DULUTH — Members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have netted lake trout in Lake Superior for the first time in more than 160 years, a testimony to ongoing tribal efforts to exercise hunting and fishing rights under treaties with the U.S. government.
Band members and others also say the event marks another chapter in the ongoing success story of Lake Superior’s lake trout resurgence.
Three boats with nine Fond du Lac members set nets and pulled 323 lake trout out of the lake on three nights in late August. The group included Fond du Lac Tribal Chairman Kevin DuPuis Sr.
“The chairman and one of our youth band members set the first net after we held a bundle ceremony,” said Eric Torvinen, a fisheries biologist with the band’s natural resources division. The ceremony includes an offering to the lake and its fish.
“This was a huge occasion to celebrate that the lake can now sustain a tribal subsistence fishery,” he said. “And this is culturally important for the community to bring back this subsistence fishery for traditional food.”
Much of the lake trout was smoked and distributed to band members this week. Additional netting sessions are planned in October with Torvinen leading tribal elders out on the water.
“This is a good news story for the band and for the lake and for everyone who loves the lake,” Torvinen added. “We’re calling it the Fond du Lac Lake Superior Subsistence Fishing Program.”
The band is strictly limiting the netting program, with 10 sets of nets available. Any participants must apply for a band-issued permit, Torvinen said, and take a Lake Superior boating safety course. The fish caught can’t be sold. About two-dozen band members have signed up to participate.
“It’s very limited and we know exactly who is out there and where. It's very trackable,” Torvinen said.
The band is keeping data on all the fish caught to share with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
That involves both biological discussions of what the status is of lake trout in the lake but also details like buoy markers and net markers for the band’s operations. The plan is for the band to net in waters closer to Duluth, mostly in what the DNR labels the MN-1 zone.
The Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa has for years netted trout and other fish in its waters of Lake Superior within the reservation at the far tip of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region near the Ontario border. Along Wisconsin’s South Shore of the lake, both the Red Cliff and Bad River bands of Lake Superior Chippewa have been conducting tribal netting for years.
Fond du Lac has set 500 lake trout as their annual harvest from the lake at this point. That compares to 700 lake trout for DNR-licensed, non-tribal commercial netters in the same MN-1 zone, Goldsworthy said.
And it compares to more than 20,000 lake trout harvested by charter fishing boats and other sport anglers in the Duluth-area zone each year. (Non-tribal netting also includes another 5,000 lake trout taken annually from Minnesota zones 2 and 3 farther up the North Shore.)
Minnesota has allowed limited, non-tribal commercial netting of lake trout on the big lake since 2007 after banning all commercial fishing in 1962. The biological resurgence of naturally reproducing lake trout in Lake Superior enabled the state to allow limited commercial harvest. Lake trout have rebounded well after being nearly wiped-out by the 1950s by both over-harvest and parasitic sea lampreys.
Lampreys, an invasive species from the Atlantic Ocean, are being controlled with ongoing treatments of lamprey spawning rivers to hold their numbers down enough to allow fish to thrive in the lake.
The Fond du Lac Band’s tribal netting program “is a great story for Lake Superior because it shows how well the lake trout population is doing,” Goldsworthy said. “It’s another box checked off for the recovery of Lake Superior for all of us.”
