Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians

Maamakaadenbaagwad (it is amazing): The Miracle of the Walleye

Producer
Red Lake Department of Natural Resources and Project Preserve
Year

This video, produced by the Red Lake Department of Natural Resources and the youth at Project Preserve, explains the history and progress of the Red Lake Walleye recovery program.

Citation

Red Lake Department of Natural Resources and Project Preserve. "Maamakaadenbaagwad (it is amazing): The Miracle of the Walleye." Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. Red Lake, Minnesota. 2008. Film.

This Honoring Nations "Lessons in Nation Building" video is featured on the Indigenous Governance Database with the permission of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

Narrator:

“The tradition of fishing has been passed on from generation to generation. It is part of who we are as a Nation. So when the fish left, so did part of our identity.

MAAMAKAADENBAAGWAD

Then came the miracle of the walleye. We thank the Creator and all those that sacrificed to bring back the tradition of fishing. We will not forget.”

REMEMBERING THE PAST
When the Lake Was Our Warehouse

Citizen:

“It was really fun in the olden days cause there was a lot of fishing. A lot of work to it, but it kept us going.”

Citizen:

“When I was growing up, we didn’t have nothing. We just had a piece of string and that’s how we used to fish.”

Citizen:

“When we fished a long time ago, we didn’t have no motor boats. We had to use paddles to get out on the lake.”

Citizen:

“We had wooden boats, flat-bottom wooden boats with an old 10-horse[power] Johnson motor, which I bought from my brother before he left. That was in the early ‘50s so you know the motor was kind of old by then.”

Citizen:

“Back in 1921, we was fishing then but we was fishing down at the [location]. That’s where I lived. We had a landing in there where we [unintelligible] and to the land. And we had a steep hill we’d pull the fish boxes up. We used a horse to do that. He helped us all day long, that horse.”

Citizen:

“In the evening, we’d set them just before dark. We would set them overnight, then early in the morning about 5:00 we’d go out and get them. We had to go out early because I was working. The nets were regular nets and we used eight of them. That’s about what we done, that’s just what we had to do at that time.”

Citizen:

“We used to use our boat to go to Red Lake to take our fish stock. Don’t think about... well, we had a fast boat, it would take about an hour on the lake to get to the fishery.”

Citizen:

“We got all different kinds of different fish. We got a lot of perch and walleyes and northerns. Then towards the end there we started to get a lot of sheephead and stuff. But then the walleyes, we used to get a lot of them then all of a sudden they just... we didn’t get any more.”

FROM SUSTAINENCE TO INDUSTRY
Establishing Fishing as an Economic Resource

Narrator:

“Traditionally, Red Lake members fished by spear and by line. It was a practice that was a way of life to the community and was in balance with nature.”

Citizen:

“This spear I made out of maple. My grandfather and grandmother were making these one day and they said I could go get fish with these when I was a little boy and I did. I made one like this.”

FISHING REGULATIONS
(Set in 1921)

Narrator:

“It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the State of Minnesota first introduced fishing as an industry to Red Lake Nation.

The annual quota for walleye and Northern Pike was 650,000 lbs.

Annual quotas were established and in 1921 the state built a fishery close to the lake. Netting was introduced and for the first time there was steady employment on the reservation. Families took up the practice of netting on behalf of the fishery.

Each night, each family could set 5 nets, each 300 ft. long with 4-inch stretch mesh.

The state then brokered all sales off the reservation.”

Al Pemberton:

“When they started fishing on the reservation, it was to keep the war effort going and the State of Minnesota started a fishing year and they started fishing with pond nets which are trap nets and they keep the fish in there. But they couldn’t get enough that way, so they started with nets and then the tribal members started fishing then.”

Ron Beaulieu:

“They taught me how to hang nets, how to pull nets, how to pick the fish out of the nets, everything, every phase. We even hauled fish around the lake so we got in on that, too. We knew what everybody caught around the lake.”

FROM INDUSTRY TO UNEMPLOYMENT
Depletion of a Precious Resource

Narrator:

“No one ever considered the possibility that the lake could become overfished. But it happened. In the late 1990s, we saw the population of walleye almost become extinct.”

Pat Brown:

“There are several things that caused the downfall of the walleye. First of all, many people blame the commercial fishery, but it wasn’t just the commercial fishery. The federal government was to manage this lake on a sustainable basis, but they never did. It was basically for social and economic issues is what they used. The Red Lake DNR [Department of Natural Resources] was started in 1987 and the main reason that the DNR was started here was because the tribal council was concerned that the fish stocks were being overfished in Red Lake. The original DNR consisted basically of a director, a secretary and a fishery biologist and after that time then it kind of grew.”

Ron Beaulieu:

“We took spawn in the spring. Usually it takes four males to one female and we had a biologist check and our rate I think in about ‘90 was 250 to one female so you could see why I was alarmed but other people didn’t seem to be alarmed by it but I was because I thought, ‘If the female all go, then we’re done.’”

Charles Barrett:

“They started making big fish bonuses here and everybody wanted to get in on it so at one time there was over 600 fishermen, but that wasn’t all, there was other people fishing too, Upper Red [Lake].”

Ron Beaulieu:

“Yeah, they weren’t paying attention. They wanted to make more money because guys started using more nets and more illegal nets, too, which they should have probably never done because it cleaned it out pretty quick there in the early ‘90s then.”

Pat Brown:

“On the state waters they had the same problems. Basically we had people taking more than one limit a day, but they just never had the enforcement staff to properly monitor up there either.”

Ron Beaulieu:

“And we always figured another 60,000 to 70,000 was going off on the black market and that hurt the lake, too.”

Pat Brown:

“A lot of people talk about the black market that was running rampant around the Red Lakes. If there was not a market for those fish off the reservation, then there wouldn’t have been a black market. So all those things together basically caused the collapse.”

Narrator:

“The impact of overfishing was devastating to Red Lake’s economy. Everyone living on the reservation felt the impact. It served as a wake up call, a reminder that the lake and its fish were the reservation’s most valuable natural resource. The time had come for sacrifice and for change.”

Al Pemberton:

“'Cause there wasn’t enough stock in the lake they voted to stop fishing.”

Floyd Jourdain:

“It was a hard pill to swallow for some people to say, ‘Geez, we’re not going to fish any more for 10 years.’ And there was... even though everything indicated that our lake was not in a good way. Some people just did not want to accept the fact that we were really hurting and that our fishing populations had depleted to a point of danger. And even with all that information, they said, ‘We don’t really want to stop. We don’t think we should have to.’ So it was the tribe who initiated the moratorium. It was the fishermen themselves who said, ‘We’re not catching fish anymore, something needs to happen,’ and it was the tribal leadership who said, ‘We’re going to reach out to the State of Minnesota, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] and the surrounding communities to work with them to make this thing successful.’”

