Mark Ojibway wades in shallow water looking for walleye during the spring spearfishing season at the Chippewa Flowage on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, Sunday, April 14, 2024, near Hayward, Wis. Walleye numbers in some lakes are dwindling due to warming waters, increasingly variable seasonal changes and lakeshore development. Losing the species would mean losing a food source for Ojibwe and other Indigenous people, a sovereign right to fish and a deep connection to tradition and nature.
“We’ve seen things here over the last couple of years that I’ve never seen before,” said Brian Bisonette, Gabe’s uncle and the conservation director of the Lac Courte Oreilles Conservation Department. “It worries me, what I’ve seen in my lifetime, what’s my grandson going to see in his lifetime?” Today, wardens at every boat landing work to keep people safe, but incidents still happen from time to time. Bisonette can laugh at the notion of people screaming “go back to where you came from” at Native people, but still carries the weight of past run-ins. “It would be scary for anybody,” he said. “You like to think time heals everything, but it still doesn’t.”
They take a motorboat out to strategically placed nets set up at different points on the shoreline, and Sikora gleefully plops each walleye or crappie onto the measuring surface to record its size and sex. If it’s a new individual, she tags it by clipping a fin, then throws it back. Kelly Martin, who has been spearfishing with his family for multiple decades now, sees changes firsthand. This year he was surprised by the start of the season, which came early because there was no ice on the lake this winter.
The DNR in 2022 updated its conservation plan for walleye, with a focus on climate change. And in January 2023 GLIFWC released the updated version of its climate change vulnerability assessment, a work seven years in the making, driven largely by what they were hearing from tribal members about changes they were observing.