Word: fish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...state, which has appealed Fox's decision, wants the Indians to use cage-like trap nets, which do not kill the fish, and to return the game fish to the water...
...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...
...Boston predicted in court that at least one major spill would occur over 20 years. Worse yet, warned Foy, would be the almost continuous discharges from day-to-day operations. Adds Biologist Howard Sanders of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: "There is a very real danger to Georges Bank fish from low-level chronic pollution...