NISSWA, Minn. – Indian treaty rights activists picked a small amount of wild rice from Hole-in-the-Day Lake on Thursday in a protest blunted by an unasked-for permit from the Minnesota Department of National Resources (DNR).
The DNR surprised the group by issuing a one-day special permit to sanction the so-called "en masse" harvest, defusing any conflict for an event that had been widely anticipated and heavily covered by the media.
But the activists vowed to return Friday and for many days to come to provoke a court challenge to the state's insistence that Chippewa tribes gave up off-reservation hunting, fishing and gathering rights when they sold a giant patch of North Woods land to the federal government in an 1855 treaty.
"We want to settle it," said Jim Merhar, a White Earth band member who was in the crowd along Hwy. 371, a stone's throw from Gull Lake. "The only way you can do it is by getting it into federal court."
Col. Ken Soring, chief enforcement officer for the DNR, said Thursday's one-day permit was issued without request to honor the importance of wild rice in Chippewa culture, to bring attention to clean-water issues and to pay homage to the late Ojibwe Chief Hole-in-the-Day, for whom the lake is named.
Beginning Friday, Soring said, the DNR will stand ready to prosecute anyone who gathers wild rice without a permit.
"After this, it will be normal law enforcement for all people," Soring said.
Frank Bibeau, an attorney for the group called the 1855 Treaty Authority, said band members from Leech Lake, White Earth and Mille Lacs plan to exercise their off-reservation rights for rice-gathering, duck hunting, fishing, deer hunting and the taking of small game. The group first challenged state officials over its treaty rights in 2010, with unsanctioned fish netting on Lake Bemidji, but the state never followed through with prosecutions.