David Conner:

“Former Chairman Bobby Whitefeather had a meeting with State DNR Commissioner Rod Sando down in the Minneapolis area and they talked about the problems with the Red Lake Walleye fishery, the sharply declining catches, and since the state owns a portion of Upper Red Lake, they have some jurisdiction there, so the two talked about a joint effort to try and recover walleye stocks.”

Pat Brown:

“The Band and the State and the feds had to come to the same table and agree on how we were going to bring back the walleye.”

David Conner:

“The plan included both short- and long-term goals. What did we need to do to get the recovery off the ground and running? Such things as short-term stocking to help, it also included a moratorium on fishing on the Red Lakes. The memorandum also included an enforcement plan spelling out the responsibilities of both the state and the tribe and how they were going to enforce stoppage of fishing and various other regulations. So it had two important components, the recovery plan and the enforcement plan and these were incorporated in the Memorandum of Agreement and then that was signed back in 1998 by the Band, the State and the federal government. So that officially started the process for the recovery of Red Lake Walleye.”

THE MIRACLE
Hard Work, Patience and a Little Good Luck

Narrator:

“Several years passed. The community honored the request of the technical committee and slowly, over time, with hard work from many people, a healthy population of walleye returned to Red Lake.”

David Conner:

“We had some good luck, we did some stocking which worked and did good there. But we also had a moratorium on the harvest of walleye and that was extremely important having that in place. So it was actually the patience of the people who liked to fish in giving up fishing for quite a few years that aided in the recovery also.”

Pat Brown:

“It was... it’s kind of a miracle and we had a lot of good luck. When we first started to recover the population we felt that if we did the big stocking then we would be able to maybe bring the lake back in 10 years. And the reason we said 10 years was is that we were going to do these major stockings every other year to bring back the population. Our guess was that we would only get one or two of those big stockings to actually take and in fact what we ended happening was all three of the big stockings that we did, all three of them produced big year classes and that was the good luck.”

David Conner:

“We had teams of fisheries assessment folks from both the tribe and the state and they worked the waters pretty much all year long to collect information on the fish stocks. We undertook tagging of fish where we implanted the fry before stocking in a tetracycline solution, which put a mark on the fish and that allowed us, when the fish were released into the water, we could track them as they grew up and determine which numbers were stocked and then what the percentage of stock versus natural walleye were in the lake and that was a critical component to being able to assess the recovery of the walleye.”

Herb Mountain:

“I’ve got to admit I had my doubts, but like I always stressed before, it was a lot of luck involved in this besides a lot of work. But I know that we need to keep monitoring it and doing these assessments so we can always be aware of the condition of the lake so we can take appropriate measures if and when it ever happens like the way it goes starting to be overfished. Hopefully with what our job is that it’ll never happen.”

Al Pemberton:

“The gods helped us out a little bit. We had good years and stuff happened the way it was supposed to so it came back faster than they ever thought it would.”

BACK TO FISHING
Finding a Sustainable Balance

David Conner:

“During the recovery process and a couple years prior to the reopening of the fishery, we had community meetings across the reservation in off-reservation tribal communities like say in Minneapolis and Duluth to talk about the fact that the fish were coming back and it looked like we were going to reopen.”

Pat Brown:

“The catch limits were put in place, the recommendations were put in place by the Red Lake Fisheries Technical Committee, and the reason they did this is to try to make the harvest so it’s sustainable.”

Al Pemberton:

“It’s more of a change for some of the people that used to fish with nets but maybe it’s like... Indians, we’ve always adapted anyway so we’re going to learn a different way of doing things.”

Floyd Jourdain:

“As far as preserving the lake, we’ve taken a very slow approach to how we’re going to get back into the fishing industry. One of the main things was regulation. We want to make sure that we listen to the tribal members who wanted fishing industry regulated. Until we’re able to adequately do that, then we’re going to go slow. For about the first two or three years we’ll hook and line and then after that when we have the resources to regulate we’ll go further from there.”

Narrator:

“When fishing was reintroduced in 2006, a series of regulations were put in place to protect this new population of walleye.”

Only Red Lake Band Members may fish reservation waters

Citizen:

“It feels good to see all that fish and it’s just good to come out here and fish and see the walleyes.”

Hook and Line is the only legal way of harvesting walleye

“Bring him up. There he is.”

[cheering]

“I got that one.”

“All right, Ryan.”

All Walleye Between 20 and 28 inches must be released

“It needs to be 18 inches to keep.”

“19.”

“You can see it’s too big.”

“You going to throw him back?”

“This needs to be put back.”

Subsistence limit, to walleye commercial limit, 75 walleye

Narrator:

“Along with the regulations a series of six biological assessments were established to assist with determining population levels and trends.”

Pat Brown:

“Yeah, we basically do six different assessments throughout the year, and the first one we do every spring is usually in mid-April and that’s the spawn trap assessment. And what we do there is we basically block the river off. It allows us to see how many males and females are going up the river to spawn and we do the same thing every year and that allows us to compare that information from year to year to see how the recovery was going, but secondly now that the recovery is done we can see how many spawning fish are coming up the river. The second assessment that we do every year is called a post-spawn assessment; it’s a gill-net assessment. And the reason we do that is because we base so much of our quota on the number of mature females in the lake and they’re saying that all those females are basically laying eggs, at least the mature ones. Sometimes in a system like this, not all those females who lay their eggs will actually re-absorb or not spawn the lake now and that can throw our estimate off. The third survey that we do every year is usually the whole month of July and the first two weeks of August and that’s our shoreline seining, and that’s how we tell how many baby walleyes are being produced on an annual basis. And the way we do that is we have eight different sites on Upper and Lower Red Lake that we sample each week for six weeks and then we count the number of walleyes that we catch, the young, yellow perch, particularly the perch fish and then we compare that from year to year.”

Herb Mountain:

“And that goes on for quite a while there, weeks. Our objective there is to collect all the different year classes of walleye and we’ll cut their heads open and take the loose bones out of them and scale. This way we can age them in the winter months. Field surveys -- we’ll do interviews with fishermen on the lake in the summer months and the winter months. And what we do is we write a little questionnaire that we fill out and we ask them for their permission if they want to be in this, they have a choice. It’s just simple questions. What we do with this data is we use this to determine the pressure on the lake.”

PLANNING FOR TOMORROW
Working Together Towards an Economic Future

Narrator:

“In 2008, the Red Lake Fisheries reopened its doors ready to begin a new chapter of commercial innovations. This time not only processing the fish caught from the lake, but also packaging and distributing the walleye on behalf of the community.”

Sean Rock:

“With all the machinery in place the fishermen will come in, their fish is weighed and the fish is then gone through a de-scaling machine, then it goes through a heading machine and then a fillet machine, which will basically give us a bone free fillet. From the fillet machine it’ll drop onto a trim table and that’s where the process will do the final trim and making sure that the specs are good on the fillets so hopefully no bones and good V-cuts. And then from the trim table it’ll go into the new freezer tunnel. It’ll go out of the freezer tunnel onto a glaze conveyor. And then from the glaze conveyor it goes to a machine that’s called the scan back machine that’ll actually weigh the individual fillets into size coordinating, whether it’s two to four ounce, four to six ounce and it’ll also weight the fish into an 11-pound box for us and from there it goes right to the freezer.”

