Walter Bresette: Treaty Rights and Sovereignty

[lively string music] [gentle acoustic guitar music] – Walter Bresette: I want to begin at the beginning, and I always draw a map of Wisconsin, and I keep getting worse each time that I do draw it.

Here’s Duluth, here’s La Crosse.

I’m from this little community up here, which is the Red Cliff Reservation.

So I’m a Lake Superior Chippewa.

My village has a government to government relationship with the United States called sovereignty.

Laws, et cetera, need to take into account this concept of sovereignty.

And the treaties of 1837 and 1842 were basically deeds to real estate transactions.

You know, I’m sure there was a little bit more than that going on.

We won’t debate that here.

When that land was sold to the United States, there were easements on it.

The easement was that we would always have access to hunting, fishing, and gathering of the resources of this land.

So we sold the surface and the United States said, “Great.”

Policies change, some years they like Indians, some years they ignore them, some years they try and get rid of them.

So back in 1974, here on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, there was a lake, but these young brothers said that perhaps that the state really never had authority to impose state game law against the Chippewa.

They would remember the old grandpa stories.

“Grandpa told me that his grandpa told him, “he was there when they signed those treaties.

And the treaties are our license.”

So what they did was not unlike what Ghandi did, was not unlike what Rosa Parks did, was not unlike what anyone else did when they kind of knew in their heart that this law was not right.

They went across the imaginary line here and began spearfishing and of course they were arrested, cited for violating state game laws.

Well, to make that story shorter, in 1983, a three-judge panel in Chicago said Grandpa was right, that these young Tribble brothers had indeed stumbled onto lost rights.

They said, “We think that the state has been given “no constitutional authority for them to impose “against the Chippewa, who are the legal inheritors of these easements.”

However, when the court ruled they said, “You know, it’s a long time since 1837 and 1842, “so what we want you people to do, to go argue the scope of these rights.”

There is nothing in the treaties which say we must use the technology that existed when the treaties were signed.

So the Chippewa can do anything in terms of methods that are available that doesn’t threaten the resource.

What was concluded was that wherever any of these resources are harvested by the general public, the Chippewa could harvest their portion of these resources.

Wherever anybody else can do it, we can do it.

And the tribal government understood for the first time that geez, this is a right.

Lost rights.

Rights that were never given up, were never sold, were never taken away, but were just usurped by might by the state of Wisconsin.

[gentle acoustic guitar music]