Wisconsin Walleye War - Conflict

Conflict

By late April 1988 of the spring spearfishing season, residents and visitors of Park Falls, Wisconsin rallied at Butternut Lake, where a band of fishers were led by Tom Maulson, a former judge and council member of the Lac du Flambeau judge and council member. The crowd pressed against the fishers, the tribal wardens and the few state game wardens, pushing them toward the water. Local police declined to render mutual aid, and the standoff lasted until a convoy of officers was brought from Superior, Wisconsin, almost 100 miles (160 km) distant. They made their way through the crowd to rescue the fishers and game wardens.

The 1989 fishing season opened with interested people having vivid memory of the April 1988 incident. The governor Tommy Thompson, a Republican, mobilized the state's Division of Emergency Government to form a Treaty Rights Task Force. He ordered them to find a way to keep the peace. Dressed in riot gear, police more accustomed to breaking up fights at Milwaukee sporting events stood shoulder to shoulder, often three deep, with sticks and shields ready to stop the crowd if they pressed past snow fences hastily erected for crowd control.

During the spring walleye spawning seasons of 1989, 1990 and 1991, the task force deployed hundreds of police officers from around the state to help local sheriffs maintain order at lakes where Chippewa members began exercising their newly recognized rights. Hundreds of protesters lined boat landings to make their case that tribal members enjoyed "special rights" under Crabb's decision. They shouted offensive slogans and sometimes threw rocks at the tribal fishers and officials assigned to protect them. To disrupt the fishing, protesters launched boats and circled the fishers at high speed on the water, attempting to upend the tribal fishers standing in boats to spear fish under lamplight. Other protesters joined mass arrests, at least one of which degraded into a melee when police moved to seize sound amplification devices from protest leaders.

In 1989 pro-treaty groups organized as the Midwest Treaty Network in support of the Ojibwe fishing families. Activists such as Walter Bresette of the Red Cliff Band from southern Wisconsin and the Twin Cities of Minnesota trained witnesses to document by video the anti-Indian harassment and violence at the boat landings, and issued Witness for Nonviolence Reports in 1990 and 1991. Convoys of activists from the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis also joined the protests, bringing Native drums to sound above emergency power generators and protesters' chants.