band maintained total control of the land within the reservation's boundaries; and, to this day, Red Lake remains a "closed" reservation. That control was crucial to the eventual development of Red Lake's commercial fishery.

Commercial fishing on Red Lake hasn't always been solely a tribal enterprise. Netting for profit dates back to 1917, when the state of Minnesota opened a commercial fishery on all of Red Lake in response to a food shortage triggered by World War I. Anyone could net back then. In 1930 the state got out of the commercial fishing business, and the non-Ojibwe who lived near Waskish turned their attention to resorts and sportfishing.

Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs took over commercial fishing on the band's share of Red Lake. That same year, the band formed the Red Lake Fisheries Association, a tribal cooperative that administered the day-to-day operations of the commercial fishery and divvied up the payments among Red Lake band fishermen, who were required to be association members.

Over the years the Ojibwe netted and the non-Ojibwe sportfished, and the two sides rarely crossed paths. Like commercial and sportfishing interests everywhere, they had a tenuous relationship, which became more contentious because race colored the picture.

As early as the 1970s, Red Lake was showing signs of overfishing, such as boom-and-bust cycles in walleye abundance. Still, fish prices soared, and membership in the fisheries association swelled from 200 to as many as 700 netters by the early 1990s. Association and federal rules limited each fisherman to eight nets, but band members readily admit that the regulation wasn't enforced.

The BIA, which regulated the walleye harvest on tribal waters, had set an annual quota of 650,000 pounds, but it regularly approved requests to increase that number. For example, in 1989 the band's commercial harvest was 950,000 pounds.

In reality, because bootleggers sold walleyes off the reservation and sidestepped the fisheries association, harvest numbers were even higher. How much higher is impossible to say.

May's interest in the business side of commercial fishing eventually won him election to the association's board of directors. He blames the lure of the dollar for Red Lake's demise. By the '80s, walleye in the round (not filleted) fetched 60 cents per pound. Throw in the association's annual bonus, which could triple a fisherman's income, and every fish was worth $1.80 per pound. That meant thousands of dollars to a family's bottom line.

"People were sitting around saying 'I want some of that money,'" says May. "You get one walleye, you get two, you get 1,000. You want more because people will pay good money."

Meanwhile as commercial fishing increased, walleye numbers fluctuated in Upper Red Lake. That didn't sit well with non-Ojibwe. Bar stool and coffee shop conversations spawned offbeat solutions, such as filling the lake with dog food to lure walleyes from reservation waters into Upper Red, where the fish would be safe from tribal netters. Some also wanted the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to erect a barrier between the band's part of the lake and the state's share.

"If we are going to help tourism and fishing on Upper Red Lake, we need to put up a permanent wall between Upper Red Lake and Lower Red Lake," a Princeton, Minn., man wrote in a Twin Cities outdoors publication. "Otherwise, don't stock the lake."

Despite the need to understand what was happening to the fishery, there was little scientific knowledge of the walleye population until the state and the band implemented fisheries assessments in their respective waters. The DNR began limited survey work in 1979 and has conducted annual assessments on the state's share of the lake since 1984. The Red Lake band created its own natural resources department in 1987.

The tribal DNR documented the decline in walleye numbers, says Dave Conner, fisheries biologist and administrator of the Red Lake DNR, but until the situation reached a crisis point, the fishing continued--on both sides of the lake.

"It was hard to talk to people about fishing because the netters were making more money than ever," he says. "There definitely was greed. There were greedy commercial fishermen and greedy anglers too. When fishing was good, everyone wanted it and took advantage."

Then the bottom fell out. By 1996 the band's walleye harvest had plummeted to 15,000 pounds. A year later the fisheries association voted to suspend its commercial fishery. In 1998 the tribal council banned all netting.

The netters, in a historic sense, had been hung out to dry.

There's a lesson to be learned from what happened, a lesson for the band, the state, and the federal government, which all played a role in Red Lake's decline by waiting so long to act.

"What happened was the way that commercial fisheries all over the world operate," Conner says. "Until a serious problem develops or a stock collapses, action doesn't get taken. It's not that we said, 'We're just going to wait until something happens.' It wasn't that at all. But there's just so much involved with it."

May recalls the warnings from biologists such as Conner. He also remembers the warnings of tribal elders, who attributed the decline to people who had lost their connection with the lake.

Robert Head is one of those tribal elders. In 1991, after 45 years of fishing, Head hung up his nets when his 18-year-old son, Kevin, drowned in a fall fishing accident. "I decided that was enough," says Head, who, like most tribal members, fished to supplement his income.

"The Indians, we think you take something out, you're going to have to give something back. Maybe I fished too many years. We had a lot of good years, but it's just that it couldn't keep on, that's all."

Still, Head says, to blame only the Ojibwe for what happened on Red Lake isn't really fair.

"They've got a point," Head says of the band's critics. "But in my younger days, I bet there were 5,000 boats up at Waskish, and they were catching fish. You just stood there, and they'd get their limit, run to the woods, fry 'em up, and go back out again. They can't blame the Indians for all of it. They had a pretty good black market on the upper lake too."

After the fishery collapsed, Bobby Whitefeather, Red Lake's tribal chairman, took a bold step: He initiated a meeting with then-Minnesota DNR Commissioner Rod Sando. When they met in February 1997, "we were shocked by the information we each had" on the lakes, Whitefeather recalls. But until then, "we just didn't share it."

The meeting between Whitefeather and Sando led to the formation of the Red Lake Fisheries Technical Committee, a team of state, federal, band, and University of Minnesota fisheries experts who eventually hammered out the walleye recovery plan. A group of reservation and Waskish-area citizens also offered input.

