FEDERAL APPEALS COURT AFFIRMS OJIBWE BANDS’ TREATY RIGHTS

Former Minnesota Vikings football coach Bud Grant, in a March 30 letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, had this to say about the Minnesota district court’s ruling in favor of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe’s treaty rights: “We are behind at half-time, but the appeals process, and hence the game, isn’t over.”

He was referring to “the game” he and his teammates at the neo-conservative group Proper Economic Resource Management (PERM) hope to win against the Mille Lacs and several other Ojibwe bands in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Mille Lacs band filed a lawsuit against the State of Minnesota in 1990, claiming the state government was denying the band its treaty-guaranteed rights to fish, hunt, and gather - unregulated by state laws and according to the band’s own conservation plans - throughout the east-central territory it ceded to the United States in an 1837 treaty.

The band won in district court earlier this year. But Grant, and the State of Minnesota, wanted a replay. The State, joined by nine counties and eight landowners, appealed to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed in April to hear the case. On August 26, the court’s three-judge panel unanimously ruled in favor of the band, and upheld all previous rulings in the dispute. The favorable decision means tribal members will be spearfishing on Mille Lacs and other lakes as early as this fall.

Of course, the losing parties could appeal the decision to the full Appeals Court or the U.S. Supreme Court. Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson vowed that the state will “actively pursue all avenues for appeal.” To date, the State has spent around $3 million of taxpayer’s dollars in litigation. Last spring, Governor Carlson persuaded the state legislature to commit $6 million for extra law enforcement to prevent the kind of violent boat landing eruptions that occurred between tribal members and non-Native sportspeople in Wisconsin during the late 1980s and early 1990s from taking place in Minnesota.

For their part, Grant and PERM members who sided with the State are part of a larger movement to do away with treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, and Federal Indian Policy altogether. As Mark Rotz, PERM’s chairman, wrote in the April 1996 issue of PERM’s newsletter, “It will take a long time to change Federal Indian Policy...the very fact that we have an ‘Indian policy’ is racist and divisive for our country.”

Recently, PERM’s public relations machine has been trying hard to downplay the idea that they are, as columnist, Nick Coleman of the St. Paul Pioneer Press called them, “Bud-Heads, Yahoos, and Bony-headed Walleye Worshippers.” (Feb 10)

But to have a shot in scoring on the field and in court at all, it falls on PERM to answer a more serious accusation: that its rank and file are themselves racist...

(Reprinted with permission from The Circle, vol. 18-No 9, September, 1997, by Mark Aamot)

For more detail on the Sandy Lake tragedy, see the Wisconsin Death March