IPR: Looking back on the battle for tribal rights in Michigan

Arthur Duhamel played a pivotal role in the history of his people. In 1974 he launched a new career as a commercial fishermen. His son, Skip Duhamel remembers it was an old member of the tribe, Geboo Sands, who told his dad to get out there and fish.

“He told him he had to do it. It wasn’t even optional.”

The question of Indian treaty rights in Michigan was hot at that moment. Sport fishing was taking off in the Great Lakes and the state felt that commercial gill nets were a big threat to a growing industry. Two tribal fishermen in the Upper Peninsula had already been arrested and Skip Duhamel says his father knew he too was going to jail.

“It looked absolutely like you could never prevail in this. And he was really steadfast in this. He’s like, ‘we’re going to prevail in this. We have to!’”

The urgency was about more than fish. The federal government had ignored the poverty in Peshawbestown for generations. As Matthew Fletcher puts it, the federal government just stopped returning the tribe’s phone calls in the 1870s.

Fletcher teaches indigenous law at Michigan State University and is a member of the Grand Traverse Band. Fletcher says the tribe needed some way to make the federal government recognize its existence and asserting fishing rights under a treaty signed in 1836 was the way to do that.