Floyd Jourdain:

“Well, we envision having a very exclusive operation like no other in the world.”

Sean Rock:

“We want to start trying to bring in Canadian fish down here which would more than double our process capacity. It’s just a matter of everything getting in place.”

Floyd Jourdain:

“We’re talking about working with some of the Canadian First Nations to produce some of their walleye as well, bring it in and help them to distribute. And we see ourselves within 10 years of being the top walleye manufacturer in the entire world.”

David Conner:

“Today a fresh hand-caught, line-caught product carries a premium, so that’s another advantage for the tribe and for now looking at hook and line as a continued option.”

Donovan Sather:

“Red Lake now is turning to making a branded product. Morey’s was the company that helped us before get out there and sell all over the world. Now we market currently with wild rice all over the world and now we’re starting to bring the fish into the picture with a local freshness and year round availability.”

Joel Rhode:

“Our goal with time is to have as much of our products sold online as we possibly get.”

Pat Brown:

“In the future, what most people want to see is that the fish are captured by tribal members, taken to the fishery and then also processed by tribal members, that would be to fillet, and then we’ll market those either through the internet or through some type of restaurant sales or just sell them right out of the fishery itself.”

Floyd Jourdain:

“This is a good time to educate our people on historically how special the relationship with the Indian people here is, continues to be with the lake and emphasize that a whole new generation of people need to carry that on.”

Narrator:

“Time is passing us slowly. The wind is blowing, it is here and it is there. We wait to hear when we can go back on to the lake, waiting for the walleye to reappear. This walk, this journey, this passion, this waiting -- we are the only generation to grow up without the tradition of fishing. Our parents told us to wait and be patient. We were. Others worked hard on our behalf. We all believed, we all waited; everyone is here and we are ready. Oh, what is this -- a walleye? A gift from the Creator. We are not the first generation to protect our lake but we will be the last generation to grow up without fishing.”

Student 1:

“Although my favorite part was the ice fishing, when we went ice fishing. The day was like sunny out and it was really cold. And, yeah.”

Student 2:

“But it was fun 'cause we got to out on a boat and fish. I caught a fish. Yeah, I caught a fish. It was a sheephead. That’s an ugly fish.”

Student 3:

“All the walleye out there, you can go out anywhere out on the lake and you can catch fish.”

Interviewer:

“Could you do that five years ago?”

Student 3:

“No. It was a lot harder five years ago. We couldn’t take them.”

Student 4:

“I will probably remember for the rest of my life.”

Produced by the students of PROJECT PRESERVE:
Brandi Barrett
Ryan Brown
LD Harris
Sherene Iceman
Tessy Johnson
Clayton Jourdain
Justin Jourdain
Starr Jourdain
Sara Rushman
Ryan Stillday

Edited by:
Tessy Johnson
Justin Jourdain
Sara Rushman

Interviews, Red Lake Department of Natural Resources:
Al Pemberton, Director
David Conner, Administrative Officer
Pat Brown, Fisheries Biologist
Herb Mountain, Fisheries Technician
Ron Beaulieu, Forestry Technician

Interviews, Red Lake Fisheries
Charles Barrett, Plant Foreman
Sean Rock, Manager

Interviews, Red Lake Foods, Inc.:
Joel Rhode, Manager
Donovan Sather, Sales Associate

Additional Interviews:
Floyd Jourdain, Jr., Chairman
Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians

Leo Desjarlait
Mauarice “Jocko
• Thunder

Project Preserve Educator:
Diane Schwanz

Artist Mentors:
Kristine Sorensen
Anna Swan Sherwood
Kao Choua Vue

Special Thanks to:
Nathan Anderson
Randy Barrett
Tom Barrett, Jr.
Kevin Spears
Murphy Thomas
Andy Thompson
Steve Wennblom
Vernon Whitefeather
Randy Wold
Red Lake DNR Staff
Red Lake Historical Archives
Red Lake Net News
Red Lake Tribal Council

This project was made possible with the support from the following:

Harvard University
The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development:
Amy Besaw Medford, Director of Honoring Nations
Jackie Old Coyote, Director of Education and Outreach
Eric C. Henson, Research Fellow

University of Arizona
Native Nations Institute:
Ian Record, Ph.D., Manager of Educational Resources

The Ford Foundation
The Nathan Cummings Foundation
Red Lake High School
In Progress
The Stepping Stones Foundation
International Water Institute
Riverwatch Project
Prairie Public Television
University of North Dakota
And private donors

© 2008 

Honoring Nations: Kristi Coker-Bias and Allen Pemberton: The Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation and the Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program (Q&A)

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Honoring Nations symposium presenters Kristi Coker-Bias and Allen Pemberton field questions from the audience about the Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation and the Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program.

Resource Type
Citation

Coker-Bias, Kristi and Allen Pemberton. "The Citizen Potawatomi Community Development Corporation and the Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program (Q&A)." Harvard Project on American Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Alfreda Mitre:

"The next question is from Ben Nuvamsa, chairman from the Hopi Tribe."

Ben Nuvamsa:

"Thank you. I just wanted to thank you for all the good work that you're doing out there for Indian Country, all of you. I just have a question for Kristi Coker on your program. Most of our reservations are isolated out there and we typically have a difficult time attracting businesses, or at least the financial, the banks and so on, out on our reservations. My question to you is, your population, was that a deterrent in trying to get the banks or that kind of financial [institution]? Maybe you took the matter into your own hands, but it seems like that's something that may be a challenge for most of us. And how did you overcome that obstacle? Because we are faced with that -- we would like to have some banking institution out there, but it's because of our isolation it's often difficult for us to do that. By the way, we're Hopi, we may be short but we walk tall."

Kristi Coker:

"Well, we did take matters into our own hands. In 1994, we bought a struggling bank, a national bank, the tribe did. And why we started the Community Development Corporation in 2003 is that traditional financing, traditional financial institutions, just weren't the answer for the Native American community. It was a great enterprise for the tribe and it's a great financial institution, but so many people just needed the handholding and just were leery of banks still. And so even though we have our own bank there, there was a need for a non-traditional, flexible, self-regulated financial institution that is geared toward your mission, geared toward your market.

There's a lot you can do with a CDFI [Community Development Financial Institution]. You can do a credit union, and a credit union is the answer for a lot of Native communities. Oweesta even has some upcoming training. I'm on the Oweesta board, if you couldn't tell. But Oweesta has some upcoming training on ‘does your native community need a credit union?' And it's actually online and over the phone and so that might be something you want to get involved with. But a CDFI can do a lot, as you see. We're doing financial education, we're doing credit counseling, we're doing commercial lending, micro loans, larger loans. So we're doing loans from $2,000 up to $750,000. So we have a wide range of loans.

