Fishing

CORA Fishing Timeline 400 - present

Fishing: An Industry, a Right, and a Life Support

Fishing was and is a core way of life for the Ojibwe, especially the Bay Mills Indian Community. Historically, our tribe lived on the water in many locations and fish were caught for food and trade. The Anishnabeg have always developed and adopted new technologies to fish, from spears, hooks, dip nets and gill nets to catch plentiful whitefish and herring. At the beginning of the twentieth century, tribal commercial fishing was expanded to supply markets in Chicago and New York.

For generations after the treaties in the 1800s, tribal fishermen bought state licenses and complied with state laws and fishing rules. But because they were always small—mostly family operations—Indian fishermen became the victim of the state’s attempt to limit licenses and develop bigger fisheries.

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There are a number of different ways of fishing, explained below by Brad and Cole Tadgerson from information gathered from speaking to tribal fishermen, glifwc.org, 1836cora.org, and other resources.

Gill Net

Traditional gill nets used wooden floats, nets of inner cedar bark twine, and stone sinkers. This type of net angles out from riverbanks. Fish are trapped by their gills within the netting. These nets might have been secured by posts on shore or suspended between two canoes. The nets, often about six feet in depth, were pulled to shore and the trapped fish were harvested. The lake gill nets were made the same way, but were fished in the open lake. They would have been anchored to the bottom of the lake and would have been made to reach deeper than the river gill nets. Cork floats, nylon nets, and lead sinkers have replaced the former traditional resources.

Physical Description of the Gillnet

• Contains floats along the top and weights on the bottom (Stands like a fence along the bottom, but can also be suspended)
• Fish too big to swim through the netting get caught by the gills when they try to back out
• Generally set perpendicular to shore and strung end to end in gangs
• Single net varies in depth from 6 to 20 ft and length from 100 to 400 ft
• Handled in boxes, 3 to 5 nets or 1,200 to 1,800 ft per box
• United end to end to form gangs and may reach 3 to 5 miles in length
• Large mesh 4 to 5 inches stretched to measure for whitefish, trout, and walleye
• Small mesh 2 3/8 to 3 inches for lake herring, chubs, yellow perch, and round whitefish
• Gill nets have been set in depths greater than 700 ft

Trapnet

The trapnets are not the traditional way of fishing but have been used for several generations and are still used today. Using trapnets is the more modern way of commercial fishing. These types of nets replaced the gill nets in the 1960s. In the late 1960s, the Michigan Natural Resources Commission issued orders that banned large-mesh gill nets and required replacement of gill nets with impoundment gear (trap nets). The intent of the ban was to "encourage conversion to the more selective, highly efficient, less damaging, trap nets, which were considered to be compatible with the goals of lake trout restoration" (Rybicki and Schneeberger, Recent history and management of the State-licensed commercial fishery for lake whitefish in the Michigan Waters of Lake Michigan. Michigan DNR, Fisheries Research Report No.1960, 1990).

Physical Description of the Trapnet

• Long lead net that diverts fish into an enclosure (heart) and through a tunnel into a pot (whitefish naturally lead into pot).
• The net has a 1,000-foot, 14-inch stretched mesh lead.
• Submerged closed-top hearts and pots supported by floats, frames, and anchors.
• Trap nets have wing nets leading into a V-shaped heart and box-shaped pot.
• Trap Nets typically fish in water shallower than 90 ft.
• Shallow water trap net-lead averages 15 ft or less in depth; and the pot 2 -15 ft in depth and 6-15 ft in length.
• Deep water trap net-lead averages 35 ft or more in depth; and the pot averages 20-40 ft in depth and length.
• Trap Nets often have a flag marker buoy or float at the lead end toward shore and the main anchor end lakeward.
• The pot always has a flag marker buoy.
• Floats may also be present at the ends of the wings

Spearfishing

In the 1980s there were a lot of hostile and horrible acts directed at Ojibwe tribes for spearfishing. This included shooting at Native fishermen going out to spear walleye at night. Some of the white people would throw sticks, slash fishermans' tires, and get gangs of people to harass the fishermen when they came back to shore.

There wasn't too much spearfishing controversy up in Bay Mills--it was happening more in Wisconsin at Big Lac. The white people would shoot holes in the boats or they would go in their own boats and drive right by them and splash them or even worse, like hit them with blunt objects.

When one of the spear fishermen would fight back they would go to jail. But some wouldn't even care.

Types of Fish

Whitefish - Whitefish were fished by our people for centuries and are native to Lake Superior.

Perch - Perch were also fished by our people for centuries and are also native to Lake Superior.

Lake Trout - Lake trout were native to this land, but in the 1950s, they were almost all wiped out by the introduction of the sea lamprey. The trout that are here now have mostly all been restocked by fish hatcheries around Michigan.

Walleyes - Walleyes are native to Lake Superior and were fished by our people for centuries.

All of these fish and many non-native fish are still being fished by use of trap and gill nets.