American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION In recent years the federal courts have been busy interpreting the Treaty of 1831 between the Menominee Nation and the United States, and what it means for relations between the Menominee and the state of Wisconsin. The Menominee Nation asserted a claim to off-reservation hunting and fishing rights based on article six of the treaty. After many years of litigation, the federal district and appeals courts, and the US Supreme Court ruled against the Menominee Nation and in doing so brought to a close a contentious dispute. The very same Treaty of 1831 also figured in a lesser-known court dispute in the 1990s between the state of Wisconsin and some Oneida Indian fishermen over access to netting on Duck Creek in Brown County by tribal members. Duck Creek runs parallel to the Fox River and bisects the Oneida Indian Reservation for twelve miles as the sluggish stream makes its way toward the waters of Green Bay. The creek once provided good fishing, particularly for sturgeon that swam up the creek from the bay, for Oneida Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s the state of Wisconsin erected a dam astride Duck Creek, right at the extreme northeastern end of the reservation on the west bank and at Brown County’s Pamperin Park on the opposite east bank. An immediate effect of the dam was that it limited sturgeon and other fish from swimming upstream to the main settlements on the reservation. After the erection of the dam, tribal members moved their fishing to the dam site and fished there unhindered by the state, if not by pollution, until the early 1990s, when the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) informed them they were fishing illegally.