And we have had a tremendous amount of interest from private foundations, from the large national banks. They don't understand how to do lending in Indian Country and a lot of them, through the Community Reinvestment Act, have incentives to do this type of work. So one of the things they can do is they can fund CDFIs in Indian Country to do this work for them. If they're not interested in doing that, you could at least engage the local institutions in financial education as trainers and curriculum they may have.

I think what's so neat about the CDFI -- and the Treasury Department has been an amazing department, as far as a partnership with tribes. They have set up very comprehensive, coordinated programs and actually give you the training and technical assistance along with the money. And one of the things about being a CDFI, for those of you that don't know, our incentive, one of our incentives was for every non-federal dollar you can raise, you get that matched dollar for dollar from the Treasury. So a lot of my time goes to fundraising efforts and those sorts of things.

But I think what's so neat is the flexibility of it. It's regulated by the tribe, by the board of directors of your community development financial institution, and that it meets the needs of your people. You design it around your people. It looks many different ways. Some CDFIs are doing housing, some CDFIs are just doing IDAs [Individual Development Account] or just micro loans. You gear it toward your mission and your market, which is kind of driven by a study. It all kind of starts with a market study to determine what the needs are. Is there a housing need? Is there a business loan need? Do we have a gap?

Another thing that we're doing is even helping with gap financing for banks. A lot of the times even existing businesses that have assets, that have collateral, that have financial records, and those types of things, most of the time you can only get 80 percent financing at a bank and they just don't have 20 percent cash to inject at that time. So we're able to come in and it would actually be a bankable project through a bank and we're actually able to come and do the 20 percent.

So I think there's lots of creative things you can do and lots of opportunities and I would recommend exploring developing your private sector."

Mediator:

"Next question is from JoAnn Chase."

JoAnn Chase:

"I have a question for Red Lake. Obviously, so many of the stories that we have heard, they're very moving components to how initiatives and programs came to be. And one of the most moving ones for me, during my involvement with this program, was the fact that your own fishermen chose, they voted actually to vote themselves out of a job in economic situations which were absolutely dire. And so that told me that you obviously spent some significant time with your own community and working with the community. I'm wondering if you might just talk just a little bit more about what went into engaging folks, to the point that they would take a very deeply sacrificial decision in order to replenish the lake, and some of the aspects of the dialogue or the efforts that you, as a program, had to undertake in order to get the community to really buy and support and ultimately make very deeply sacrificial decisions."

Allen Pemberton:

"I wasn't actually at the meeting, but there was a lot of talk. Some people didn't want to do it, but I think the majority of the people seen that they just weren't getting the catches that they were in years past, and if they didn't do something now it would never come back.

I think looking at the records and some of the stuff that happened years before -- like about six years earlier we had a really big year class of female walleyes. And, as we all know, we have to have females to keep moving in this life. And there was -- the fishery guys that I talked to, they did the spawn nets every year and there was like -- they'd get like 100 males in the net and no female. And what happened was that -- If they would have just stopped like five years before, which is pretty hard for them to do because they were really catching the walleyes that year, and if they would have just stopped then, knowing what they know now, maybe we wouldn't have to quit for ten years [because] there was that nucleus of fish out there at that time, but they got hit pretty hard by the nets and stuff. And I think a lot of the people back home now, they're worried about -- that's why they told us to take a cautious look at what we do from now on. We've go to protect that resource.

One of the things the old people, the chiefs, and people called it, that lake was our freezer. As long as you have fish in there we're never going to starve. There are so many things that move to these days. Like my grandpa, he told me, there's another -- I have a hard time talking about him because I loved him. He told me, 'There's another lake under this lake.' That was one of the kind of -- the fish will come back, there's another lake under here. And a lot of people to this day still think that there is one there, but I don't know. It's kind of hard to -- it's in my heart to take care of our land. The fishermen are -- right now, they're looking at a different way of taking fish because a lot this, what happened was -- they all know it. All of them were older guys and now there's ten years of people, almost a generation of people, that didn't go out into the lake and do any fishing.

So the lake, our lake is -- I always remember what Pat Brown said, our fishery biologist, when he first came to Red Lake just before they started the recovery. He came from Wisconsin (another Packer fan), but he says to me, he said, ‘Man, I walked up to...I got to DNR [Department of Natural Resources] and I looked out on that lake and said, ‘Oh, man, how am I ever going to bring this thing back? I can't even see the other side of the lake. It's just monstrous.'' It's the sixth largest fresh water lake in the United States. He just said, ‘Oh, man, are we ever going to be able to bring it back?' It was a big initiative. And actually, the DNR took a big step forward in that. And really, Dave Connors, and there's a lot of people to thank that were non-members, but they were hired by the tribe to help us bring this lake back and it's back bigger than it ever was. The numbers show that there's more fish in our lake than there ever was.

And I think one of the things that happened throughout -- when I first got on the council we went to a game one time. I always like to tell this story. Red Lake was playing in Grand Forks, which is about 90 miles away. Basketball -- it's a big thing on our reservation. So everybody went. And we were coming home, and my wife -- we were riding down the road between Red Lake and Redbye coming home -- and I said, ‘Man, what is that on that truck?' We seen these red lights coming and I said, ‘What is that?' It's almost covering the road. And we got closer and there was a plane, there was a plane on the back of this truck. These non-members came and they flew up and down Redby, which is the district I live in and represent, and they landed on the lake and started fishing, which is -- the fishing, you can come buy a permit on our reservation to fish the small lake but the big lake is only for [band] members; only members fish that lake. So we guard that with our lives. So people are calling the cops. I suppose these guys thought, ‘Oh, these Indian tribes they don't have no game wardens. They ain't going to care if we go fish on their lake.' They knew where they were. And what they did was they landed and started fishing. And game wardens went out and arrested them, took their plane away.

They were coming down -- Then when I come home, it was like my first year on the council and we were getting bombarded, the council was, with ‘What are you going to do with this?' Because we really can't...in our laws -- it's one of the things we've been working on now -- that we can't do anything to non-members. If a non-member comes [and] punches me, we can't take him to court. The federal government would probably slap his hand and, ‘Go ahead. Go ahead and land on the lake some more if you want. It's only Indians that live down there.' But one of the things that I said at that time, I said, 'We should just keep that plane because there's going to be more people coming, thinking that they can trespass on our land.' But we said, ‘Well, we'll be good neighbors and give it back to them.' Like we've been catching heck over that for the last -- I think at the Honoring Nations deal I was telling them, I said, ‘If we would have kept that plane I could have flew out here to Sacramento. I would have been a pilot by now.' One of the things that happened after that, they did get fined a lot. It wasn't the best plane in the world. But you have to, as Indian people, you have to stand up for your rights.