The agreement, signed in April 1999, called for stocking 40 million walleye fry up to five times during the next decade, a zero-walleye limit on all state and tribal waters until stocks recover, and stepped-up enforcement. The band, through the federal BIA, would pay $40,000 of the $68,000 annual cost of the stocking program; the state DNR would foot the remaining $28,000 from money generated by fishing license sales.

Reaching an agreement wasn't easy. According to Conner, the technical committee nearly fell apart in early 1998 because the band felt the Minnesota DNR was dragging its heels on reducing the walleye limit in state waters. "The band shut down the commercial fishery, and the state didn't do anything," Conner says. "At that point we were near saying good-bye."

It's not completely accurate to say the state was doing nothing, says Henry Drewes, DNR regional fisheries supervisor in Bemidji. While state fisheries managers wanted to reduce walleye harvest, they also recognized the need to gain public support before making any changes. To that end, they held public meetings and formed a citizens advisory committee to gauge support for everything from spending license dollars for stocking to closing the walleye season. "There was an amazing transformation from some of the earlier informational meetings where even the suggestion of reduced walleye limits and cooperation with tribal DNR generated anger and distrust," says Drewes. Eventually, fisheries managers could assure Sando of local support for recovery plan measures.

Whitefeather met again with Sando, and Sando agreed to reduce the walleye limit from six fish to two in the state waters of Upper Red Lake. The technical committee continued to meet, and the recovery plan moved forward.

May represented the fisheries association on the technical committee. Although he had some initial suspicions about the process, he says the talks were productive.

"I really listened to what the guys had to say, and everything they said made a lot of sense to me," he says. "The biologists were using all their techniques to develop a plan. And what I liked about it is nobody in the group was there to say, "It's because of you guys." Never did that attitude come out. It was just this group of people saying, 'What can we do together?'"

And despite perceptions off the reservation, May says, the band wasn't crying to the state for help.

"I don't remember ever asking for help," May says. "The biologists here, once the lake was closed, everybody knew what was going on, so they just started calling and talking to each other. I don't remember anybody saying 'Our lake has collapsed, please help us.' Because it's not only our lake, it belongs to the state too."

Fisheries managers for the Minnesota DNR view the recovery plan as a good investment. "It's a body of water with immense fish potential," says Drewes. "When you talk about the opportunity to restore 48,000 acres of prime walleye-fishing water, that's impressive. That lake during its heydays could support a quarter-million angler hours of fishing pressure. That's pretty amazing."

Perhaps even more amazing are the early returns from the 1999 spring stocking. Lakewide summer seining assessments of young-of-the-year fish averaged about 86 fish per haul, far exceeding any previous catch rates.

About 85 percent of the young-of-the-year walleyes sampled during 1999 were stocked fish, which had been marked by immersion in a solution of oxytetracycline, a chemical that shows up in a fish's middle ear bones when viewed under a microscope. The high percentage of stocked fish means the lake doesn't yet support a self-sustaining walleye population. Fish from the 1999 year class will start to contribute to the spawning population in 2002. Recovery won't be complete until multiple year classes are mature and reproducing, which could take many years.

"As the population starts to recover over the next few years, enforcement is going to become really important," Conner says. "People everywhere are going to see walleyes, and they're going to want them."

From a fishing standpoint, the Red Lake recovery is in the wait-and-see mode. Yet people along its shores are looking ahead. Last fall the band purchased Sunset Lodge, a victim of the walleye decline. According to tribal treasurer Dan King, the lodge could open doors to the sportfishing business because it's off the reservation. (Because Red Lake is a closed reservation, many band members say they are reluctant to open tribal waters to non-Ojibwe, fearing they eventually would lose control of the land.)

"We're kind of looking at options for developing that," King says of Sunset. "Even now, with no walleyes, perch numbers are coming back, and crappie fishing has been great. If you really marketed to Wisconsin, you could probably bring a bunch of folks up there."

Of course, if that happens, the people of Waskish also would benefit. Even without the walleyes, they feel there's plenty to offer tourists. That kind of positive thinking led to revival of the Upper Red Lake Area Association, the Waskish community's tourism group. The group thrived in the glory days of Upper Red sportfishing, but as the walleyes declined, so did the association. By January 1999 only seven or eight dues-paying members remained. The group wasn't dead, but its pulse was barely detectable.

Enter Joe Corcoran, a retired lieutenant and commander for the St. Paul police homicide unit. Corcoran and his wife, Karen, had built their dream home on Upper Red. A man who in his career earned a reputation for people skills and getting things done, Corcoran accepted the call to take over the association in April 1999. His mission was to break down barriers and revive enthusiasm. Thanks in part to his efforts, the association now has more than 133 dues-paying members.

"Adversarial relationships don't accomplish a lot of things," Corcoran says. "You don't look backward. Forget about blaming people and move on."

And that's exactly what the group is doing. Last winter, in an effort to lure crappies and anglers, the group constructed several log "cribs." Where there's structure, the thought went, there'll be fish, especially crappies. Sure enough, it's working.

For the first time in far too long, Waskish has new business--a restaurant and bar. Though still in the dreaming stages, Big Bog Interpretive Center has been proposed to attract tourists for a close-up look at the Red Lake Bog, one of Minnesota's last wilderness areas.

"It's going to make a big difference for this community if it goes through," Corcoran says. "I think people will come to see it, definitely. That's hard for people up here to realize. But rare birds and flowers don't exist in St. Paul. They exist in nasty, hard-to-get-to places. I don't think they realize what they've got up here. They've got a treasure, and they need to protect it."

Just as they need to protect the walleyes, when they come back. Talk to anyone, Indian or non-Indian, and that much is a given.

"I think this lake will surprise a lot of people," Corcoran says.

In many ways, it already has.

--Brad Dokken, Grand Forks, N.D., is Outdoors Editor of the Grand Forks Herald.