Harvest levels on Lake Mille Lacs stir debate
The Chippewa bands netting Mille Lacs walleyes this spring will be shooting for a record 142,500-pound harvest, 10,000 more than last year. Non-band anglers take has been reduced by 14,000 pounds. (From Doug Smith March 3 story in Star Tribune)
Bands’ walleye harvest continues to rise
Harvest levels on Lake Mille Lacs stir debate
The Chippewa bands netting Mille Lacs walleyes this spring will be shooting for a record 142,500-pound harvest, 10,000 more than last year. Non-band anglers take has been reduced by 14,000 pounds.
That’s 71 tons of fish, 42 percent more than the allocation four years ago. It shows a rising harvest by Chippewa netters since 1997, when courts affirmed off-reservation fishing rights.
The bands’ 26 percent of the “safe harvest level” is a 26-74 percent split. But actual harvests the past three years have averaged 42 percent of the total. Twice in the past eight years, the bands’ actual harvest exceeded 50 percent of the total walleye take due to low overall harvest.
How high will the bands’ harvest go in the future? Will fishing regulations for non-band anglers need to be tightened to prevent over-harvest? At what point might band allocations be challenged?
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Chippewa’s favor in 1999, but the court never said how the walleye resource should be divided between the bands and non-bands.
There is growing interest in netting fish among band members according to Brad Kalk, from the Mille Lacs band natural resources department. “Over the past decade, the number of band members who net on Mille Lacs has steadily increased,” he said.
But the bands’ next five-year plan is a big unknown according to the DNR.
Mille Lacs fishing guide Steve Fellegy violated fishing laws to raise a court challenge to what he says are unequal hunting and fishing rights. He says when the bands first filed their initial lawsuits in the 1990s, they asked for relatively few fish a year. “Here we are at 65 tons in spring 2010,” he said. “I have grave concerns about what the future brings, based on the past.”
From story at Star Tribune