We own that land in Red Lake. It's all owned in common. It's a closed reservation. We own all the land there. We have hunting and fishing rights and we never ceded our lands to the federal government. I'll just let you know that they had a game warden that was for the State of Minnesota, and it seemed like we have a pretty good relationship with them now, but this guy kind of threw like a wrench in it last spring. They didn't care about our lake before, but now that the walleyes are back, ‘Okay,' they said, ‘All right, Red Lake, you don't own that lake. You own the land under the lake.' Uh, okay? Well, they were citing some kind of court case in Montana, but those people in Montana they allotted their land. So it was more of a waterways issue. We talked about it and we said, ‘Well, Red Lake's totally different than that tribe. We own our land. And they said, ‘Well, I'm going to bring a bunch of people over there and we're going to fish on your lake.' I'll tell you, a lot of people at home said, ‘Well, bring it on.' There's going to be -- we're going to fight for our land again. If it comes to that, that's what's going to happen. But it never did. But just that part of it, we have to always be on our toes as Indian people because there's always somebody out there that wants our land. They put us on land that they didn't think anybody wanted. But it's our land and we've got to take care of it.

This guy -- I had an old man call me one time, he was an older fellow, a white gentleman and he said -- I got this call at my office --and he said, ‘Yeah, you know, I don't like that that you guys took this boat away from this guy 'cause he went across the line and then you guys had machine guns in there. The game wardens had machine guns.' And I said, ‘Well, they weren't machine guns. They were issued arms for their work. You guys were a mile onto our land. You knew where the -- we put GPS -- they had GPS ratings with the state and all this stuff. And they knew where they were at, but yet they came on to Red Lake to fish. So our game wardens had time to go all the way to Red Lake, which is about 40 miles away from the Upper Red Lake, get their boat, come back and them guys were still fishing on our side of the lake.' And this old guy tells me, he says, ‘Oh, I don't think -- then that plane. You guys kept that plane.' I said, ‘Well, we didn't keep the plane. We gave the plane back.' I said, ‘I just want to say something to you.' I said -- I was trying to do it in kind of laymen's terms and be nice to him too, but I said, ‘If you owned 100 acres and you had four or five really nice bucks on your land and I knew about it. And just before deer season I came over and shot all four of those deer...' I said, ‘How would you like it?' ‘Well, I wouldn't like it,' he said. ‘Well,' I said, ‘it's the same thing here.' I said, ‘We own this land. It's not owned by the state. It's not owned by the government. It's owned by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa.' I said, ‘We all own it in common.' He said, ‘Well, I kind of understand now.' I said, ‘But one of the things that I think a lot of people don't understand is that they think that no matter what it's everybody's land, but it's not.' That's one of the things that's unique about Red Lake. And like I said, the chiefs for -- they had some real good insight to keep that land for us. And we have to -- we, as a council and people, have to protect that [because] that's our land.

I think one of the things I forgot to say earlier was that the tribe recently served notice to the Secretary of the Interior that they will no longer abide by the federal regulations governing the fishery. We are going forward and determine our own quotas. Every year it'll change depending on how many fish we have in the lake. It'll no longer be -- we won't have to go see Big Brother to say, ‘Hey, is it all right to go and take some of our own fish? Can you guys sign off on this?' I think one of the things I always laugh about, at the DNR when we went Self-Governance, they kept one person there to sign off on things. The guy didn't, the guy really didn't like what I said to him, but I always told him, ‘Oh, yeah, we better get our Indian agent in here so we can make sure that we're doing things the right way.' He didn't like that. That's about all I've got to say. Thanks."

Alfreda Mitre:

"Thanks, Al. One of the recurring themes that you're going to see throughout the symposium here is -- that's going to make this symposium a little bit different is -- the love of the land. We are who we are because of the land. The only thing American about America is us. Everything else was imported into this country and I think that's important. You can see, and you'll probably see throughout the symposium, the love for the land inspires the programs that are put forth to Honoring Nations. No one can tell our story better than we can. When westerners do something in their neighborhood that they don't like, they can move to another city, they can move to another town, they can move to another neighborhood. We are truly connected to the land and therefore no one could love the land or protect it better than we can. So that's going to be a recurring theme, and I want to again thank you all."

Honoring Nations: Allen Pemberton: The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Project

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Red Lake Chippewa Natural Resources Director Allen Pemberton provides an overview of the Honoring Nations award-winning Red Lake Walleye Recovery Project, and illustrates how the program reflects the benefits of Native nations taking over control of their own affairs from the federal government.

Resource Type
Citation

Pemberton, Allen. "The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Project." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Alfreda Mitre:

"Our first panelist is Al Pemberton, Director of Natural Resources for Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program. He is a 2006 honoree."

Allen Pemberton:

"Thank you. It's pretty hard to get up here after all the good speeches everybody gave today and yesterday. I'm just a person that worked in forestry, pretty much most of my career. And I'm probably used to talking to trees more than I am people. You talk about the strength of Honoring Nations. It's a real good program. I'm very honored that we won that award. And just the family that comes along with it is spectacular. I brought my mother along. We had some friends down here where I worked for the IHS [Indian Health Service] years ago, a doctor, and we sat down and had supper with them yesterday; [I] hadn't seen them for about 30 years. I just want to let you know -- I forgot to tell you my name. My name's Allen Duane Pemberton. My Indian name is Coming Down to Earth Thunderbird.

I work for the -- When you talk about self-governance and stuff like that, I worked for the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] for 15 years, almost 15 years, when the tribe took over the self-governance program. I was kind of a skeptic to begin with. I was one of the ones, you know, ‘Geez, I'm losing my job.' But the tribe took a big step there and looking back on it now, I'm very glad they did that. To me, working as a Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] employee -- you've got one of them Bureau people sitting right over here -- and one of the things that, to me, as an employee of the Bureau, I was really, I was young then and I was really energetic about what I was going to do. I was in forestry and I seen some of the problems that were happening on our reservation and I wanted to make it better for the timber and stuff like that.

And one of the things, I started a program with all the young students on planting trees. I seen a need for that, that we had a problem with fires and stuff on our reservation. And I was just trying to start at the bottom with all the young ones so they would work their way up to knowing about -- there's actually trees out in those fields and it takes awhile for them to get up to where they're growing. I guess I'm going off on a tangent here, but what happened was I did that for about five years in the tribe. I went to them and asked them for money every year and they'd give us money and the kids came out and we fed them, they planted trees; it was a real good project. One of the things that I feel, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, looking back on my career, is that the people that work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, not all of them but a big part of them, they don't care. They don't care about us. We're Indian people, this is our land. There was a lot of them that did care but a lot of them didn't. They didn't say, ‘Hey, Al. Good job here. You started a program and it's really working.' Every year I'd have to go to the tribal council and ask for money when the [BIA] Forestry Department had enough money to take care of that. But my supervisors at that time, ‘Al Pemberton?' You know, ‘Pfft! Who cares you're doing that?' But it's just kind of -- I just kind of wanted to start that way.

