From the Escanaba Daily Press: Treaty gets historic clarification
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By George Weeks |
DETROIT — Much was made of last week’s historic deal between General Motors and the United Auto Workers that reflected current economic realities 70 years after a 44-day strike led to the UAW gaining power to bargain exclusively with GM on wages and working conditions.
More historically significant, after about 170 years, was last week’s recognition/regulation agreement that at long last clarifies how five tribes can exercise fishing and hunting rights under the 1836 Treaty of Washington that ceded about 13.9 million acres in the northern Lower Peninsula and the eastern Upper Peninsula.
The treaty, covering about 37 percent of the state’s land and water, was the single largest cession of land to the federal government by the first people of Michigan, and led to statehood in 1837.
As with the GM-UAW deal, the hunting/fishing agreement has some good for both sides and represents a reality check.
The reality is that although U.S. District Judge Noel Fox ruled in 1979 that “Indians have a right to fish today wherever fish are to be found within the area of cession,” there has been what Department of Natural Resources director Becky Humphries calls “legal uncertainty.”
Fox said: “The mere passage of time has not eroded, and cannot erode the rights guaranteed by solemn treaties that both sides pledged on their honor to uphold.”
But there was prolonged controversy because of conflicting court cases and interpretations of a 1985 consent decree setting tribal and non-tribal fishing zones in portions of Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron.
During the legal battles, especially in the early days, there was animosity and occasional violence between tribal and sports fishers.
While tribes will get longer hunting seasons for some game, and have other benefits over non-tribal hunters, Marquette-based Jim Ekdahl, the Upper Peninsula DNR director and key negotiator on the agreement, said, “Michigan’s natural resources will not be compromised.”
In some tribes, only a small percentage of members hunt or fish — a far cry from earlier times when fish were needed for subsistence. Fishing was part of a way of life and a major factor in the formation, migration, and settlement pattern of Native Americans.
Treaty fishing controversies in no small part led to what is now a major economic factor for the tribes and the state — Indian casinos.
In fact, it was a catalyst for the organization and federal recognition of such tribes as the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB).
Former GTB Tribal Chairman Joseph Raphael, now a member of the tribal council, does not believe federal recognition “would have ever happened” had it not been for the fishing issue and the persistence of such GTB members as Arthur Duhamel, a tribal councilor who was arrested seven times in the 1970s for pressing his claim of treaty rights in Lake Michigan.
Raphael said: “After the 1979 (Judge) Fox decision, you needed to be a federally recognized tribe. Quite frankly, that was the instrument here. That was the push.” (The comment was in this scribe’s 1992 book, “Mem-ka-weh: Dawning of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.”)
Fish and chips. Both part of the web of economic life for our first people.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — George Weeks is retired after being a political columnist for the Detroit News for 22 years. His syndicated column appears weekly in the Daily Press. Weeks is also former chief of staff for Gov. William Milliken and as a journalist covered the White House, State Department, and Pentagon.
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