New book tells how the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe defended its reservation and sovereignty

The book “They Would Not Be Moved: The Enduring Struggle of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe to Keep their Reservation” by historian and anthropologist Bruce White was published in October by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

The book traces the history of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and their fight to maintain their treaty rights. The 1855 treaty granted the tribal nation 61,000 acres along Mille Lacs Lake, rich in resources like wild rice and pine forests. Despite initial success, challenges arose from lumbermen and settlers who sought to exploit these resources.

Melanie Benjamin, the former chief executive of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, wrote the foreword to the book and talked about how the research helped them win numerous court cases against Mille Lacs County in the 1990s and up until 2022.

MPR News’ Allison Herrera spoke with White and Benjamin about some of the history shared in the book.

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There’s a long history of treaty making with the Ojibwe in Minnesota from the 1820s but the main treaty that’s discussed in this book is the Treaty of 1837. What did that treaty do?

Melanie Benjamin: When we think about the Treaty of 1837, and that was the hunting and fishing and gathering for the Ojibwe which included Wisconsin tribes and the Mille Lacs Band. When you think about our land, wherever we are, the manidoo (spirits) — they have provided everything we need in our land to survive.

And it’s so important when we think about that 1837 treaty, there is our substance, what we need to continue to live and have a healthy life as we're going forward for our families and any of our community.

There have been huge conflicts that happened in Wisconsin over the 1837 treaty, and Mille Lacs was in the position that it went to court. It went to state court, and this treaty went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that the Mille Lacs Band still had the ability to hunt and fish and gather in those ceded territories of the 1837 treaty.

Bruce, this book traces the history of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, the challenges to their 1855 treaty, and how they defended their rights under decades of opposition. Can you go into more detail about who made these challenges and what the challenges were, and how do they keep their land and their reservation?

Bruce White: The Mille Lacs Band and a number of other bands got reservations from the Treaty of 1855, which was signed in Washington, D.C.

They decided that Indian tribes should receive particular parcels of land, should be able to reserve particular parcels of land on which they could live, which would be their own home, their permanent home, and would never, could never, be taken away without their agreement.

In the case of the Mille Lacs Band, this gave them a piece of partial townships along the south shore of Lake Mille Lacs, four partial townships, as they said, consisting of 61,000 acres. By the late 1850s suddenly people were saying, “Well, maybe it’s not a great idea for them to be there. We ought to reconsider that.”

Who was saying that it was not such a good idea?

White: Lumbermen found that Mille Lacs, the area of the 61,000 acres, had some of the richest pine lands in the whole region, and it was close to the river. So, the lumbermen were saying,
”Well, you know, we’d really like to get our hands on that.”

And there were beginning to be settlers all around the reservation, which were, you know, thinking this would be a great place for a white community.

There are a lot of ways in which landowners and other people living in Minnesota at the time tried to say that the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe’s reservation was disestablished. What does the word disestablish mean? And how did they try to do this?

White: Reservations were created under treaties and subject to the will of Congress. So, you know, once treaties were signed, sometimes Congress would decide to edit or make changes in provisions of the treaty, and then they would have to take the treaties back to the tribes, and then they would be passed by Congress.

But essentially, as people, people of that time said, you know, treaties are the law of the land, because they are enacted, not just by the tribes, but by the U.S. Congress. They are created by Congress, and so like everything else created by Congress, they could only be revised or revoked by Congress itself.

In the period after the 1860s government officials decided, well, you know, this land is reserved for the use of the Mille Lacs Band, they said. But it didn't mean that the land couldn’t also be used by others like settlers or timber companies, and so they started to allow land to be sold from the reservation in the land offices to non-Indians.

And that was supposed to prove that the reservation didn't exist?

White: People at the time said, “Well, this means the reservation doesn’t exist anymore.
But the reservation could continue to exist even if the parcels of land in the reservation were owned by people other than the Indians. You taking away the land did not take away the reservation because taking away the land didn't involve an act of Congress.

How has the Mille Lacs Band resisted this notion that their reservation didn’t exist up until a recent 2017 decision over law enforcement jurisdiction?

Benjamin: This is all about respecting the sovereignty of the tribe at the end of the day and who has authority over the lands. And when Mille Lacs County decided that our reservation no longer existed-they decided they were going to then have the power to make the decisions. And it so happened, this was about law enforcement, and we went to court because we wanted to basically reinforce our sovereign right.

We wanted also to have them recognize that our reservation was never disestablished, and it took us many years for that, and it left us with a lot of negative influences on the reservation for things, but at the end of the day, that is probably one of my greatest moments — that when the federal government and the state of Minnesota stated that the reservation has never been disestablished, therefore, the Mille Lacs Reservation exists.