The self-governance program, looking back on it now, is the best thing the tribe ever did. We're going to do things better than the Bureau would ever have done because we care for our land. We want to be, like Oren Lyons says, the seventh generation. I'm not going to see what happens to our trees and our fish. Our fish, they came back. That's something we can see and it happened. Just miraculously, they came back. But you're looking down as a leader of your tribe; you're looking to your grandkids, your great grandkids. And if you stick around long enough to see some of that, that's the best thing that could probably ever happen to you.

In the walleye recovery, one of the things that me, as a Red Lake member -- we never ceded our lands to the government. We're a closed reservation. And one of the things that happened, my great grandfather, Peter Graves, was asked by the chiefs to come help them because they were having such trouble with negotiations with the government. They wanted to allot our land and the chiefs said, ‘No, we're not allotting our land.' And when they negotiated with them, they were so mad at them. And they had the foresight to, back then, to know that we should keep our land. And they did it in a way that got the government agent mad at them. This walleye recovery process, it's kind of hard for us as Indian people to -- when they went back to Washington, they were so mad at Red Lake. The Red Lake, the chiefs told them that, ‘We want the whole of the lake,' and when it came back later on, they'd cut part of the lake off. The reason, I was told, that some of that happened because there was non-members living up there. And at that time you -- back in them days, you didn't get around. They didn't have very many cars, so they probably didn't even know there was people living up there. And it was hard for us to negotiate with the State of Minnesota. Because why should you negotiate for something they stole from us? That's our land. And to this day, we still think that's our land. There's an imaginary line there. But no matter what you do, as Indian people, we have to, we have to fight for what we have. You have to keep it. It's hard. The Bureau throws stuff out to us and let's the tribes fight for it and I don't think that's right. We should be nation to nation. We're Indian tribes. We're a nation. Give us our money that -- you stole land from us through the centuries and what do we get back for it? A slap in the face. I'm just going to get back to our walleye recovery process. I could go on all day on that but...

The Red Lake walleye Initiative was our -- in 1997, was the first year of the self-governance program and we reached out to the State of Minnesota to explore a partnership to recover the famous Red Lake walleye. One of the things that happened was, the Red Lake fishermen, they voted -- they were at a co-op and they voted their self out of a job. There was over two to three hundred fishermen at the time and they voted to stop fishing because they knew the walleyes were down and we needed to -- they needed to do something. And they sat there and voted themselves out of a job. And we have 70-80 percent unemployment on our reservation. This was a thing that people had done for years. It was in their families, the fishing, the netting, the people made money, the kids helped, the whole family, so it was kind of a culture in our tribe. And these guys voted their self out of a job. They knew it would take -- we said ten years and it ended up eight years. And what happened was some of the council people, at that time, went and asked the government -- some of the fisheries in other places, when they go down, they give them help, as stipends, to go to school or find a different job or anything like that. But, 'No, the Red Lake people, no. We don't have nothing for you. You're just going to have to suck it up and have unemployment on your reservation, more than what it was before.' And that's one of the things that bothers me. They could have come out and tried to help us out a little bit but no, they didn't. Red Lake did it pretty much on their own.

When we negotiated with the State of Minnesota, prior to that, there was no contact or cooperation with the state fisheries on any issues. Essentially, one hand didn't know what the other hand was doing. And Red Lake was the first one to put a moratorium on the walleye fish harvest. It took the State of Minnesota two more years to do a similar moratorium, when Red Lake had already quit two years before that. Red Lake worked with the State of Minnesota and other technical committees to restore the Red Lake walleye, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And through this -- I remember when we sat down, some of the guys said when they first sat down, I wasn't there at that time, but -- when they first sat down they were, all the different divisions sat in separate tables, but after the years went on, we began to trust one another. And I think there was -- we fostered some cooperation and trust between the programs and the Red Lake walleye recovery was a success because of this partnership. We're going forward, we'll be managing using state of the art science, where we have -- every year the catch is going to be measured by what the -- they'll go out and do their test netting every year and find out how many fish we can take in the following year. And Red Lake has a top-notch science team. I think talking about some of the stuff earlier that Red Lake has a real good group of people now that care about our resources, and then that way we pick the people -- through self-governance -- we pick the people that we want, not who the Bureau of Indian Affairs wants. Going forward, I think this whole thing really worked out pretty good.

And in the past, the Red Lake fishery was governed by the Secretary of the Interior using outdated quota systems. Every year it was 650,000 pounds of fish no matter whether the walleyes were low or not. They'd just sign off on 650,000 pounds. Now we're going to, if it's 800,000 pounds this year, next year it might be 600,000 pounds. That's what we're going to go by. We're not going to -- once it gets to that point it just stops. Before, it was kind of driven economically by the fishery people and the cooperative asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs for -- say they got into July and they already hit their quota, well, they just asked the Bureau for another 650,000 pounds and they'd sign off on it. But the tribe is not going to do that anymore. You're borrowing on your next year's catch, and the years to come, and we can't do that anymore and we know that. The tribe will -- we sent out letters to the members and they told us different things that they wanted, more rules and regulations, and it's really worked out pretty good.

The fishery is opening up again, but we're going to use hook and line from now on. We're going to try that. It's kind of a culture shock for everybody [because] a lot of them are used to using the nets and stuff. But we thought that we're going to try it this way and it seems to -- what's going to happen is there [is] going to be a lot of walleyes taken during the wintertime. [Because] as you know, Minnesota's a pretty cold place. So during the winter, you can go out and fish quite a few months without having any problems. So last year the fishing resumed on Red Lake. And we caught a little slack over it because the State, their portion of the lake, they had two walleyes, just a two-walleye limit. So the Red Lake DNR [Department of Natural Resources] and the tribal council set the limits at 10 walleyes for Red Lake members. So we heard about that on the new things that everybody looks at, computers and emails. There's a lot of things people say about, ‘Oh, Red Lake's got ten fish, why do we get two?' But they have a lot more people than we do. And when they go and fish on their side of the lake it's, it looks like a city up there. When they fish on our side of the lake, if you go out on the lake you're lucky to see 200 or 300 people out there. On that side of the lake it looks like a city up there in the winter. It's like a little city there. So we're going hook and line right now, and taking a cautious approach to commercial fishing.

The Red Lake Fishery has completed a $1 million state-of-the-art renovation. This is thanks to a grant from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community tribe. We got a grant from them to refurbish our fishery and we are getting another grant to get some other equipment that is needed. The biggest test for the fishery will be the ice-fishing season. The fish sales will be through the Red Lake Foods. Red Lake Foods -- they're a promising tribal business. We [have] a goal to maximize by selling fully processed products and fillets. Where before, when we used nets, we made a company south of our reservation pretty rich because we sold everything to them in the round, almost everything. Where now we're going to do all of the processing on our own and sell them right from Red Lake. I think that's going to work out better. It'll create more jobs for everybody. We're currently working with a Canadian tribe -- not tribe, there's like seven of them -- and they want a better price for their fish and they're looking at us to get that. That might be another thing that happens to us, where they said they could give us like a million pounds of fish every year, where we would process those and sell them through our fishery.

