<P> Protests erupted in Wisconsin among sports fishermen and resort owners who were opposed to tribal members spearfishing walleye during spawning season . Protests continued into 1991 against the Ojibwe walleye harvests . Tribal supporters successfully petitioned federal courts to issue an injunction against the protesters, curbing the protest events at boat landings . </P> <P> The events were chronicled in a Mother Jones 1991 article, books published in 1994 and 2002, and a documentary film, Lighting the Seventh Fire (1995). </P> <P> During the 1970s, American Indian activism increased on a number of fronts, in terms of land claims, treaty rights, and sovereignty to exercise traditional practices . This particular conflict started in the 1973, when two members of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of the Ojibwe Nation crossed a reservation boundary that divided Chief Lake, cut a hole in the ice, and harvested fish with spears, contrary to Wisconsin state laws . In a class taught by attorney Larry Leventhal, the members had learned their band held by treaty an unresolved claim to off - reservation hunting and fishing rights in the northern part of the state . The members were arrested and a Sawyer County judge convicted them under state law of poaching, as they were fishing out of season . </P> <P> The Lac Courte Oreilles band joined the legal fight on behalf of the two tribal members, contending that they had the right to fish off the reservation without restrictions because of mid-19th - century treaties made by the bands with the US government; at the time, the bands ceded hundreds of thousands of acres of land to the US . The case was heard in US District Court as it related to treaty rights . This court upheld the band's treaty rights to traditional hunting and fishing throughout its former territories, without regulation by the state . The state appealed, and the Seventh Court of Appeals' decision also upheld the rights of the Ojibwe . The state appealed again, but the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the state's argument to reverse the lower court decision . After the highest court refused to reverse, five other Chippewa bands joined the Lac Courte Oreilles' legal action . The Seventh Circuit sent the case back to U.S. District Court with instructions for the court to determine the scope of the treaty rights and to resolve conflicts related to regulation of off - reservation resources . </P>

The walleye war the struggle for ojibwe spearfishing and treaty rights summary