Turtle Talk

Interlochen Public Radio continues its excellent profiles of northern Michigan history with “Looking Back: The Fight For American Indian Fishing Rights,” profiling Arthur Duhamel.

Here’s my contribution:

The urgency was about more than fish. The federal government had ignored the poverty in Peshawbestown for generations. As Matthew Fletcher puts it, the federal government just stopped returning the tribe’s phone calls in the 1870s.

Fletcher teaches indigenous law at Michigan State University and is a member of the Grand Traverse Band. Fletcher says the tribe needed some way to make the federal government recognize its existence and asserting fishing rights under a treaty signed in 1836 was the way to do that.

“The United States does not sign a treaty with counties or corporations,” says Fletcher. “They sign treaties with nations.”