So that's some of the stuff I have to say. I don't know if I went on a tangent sometimes, but you've got to bear with me. I'm just a guy that works out in the woods. So thanks."

Honoring Nations: Floyd "Buck" Jourdain: Sovereignty Today

Producer
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development
Year

Red Lake Band of Chippewa Former Chairman Floyd "Buck" Jourdain defines sovereignty as the aggressive and proactive exercise of a nation's sovereign powers, and illustrates how his nation takes this approach in advancing its own priorities and dealing with other sovereign governments.

Resource Type
Citation

Jourdain, Floyd "Buck." "Sovereignty Today." Honoring Nations symposium. Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 27-28, 2007. Presentation.

Megan Hill:

"I'd like to introduce next, Chairman Floyd Jourdain from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Program is a 2006 honoree, and we heard from them earlier today. Chairman Jourdain.

Chairman Floyd Jourdain:

"Boozhoo. I hope I don't talk too loud in this. I'm a really loud person. I wrote a speech in the last two minutes -- he inspired me. He's really good. I like him.

[Anishinaabe introduction]

This is why I'm so mixed up because one, [Anishinaabe], that means 'lead runner,' a person who is leading all the people running, and [Anishinaabe], means 'there is a man standing there,' that's why I'm so mixed up, I'm standing around and I'm supposed to be running! I need someone to come slap me upside the head every now and then, 'Lead us!' you know?

I'm honored to be here, on behalf of everybody back home. This is a pretty big deal for us, and Alan [Pemberton] did a nice job this morning. Our tribal treasurer, Darrell Seki, is seated over here. He is here also representing our tribe. And Alan's mother is here, his beautiful mom is here taking pictures for us. So, it's good to see her.

We've talked about a lot of sovereignty issues. Red Lake is a huge reservation, there are 10,000 members, we have about three-quarters of a million acres of pristine woodlands, lakes, lands, resources, and it's something that I was able to -- honored to be able to serve as the chairman there. We've been around a long, long time. There's a lot of Ojibwe nations. In Minnesota, there's a thing called the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, where all of the Chippewa tribes are like a conglomerate, joined together. Red Lake is not a part of that structure, and that goes back historically to our chiefs. We came from a system of chiefs and hereditary chiefs that govern by consensus. We moved into the agreement era, and from there we moved into where we had a chief executive, and surrounded by chiefs. At one point there was like 45 people on the tribal council. In 1959, we went to an elected form of government. Now we have four districts, two [representatives from each district], and three executive officers: the treasurer, the secretary, and the tribal chairman, who some also, a lot of the older people, still consider to be the chief of the tribe, the principal chief. So it's a position that is very complex, there's a lot to know.

And one of the things that I'd like to talk about today, which Mr. [Michael] Thomas touched on, is the education of the next generation, the next wave of people who will protect and defend our tribal sovereignty. And we just think of it as something we've always done. Red Lake did not want to be a part of the other tribes because we respected the other tribes. We knew what was going on in the 1800s with the massacres and those types of things. We knew that the government that was overseeing this country was very serious, with a very serious and dangerous agenda, so we made sure that we were very well prepared, and we consulted with our people, we consulted with our ceremonies, and we tried to do the best that we could to retain what we had as Indian people. As a result of that, we, like Alan said today, we hold in common all of our land. There are no landowners -- one hundred percent owners [are] 10,000 people. Imagine owning every tree, every fish, every aspect of the tribe. So everybody is watching everybody all the time. They are watching us right now. But we were the first in the nation. We like to see our sovereignty as a proactive use of it. We were the first tribe in the nation to have tribal license plates. We wanted to license ourselves, to have our own [Motor Vehicle] registration department, and we did that. Of course the state objected, we fought in court, we won that [case], and we set the precedent for the tribes in the United States with the license plates. We're very proud of that. We've battled in the courtrooms, Supreme Court, major cases involving members taking eagle feathers for ceremonial purposes. We've gone to war in court and we won those battles, because that was never taken from Indian people, we never gave that way -- our right to hunt and fish on our lands.

Now, we're trying to educate a whole new generation of people on the complexities of this modern era. We're in a very dangerous and volatile position right now as tribes. So rather than getting on the tribal council and saying, 'I'm going to bring home the pork for my district and I'm going to fix a road, or I'm going to build houses, and do those types of things,' we also -- because we are not subject to the laws of the State of Minnesota, we have to watch the State of Minnesota and interact with them while at the same time they are attempting to erode our tribal sovereignty and access our lands and impose their laws over us. The national government, [we're] very astute -- we're professional, we have law firms in Albuquerque, D.C., lobbyists there that work, and we have tribal members who are constantly feeding us information on Supreme Court appointments, legislation that's passed through, and so we work closely with a lot of people who are a lot smarter than us to let us know what's going on, because all the tribes are joined by the hip.

And we're -- it's funny, I went up to the grocery store today, and I saw this little clock, and I said, 'What is that little clock for?' And it said 'George Bush Countdown.' And the seconds are going, you know, and it was counting backwards -- I'm going to get one of those before I leave and it put it on my desk when I get back to the office.

But a good example of us proactive with our sovereignty is the fisheries, interacting with the State of Minnesota, the federal government, and the fishermen on our reservation. And we said, "Well, we're not going to sit around and wait for something bad to happen to us. We're going to initiate this ourselves. We don't need to be told to save our walleye. We don't need to be told to try to put businesses together. We don't need to be told to educate ourselves on how to run business. We're going to do those things ourselves.' So, I think it's a good way to go. And I really like what the Harvard Project is doing. I've been going to the website for several years now. Before I was chairman, I was reading some of the stuff when I was taking classes. It's really good that someone out there is trying to make sense of all of this. It's pretty complex.

So another example was on March 21, 2005. Some of you may recall that we had a horrible tragedy on our reservation, where we had a school shooting there. Several people lost their lives. And being a community [where you hardly ever] see white people -- they come, they work at the hospitals, some of them are teachers. We're one hundred percent Indian people. So when you see an army of news trucks and people coming on to your reservation who want access and feel that they should have access, and they say, 'How dare you restrict us from your tribal lands?' Again, we didn't wait around. We called the best resources that we have and said, We have to have a protocol. How are we going to handle this monumental tragedy? What's our plan? How are we going to do that?' And when people came to the reservation, sure enough, it happened that way. They got there, they wanted to run around the reservation and see blood, guts, gore and all this stuff. And we said, 'Well, absolutely not. We have a media pool, We have a place where we're doing press conferences. We have a designated area for you there. We'll be more than happy to help you out and accommodate you in any way.' They said, 'No!' They despised the fact that Indian people had a structure, were educated, had laws, and they had to abide by them. They said, 'That's ridiculous! This is the United States of America. Who the hell do you think you are?' So [we said], 'We're the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, and you are on Indian land, and you follow our laws.'

