The Walleye War : the struggle for Ojibwe spearfishing and treaty rights /

This reworked dissertation is an intellectualized companion to Rick Whaley's Walleye Warriors (CH, Sep'94). Nesper's advocacy for the Lac du Flambeau (LDF) Ojibwes' reserved rights to spearfish date to 1988; his formal research took place during 1991. Nesper (anthropology, Univ. of Wisconsin) demonstrates how conflict over resource rights enlivened changes in cultural identity and political awareness inside as well as outside the LDF community. He suggests that the LDF community remains self-consciously ethnically distinct, enough so to compel and sustain political action, drawing on "an enduring system of meaning" that persists despite the power of the dominant society surrounding it. Nesper contends that "the people of Lac du Flambeau have reproduced a culturally continuous historical distinctness in spite and because of the nature of their encompassment." Like citizens of most small communities, they do not perceive themselves as peripheral to larger centers of importance. Traditional activities such as spearfishing take on critical symbolic importance as they are "revalued," precisely because they are contested. This revaluing takes place in varied ways at LDF, some of which result in revitalized internal negotiations among political actors with alternative views of LDF's future. All levels and collections. S. R. Martin Michigan Technological University