Fond du Lac Band resumes tradition of harvesting Lake Superior trout to continue culture, feed students
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The sun shone a fiery orange as it emerged over the horizon of Lake Superior earlier this month, as the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior's new fishing boat motored out from the Knife River marina, battling four-foot waves, bound for a series of 500-foot nets strung out deep underwater.
“I call it sunrise season,” said Eric Torvinen, fisheries biologist for the Fond du Lac Band, admiring the sun’s spreading glow as the boat glides up to the first net. Torvinen turns on a motor that slowly pulls it in. And almost immediately, glistening lake trout up to five pounds each start to emerge from the water, trapped in the gill net.
"These are high quality fish!” Torvinen exclaimed. “They're still alive. They came from cold water. These will taste really good."
Ashla Ojibway of Superior, Wis. and her 11-year old son James are on the boat to help with the harvest. They struggle to untangle the slippery fish from the net, while keeping their balance as waves rock the boat around.
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"Oh, gosh, it's hard work. I mean, it goes fast,” said Ojibway. “You just got to keep moving and throwing the fish around and getting them out of the nets as quickly as you can."
Ojibway said it's important to her to show her son the value of a subsistence harvest, where the fish will help feed the entire community.
"Just to be out on the big lake and be practicing some of our treaty rights that we haven't been able to for such a long time, it's amazing how this population has come back,” Ojibway said.
Lake trout almost disappeared due to overfishing and the invasion of the Great Lakes by the invasive, eel-like sea lamprey. A single lamprey can kill 40 pounds of lake trout in a single year. By the 1960s, the fish was extinct in all of the Great Lakes except Superior.
But a successful lamprey control program has allowed the lake trout to make a steady, remarkable comeback over the past 60 years. Last year, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission declared the lake trout fully restored in Lake Superior.
That has set the stage for the Fond du Lac Band to bring back the important cultural tradition of subsistence netting for lake trout. This fall was the third year Band members harvested fish.
When the tribe first returned to Lake Superior two years ago to exercise their rights to harvest the fish under treaties signed with the U.S. government, it was the first time in more than 160 years ago they had done so.
The first couple years only tribal elders took part. This year, Torvinen said, was geared toward teaching the traditional practice to the band’s next generation.
"I always said that this program would be a success when we could take a group of kids out on the weekend, catch a bunch of fish, and then they can bring those fish back to the Ojibwe school and eat them in the cafeteria,” Torvinen said.
Slimy work
After all the nets have been brought in from the lake, crews of young people began working to free the fish from the nets. Several are students from the Fond du Lac Ojibwe School. For many it's their first experience harvesting fish.
"Really slimy,” said 17-year old Kail Beaulieu, when asked to describe the work, crouched low over a net in the bow of the boat. “It's hard to grip, and I can't get a hold of really anything."
It's slow going at first. But soon he and the others start to get the hang of it. Every freed fish is plopped in a big cooler that's soon overflowing. Beaulieu is proud of his work.
"Being able to do something that is a part of my culture that probably happened a couple thousands of years ago, and still being a part of it, is awesome and amazing,” Beaulieu said. “Still keeping it going, keeping it alive."
This isn't something for the history books, emphasized 73-year-old Bob Danielson, a tribal elder who came to help.
"We're not reenactors,” Danielson said. “It’s one of the treaty rights that we have. It’s part of our culture. And as a living culture, we adopt to modern things, but we also have this available to us, and I want to see this stuff continue.”
That's why he says it's so important to see young people like Beaulieu involved. He recalls a recent walleye harvest at Mille Lacs Lake where he said only he and his sister took part.
“Finally we're getting some of these people out here,” said Danielson. “For a long time, a lot of us elders would talk about this, and I was like, there's nobody doing this anymore!”
After the fish are freed from the nets, Torvinen helps collect data. Each fish is weighed, the sex is logged, and whether the fish has any lamprey wounds. The information will later be shared with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
“It’s great to see Fond du Lac back out on the water,” said Cory Goldsworthy, Lake Superior fisheries supervisor for the Minnesota DNR.
Currently about 20,000 lake trout are caught on Lake Superior every year by private anglers and charter fishing boats, Goldsworthy said. Commercial operators take another 6 or 7,000 lake trout along the North Shore.
The Fond du Lac Band set its quota at 1,000 fish this year. But their actual harvest is much smaller, said Torvinen, adding the Band doesn’t want to cause any “hiccups” in the state’s current regulations.
The ultimate goal, Torvinen said, is to get more young people out harvesting, and to prepare more Band members to harvest fish on their own. 26 Band Members took part in the program this year.
Later, Torvinen tallied the results of the day’s harvest. 340 pounds of lake trout fillets were sent to the school’s cafeteria. Mace Finoti, head cook at the Fond du Lac Ojibwe school, planned to serve it baked with a lemon white sauce. He’d also love to serve it at special events, including graduation.
“Helping the kids understand that they do have treaty rights, and these are treaty foods, is pretty special,” Finoti said. “That’s the intent.”
