Capital,Subsistence,and Lakeside Violence

Abstract

The tranquil setting in the North Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota obscures a centuries-old history of resource conflict between indigenous Ojibwe people and whites. The subsistence activities of the Ojibwe, including hunting and fishing, have been restricted by whites to ever-smaller geographies in part to bolster capitalist extractive industries and tourist economies. Only recently have the Ojibwe successfully reasserted their treaty rights to hunt and fish off their reservations through litigation with the States of Wisconsin and Minnesota. White business owners- in what became known as the walleye wars- subsequently spurred violent protests at lakes where the Ojibwe exercised their reclaimed right to spear valuable sport fish. Other Ojibwe legal victories during the course of the walleye wars forced state fish and game authorities to better cooperate with the tribes to regulate fish and game outside the reservation system. One example is the killing of thousands of fish-eating birds called cormorants on an Ojibwe-controlled island in Leech Lake, Minnesota. Ojibwe authorities and state fish and game managers touted their work together to exempt the cormorants nesting there from protection because they both claimed the waterfowl destroyed the local walleye fishery. I argue this killing of cormorants is actually an extension of the original walleye war aimed at the Ojibwe because both events criminalized subsistence in order to protect fish as capitalist commodities. Violence is necessary in the criminalization process to replace the labor of subsistence with labor that produces surplus and exchange value from walleyes. Thus I argue this constitutes a fundamental contradiction for the Ojibwe who must manage walleyes simultaneously as a means of subsistence and as commodities for the market. The real danger here is that Ojibwe authorities- in the act of shooting cormorants- inadvertently support the same violent logic used against their people in the past that could be deployed against them again in the future.