Walleye Wars and Pedagogical Management: Cooperative Rhetorics of Responsibility in Response to Settler Colonialism

ABSTRACT

This essay details a history of environmental violence in Wisconsin, showing the ways that the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) responded during the walleye wars of the 1980s and early 1990s. I show that resentment-laden settler colonialism was engaged by an Ojibwe rhetoric of collaboration, a response that pedagogically emphasizes mutual respect and responsibility. In ongoing relationships with Wisconsin publics, they practice a rhetoric that works counter to the logics of settler colonialism. This essay ultimately shows how GLIFWC’s public outreach during the walleye wars unsettles a settler colonial violence grounded in ignorance and resentment. Such an approach to collaborative relationships enacts a pedagogy grounded in treaty rights between the US and Ojibwe tribes, all the while asserting sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental rhetoric
• indigenous rhetoric
• political ontology
• public rhetoric
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Christa Olson and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke for their generous feedback on early iterations of this article, and thank you Larry Nesper and Amanda Pratt for revision advice and encouragement as the article developed. I could not have done it without your collective support.

Notes

¹ “‘Ojibwe’ and ‘Chippewa’ refer to the same cultural group of Algonquian-speaking

Indians who inhabit Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, and parts of Canada. The Ojibwe also sometimes refer to themselves as Anishinaabe, members of a historic confederacy that includes the Potawatomi and Odawa or Ottawa” (Loew and Thannum 184).

² “GLIFWC strives to infuse Ojibwe culture and values into all aspects of its work … [It] is an agency of eleven Ojibwe nations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, who retain off-reservation treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather in treaty-ceded lands. It exercises powers delegated by its member tribes … [and it] provides natural resources management expertise, conservation enforcement, legal and policy analysis, and public information services” (“About”).

³ Multispecies partnerships refer to political relationships among humans and nonhumans. In Ojibwe legal systems, nonhuman agents possess legal personhood (Nesper and Schlender 290).

⁴ In the walleye wars case, Thannum explains an ontological difference this way: “At the heart of the spearfishing controversy is a difference in ethics between sport and tribal user groups. Anglers hold the view that fish should be taken in a sporting manner and harvesters should ‘thrill in the chase.’ Most tribal members in comparison hold the view that fish are a food source provided by the creator and harvesting them maintains traditional ties to the earth” (“1991Chippewa Spearing Season” 3).

⁵ Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, Sokagon Chippewa Community of Wisconsin (Mole Lake Band).