Word: chippewa
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Winona LaDuke '80-3, a Chippewa by birth, is a leading Indian expert on uranium mining on reservations. A political organizer and journalist, LaDuke spent the past year and a half on leave from Harvard, working with Indian tribes to fight uranium and coal mining on their reservations. She has spoken as well at anti-nuclear rallies across the country in an attempt to make people aware of the dangers of uranium mining to the Indian people...
Though born and raised on the West Coast, LaDuke's family is from the White Earth Chippewa reservation in Minnesota. Her father moved to Los Angeles during the Bureau of Indian Affairs assimilation and relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s, where he played Indians in Hollywood westerns and helped organize the early Indian rights movement. Her uncle, Vernon Bellecourt, co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) and was instrumental in the 1973 Indian occupation of South Dakota's Wounded Knee Hill...
...Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which separates Lake Superior from lakes Michigan and Huron, there are bumper stickers that exhort: SAVE A FISH-SPEAR AN INDIAN. Whites have fired shots at Chippewa fishermen, smashed their boats and slashed their tires. The confrontation intensified last spring after Federal Judge Noel Fox ruled that, under treaties signed in 1836 and 1855, the state could not regulate fishing by Indians. Said Fox: "The fish belong to the Indians as a matter of right." Since then, many Chippewas on the poverty-battered Bay Mills reservation have become full-time commercial fishermen...
What infuriates the whites is that the Chippewas use gill nets, which are wide-mesh devices that also trap and kill lake trout and coho salmon. Both are among the game fish that Michigan spends $1.6 million a year to stock in its waters. Whites fear that Chippewa gill netters will clean out the trout and cohos, and destroy the state's $350 million-a-year sport-fishing industry. Myrl Keller, a state fish biologist, calls the Indians' use of the nets a "malicious, wasteful mode of fishing...
...Indians say they cannot afford trap nets. They would require an initial investment of $20,000, about 20 times the cost of using a gill net. In the Chippewa view, the dispute is plain enough: it is between poor Indians who fish for a living and rich whites who fish for fun. Says Chippewa Elmer LeBlanc: "Our forefathers gave us the right to hunt and fish. I want it to be a livelihood...