On April 17, the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame in Stevens Point will posthumously induct Red Cliff Ojibwe tribal member Walter Bresette, a prominent treaty rights activist who organized support for the fishing rights of Ojibwe in the late 1980s, and opposition to metal mines in the 1990s. We know Walt as the co-founder of the Midwest Treaty Network (MTN), and an outstanding grassroots organizer who fought hard for Native rights while building bridges with non-Native neighbors.
In the 1980s, a federal court recognized that the Ojibwe retained treaty rights to spear fish off their reservations. Hate groups organized mobs of white sportfishers to harass and attack Native spearfishers during the spring fishing season. Hundreds of anti-treaty protesters were arrested for civil disobedience or violent attacks. As a spearfisher, Walt wasn’t afraid to show up at hate group meetings to denounce their racist agenda of restoring treaty rights.
Walt inspired the founding of Witness for Nonviolence, modeled after the foreign witnesses who escorted Central American war refugees home. The MTN program trained hundreds of treaty supporters to stand with Ojibwe families at cold boat landings at night, and to monitor and prevent violence and harassment. As anti-treaty groups became more overtly racist, and their false claims that the Ojibwe were destroying the fishing and tourism industries were debunked, they declined in the early ’90s.
At the same time, mining companies are trying to open large metallic sulfide mines in the north. Walt presented treaty rights as a legal deterrent to mines that would contaminate fishing streams. He proposed a toxic-free zone in the treaty-ceded territory, and a Seventh Generation Amendment to protect air and water as common property.
Walt predicted that white northerners would realize that environmental threats and state mismanagement of fisheries were “more of a threat to their way of life than Indians going out and spearing fish. I think, in fact, we have more things in common with anti-Indian people than the state of Wisconsin.”
Inspired by Walt again, we began working with several sportfishing groups to stop fighting with tribes about fish, and to start joining tribes to protect fish from acidic mining pollution.
Many sportfishers began to gravitate from a racist right-wing populism to a cross-cultural anticorporate populism. In his book “Walleye Warriors” (co-authored by Rick Whaley), Walt tied unemployment and the closing of mom-and-pop businesses to the search for a Native “scapegoat” to blame for the decline rural economy that is actually caused by “multinational interests.”
Walt was active against the Ladysmith mine on the Flambeau River, where he used an ax (said to have once belonged to Black Hawk) to “count a coup” on mining equipment. He led the tribe’s successful blockade of railroad tracks across the Bad River Reservation to stop trains carrying sulfuric acid to Michigan’s White Pine mine. And he supported the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Community against the proposed Crandon mine, which threatens wild rice beds and the Wolf River trout fishery. The fight was joined by three other tribes, and by non-Native allies like ourselves, in MTN’s Wolf Watershed Educational Project.
Walt grew the movement by lighting the fire, and trusting other grassroots activists to nurture them. He then connects them to each other, often through walks such as the Protect the Earth Journey. At the time of Walt’s passing in 1999, we saw the growth of remarkable grassroots alliances of Native people, rural environmentalists and sportfishing groups.
Companies know how to stereotype white, urban, mainstream environmentalists as elitists, but don’t know how to deal with rural frontline alliances that cut across lines of race, class and age. The Crandon mine was defeated in 2003, laying the groundwork for later anti-mining alliances led by the Bad River Tribe in the Penokee Range, and the Menominee Nation along the Menominee River.
Walt’s legacy offers larger lessons to polarized America in the 2020s, when we are asked to choose between “identity politics” that emphasize racial/cultural differences, and “unity politics” that emphasis on common goals of a healthy economy or environment. Walt was able to effectively combine the two approaches, by framing Native treaty rights as protecting land and water for all.
Zoltán Grossman and Debra McNutt are former board members of the Midwest Treaty Network, now living in Olympia, Washington. The book
“Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands” explores their work with the late Walter Bresette.
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