So we do take the boats and the planes and those kinds of things, like Alan talked about, and even though there's laws out there and there's Congressional acts that say we can't do those type of things, we beg to differ. We test that. We've always been cutting edge. And if someone enters into our tribal lands and if they do not act accordingly, we do reserve the right to kick them the hell out. We've always done that. In fact, under the former Tribal Chairman Roger Jourdain, there was a passport system that was implemented through the Red Lake Band. He said, 'Well, if we can't exercise our laws on these people, then we're going to, ourselves, tailor a passport system and a protocol where they will have to report to the tribal government center, declare their intention here, let us know who they are, and they will have to have permission to go around our Indian lands. If they do not have this passport, there's the line, we'll help you across it.' So that's one of the things that we've used our sovereignty in a good way, and the State of Minnesota really has a lot of issues with that because, when we had this stuff going on -- I use the example, I think, of Canada. When you cross into Canada, near the Minnesota border there, you have to go to customs. They ask you, 'Do you have weapons? Do you have alcohol? Do you have anything to declare? Do you understand that if you come into Canada and you break any rules, that there will be consequences to pay?' And you say, 'Yes, understood, we'll abide by the laws of Canada.' Fine, they let you go. But if you raise heck up there, they're real tough on people with DUIs and that kind stuff. They won't even let the Indians in there, now we have to swim across on our own land. But you have a price to pay.

So I think, from the tribal leader perspective, when we come to D.C., we expect to be treated as such, because our forefathers respected each other that way. They saw each individual Indian nation like these leaders who are here today, these men out here today. I went out and I greeted these tribal leaders that are in the room, at least the ones that I knew. (I'm sorry, this is the first time I've met you, I've always wanted to meet you, and it's good to finally see you my brother.) So that's the respect, and that's the way we also think as Indian people. We are a government. We are a sovereign. We're not a municipality, we're not a corporation, we're not a township. We are Indian people, each and every one of us. And it has to be respected and used in a good way. Thank you very much."

Return of the Red Lake Walleye (trailer)

Producer
Native Nations Institute
Year

The Native Nations Institute film Return of the Red Lake Walleye chronicles the extraordinary effort of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians working together with the State of Minnesota and the federal government to bring back the culturally vital walleye from the brink of extinction and restore it to health in Red Lake. It examines how the Band and State overcame decades of bad blood to forge an innovative public policy solution that puts cooperation before conflict and science before politics, fueling an amazing recovery that has defied the odds. A compelling example of tribal sovereignty in practice, Return of the Red Lake Walleye documents the significance of the walleye's return for the Red Lake community, its people, the tribe as a whole, and those generations yet to come.

Resource Type
Citation

NNI Films (in association with Arizona Public Media). "Ogaag bii azhe giiwewag: Return of the Red Lake Walleye" (trailer). Tucson, Arizona: Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. 2010. 

"It was their most important natural resource.

'They grew up doing this. They lived by the lake shores in the summertime.'

But it was on the brink of collapse.

'We weren't gonna have fish any longer if something wasn't done.'

Now thanks to determination and cooperation, it will provide for centuries to come.

'We learned a good lesson by what happened here. We need to show respect for that fish.'

Return of the Red Lake Walleye."

Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held

Year

Issues that affect the Nation's language, culture, land and resources were the topics of the final session of the first round of meetings hosted by the Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Committee (CRI). The committee was seeking input by Red Lake enrolled Citizens and immediate family in the Bemidji area on these issues.

The meeting was held at the American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) on campus at Bemidji State University on Monday, April 14, 2014, at 5:30 p.m. This was the last of a series of meetings held in Duluth, Minneapolis, and all four communities on the Red Lake Indian Reservation...

Resource Type
Citation

Meuers, Michael. "Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held." Red Lake Nation News. April 29, 2014. Article. (http://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/04/29/news/red-lake-constitu..., accessed August 29, 2014)

Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held

Year

The meeting at Bemidji was one leg of the second round of informational meetings conducted by the Red Lake Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC) in order to seek input and feedback from the membership regarding Constitutional Reform. Meetings are held in Duluth and the Twin Cites in addition to the four reservation communities.

The AIRC seems and appropriate place to hold such a meeting. Upon entering the AIRC one is surrounded by an environment steeped in cultural heritage and tradition – a gathering place that honors the past and helps shape the future.

Resource Type
Citation

Meuers, Michael. "Red Lake Constitutional Reform Informational Meetings Held." Red Lake Nation News. September 29, 2014. Article. (https://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/09/29/news/...) accessed May 2, 2014)

Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meeting held in Redby

Year

The second of six scheduled Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meetings was held at the Redby Community Center on March 24, 2014 from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.

The first meeting was held at the Minneapolis American Indian Center on March 22, 2014 with about 60 people in attendance, as stated by one of the Constitution Committee members.

According to a press release on March 17, the Bush Foundation approved a grant of $1,542,700 to the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians to support constitutional reform outreach, education and meetings...

Resource Type
Citation

Barrett, Michael. "Red Lake Constitution Reform Initiative Community Engagement Meeting held in Redby." Red Lake Nation News. March 27, 2014. Article. (http://www.redlakenationnews.com/story/2014/03/27/news/red-lake-constitu..., accessed April 29, 2014)

Red Lake 15 years later: Historic agreement the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and Minnesota DNR signed in April 1999 produced walleye recovery

Author
Year

As Al Pemberton recalls, it was about three years after the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources signed an agreement to restore walleye populations in Upper and Lower Red lakes that he saw the true potential for the big lakes’ recovery.

The agreement, which state and tribal officials had signed on a perfect afternoon in April 1999, resulted from the collapse of the walleye population in Minnesota’s largest inland lake, a once-unthinkable outcome caused by years of overfishing...

Resource Type
Citation

Dokken, Brad. "Red Lake 15 years later: Historic agreement the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and Minnesota DNR signed in April 1999 produced walleye recovery." Bemidji Pioneer. April 5, 2014. Article. (https://www.bemidjipioneer.com/sports/red-lake-15-years-later-historic-agreement-the-red-lake-band-of-chippewa-and-minnesota-dnr-signed-in-april-1999-produced-walleye-recovery, accessed August 14, 2023)

Leech Lake, Red Lake Ojibwe bands moving on constitutional reform

Author
Year

On Tuesday, tribal members of the White Earth Nation voted resoundingly to adopt their own constitution and eventually split from the 80-year-old Minnesota Chippewa Tribe constitution that dictates the laws of many Ojibwe tribes in the state.

Neighboring Ojibwe bands at Leech Lake and Red Lake may not be far behind in similar constitution reform efforts. Reformers with both bands said Wednesday they are working to gauge what the people want in their new framework...

Resource Type
Citation

Kayser, Zach. "Leech Lake, Red Lake Ojibwe bands moving on constitutional reform." Bemidji Pioneer. November 20, 2013. Article. (http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/content/leech-lake-red-lake-ojibwe-bands-m..., accessed November 22, 2013)