Nick Hockings Spears Fish
to Remember and Honor the Old Ways

As the ice melts on  northern Wisconsin lakes, Nick Hockings from Lac du Flambeau reflects on Chippewa treaty rights.  About twenty years ago Hockings was with the first Chippewa Indians to legally spear walleye off the reservation.

The Chippewa Tribes fishing and hunting rights are based on agreements made with the federal government.  During the eighteen hundreds the Chippewa ceded the northern third of Wisconsin, filled with white pine timber, for modest payments, tobacco, and farming tools.  The tribes also reserved the  right to hunt, fish, and gather.

When white settlement came on the State of Wisconsin began illegally enforcing hunting and fishing laws against the Chippewa.

A 1983 federal appeals court ruling re-affirmed Chippewa treaty rights.

During the late nineteen eighties Chippewa spear fishing was met by fierce, anti-treaty protestors who argued spear fishing was unjust and damaged the fishery.

But a 1999 US Supreme Court ruling upheld Chippewa treaty rights.

The protest about treaty rights has largely disappeared, but questions remain about our relationship with the earth.

The ancient name for Lac du Flambeau is Waswagoning.  The word means, "the place where they spear fish at night, using a torch."

Nick Hockings talks about the meanings of treaty rights.

Well, what it means to me is first of all, it has always been a way for supplementing your income, if you will, and income I mean by that, I mean your means of getting a food source.

During nineteenth century westward expansion, most treaties between the tribes and federal government were signed under duress.

And so when you talk about spearfishing, what does it mean to me, I think about this. There was a time when I had ancestors that lived here, or in Lac Du Flambeau, or where they originally came from. But they must have went through a great deal of hardships.�

Hockings says many, many tribes, throughout North America were forced, literally under the gun, to give up their ways of life.

By spearfishing, today, Hockings and others acknowledge their sacrifice.

t is remembering those millions of people, probably, when you think of all those people who have died literally leading up to making those treaties that suffered so greatly because they didn't want to lose everything that they were about, everything that they believed in, everything that they did.  They didn't want to lose those things, so they tried to preserve those things for us.  So we have an obligation to hold onto them.  To keep them. That's kind of what it means.

Hockings gets up from the table for a minute to get a copy of Aldo Leopold's environmental classic, A Sand County Almanac.

He brings  along an  article by Bill Moyers, examining the extremes of the Bush-Cheney regime.

Hockings begins reading from Moyer's recent article about the religious rightwing.

Say it is why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warmup act predicted in the book of Revelations where four angels which are bound in the river Euphrates are loosed to destroy a third of man. A war with Islam in the middle east is not something to be feared, but something to be welcomed. An essential conflagration on the road to redemption.  The last time I googled it the rapture index stood at 144, one below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow and the son of God will return, the righteous will go to heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.  (Pause) This is what your people are doing.  (Pause) It has nothing to do with native people.

Back in the nineteen eighties, during the Wisconsin treaty rights struggle the Seventh Fire prophecy made its way around Indian County.  It was said that the lighter skinned, white race was being offered some choices. 

Walk down the road towards spiritualism, with a kind of Aldo Leopold land ethic, respecting the earth.   

Or,  follow the road towards unlimited development, leaving behind a damaged earth.

The one thing that it said was there was a window at that time of opportunity where a sensible people would listen. That there was a time. That time is past.

It is not here anymore.  We live in a whole new world. We have a whole new environmental ethic which is a hundred percent detrimental to life on this planet.

The Seventh fire prophecy indicates people would know whether the face the dominant society wears  is the face of death, when the rivers flow with poison and the fish are unfit to eat.