Marjorie Ann “Marge” Anderson, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe leader, defended treaty rights with Supreme Court victory
“Women are moving into leadership at all levels, but to me not fast enough. When I first started here I was the only woman. You have to prove yourself again and again even though we can do the job. We can’t afford not to use the wisdom that women have.” — Marjorie Anderson
Written by shift7, published here with permission.
First, some brief historical context:
In the words of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, “The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands…to facilitate the spread of European Americans westward across the continent.”¹ Via the Treaty of 1837, the United States Government purchased millions of acres of land from the “Chippewa nation of Indians,” which later became part of the states of Wisconsin in 1948 and Minnesota in 1958. This affected many bands of the Chippewa, also known as Ojibwe.
Though the Ojibwe had ceded territory, they reserved usufructuary rights for these lands. In the Treaty of 1837, Article V states, “The privilege of hunting, fishing and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians, during the pleasure of the President of the United States.”
More than 160 years later, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe were inside the US Supreme Court, fighting for those rights to be upheld.²
At the head of this movement was Marjorie Anne “Marge” Anderson, the first woman elected to serve as Chief Executive of the Mille Lacs Band and the first woman to lead an American Indian tribe in Minnesota.³ Marge served as Chief Executive of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe for 13 years, from 1991–2000, and from 2008–2012 (after serving as District I representative from 1976–1987, and Secretary/Treasurer from 1987–1991).⁴
Why were the Mille Lacs Band having to fight for their treaty rights?
Let’s go back to 1850.
In that year, President Taylor ordered the removal of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe from the ceded territory and revoked their usufructuary rights.
In Treaties of 1854 and 1855, the Ojibwe ceded additional territory to the U.S. Government, and the U.S. government created land reservations for several bands. The Treaty of 1855 set aside 61,000 acres south and west of Mille Lacs Lake in Central Minnesota as reservation lands for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. However, this Treaty did not mention their usufructuary rights.
In addition, the U.S. government was creating assimilation policies, “declaring that Indians must conform to the lifestyles of non-Indians.”⁵ Mille Lacs Band history explains:
“Mille Lacs Band children were moved to government boarding schools, where, in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream society, they were forbidden from speaking the Ojibwe language or practicing their religious and cultural teachings. Generations of Ojibwe people were stripped of their identity in an effort to achieve conformity.”
State officials began to arrest tribal members for hunting, fishing, or gathering on lands outside of their reservation.
Tribal members resisted and persisted. Government officials were unrelenting.
Tensions intensified in the 1960s as commercial and sport fishing and hunting were on the rise, dramatically reducing fish and animal populations. The State introduced conservation measures, which they cited when restricting fishing and hunting by tribal members.
In the late 1980s, because many tribal members were being wrongly arrested for hunting and fishing in the ceded territory, “the Mille Lacs Band attempted to resolve issues with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), including “the amount of fish that its members harvested in the Mille Lacs Lake area, as well as the Band’s use of spears and nets during the spawning season.”⁶
Negotiations failed. In August 1990, the Mille Lacs Band “filed suit in federal District Court against the state of Minnesota, the Minnesota DNR, and various state officers seeking to prevent the enforcement of state regulations that impaired the Band members’ ability to exercise their treaty rights.”⁷
At this time, Marge Anderson was serving as Secretary and Treasurer for the Mille Lacs Band. She became Chief Executive in 1991.⁸ She would spend much of the next 8 years leading the Band through legal fights to have their treaty rights fulfilled, all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 1994, the District Court ruled in favor of the Mille Lacs Band. The State of Minnesota appealed.
In 1997, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit affirmed the District Court’s ruling, rejecting the State’s arguments “that an 1850 Executive Order and an 1855 Treaty extinguished the Band’s usufructuary rights,” and “that any rights the Bands acquired under the 1837 Treaty were extinguished upon Minnesota’s admission into the Union in 1858.”
The Court of Appeals affirmed the Mille Lac Band’s argument that “The President’s power, if any, to issue the [Executive] order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself,” and stated, “An executive order without congressional or constitutional authority is unconstitutional.”⁹
The Court of Appeals elaborated:
“The Constitution does not provide the President with the power to remove Indian tribes or to abrogate rights guaranteed under treaties. Congress has plenary authority over Indian affairs. […] Congress did not give President Taylor the authority to remove the Chippewa without their consent. In fact, it expressed an intent that Indians should not be removed without their consent when it authorized the President to convey lands west of the Mississippi River to ‘such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there.’ 1830 Removal Act § 2, 4 Stat. 411, 411–12 (Plaintiffs’ Ex. 43).”¹⁰
The State of Minnesota appealed again, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It was very expensive in terms of both time and money for the Mille Lacs Band to keep fighting for treaty rights through ever more complex, and physically distant, levels of the United States court system.
Marge Anderson was asked by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1998, “Why has it been so important for the Mille Lacs Band to pursue this case for nearly a decade, all the way to the highest court?”
Marge answered:
“Although my people have been denied our rights for more than a century and a half, we have persisted in maintaining our traditions and our culture. By pursuing this case to its conclusion, we pay tribute to the generations that have gone before us for their courage, and we promise the generations yet to come that we will show the same courage in defending their traditions, their culture and their rights.
This case is about more than hunting deer or catching fish. It is about passing on the lessons we have learned from our elders about our role in the delicate web of life. It is about teaching our children to honor Mother Earth and to respectfully receive the gifts she offers us in return for the care we give her. It is about preserving and passing along the traditional ways that make us who we are — Ojibwe people.”¹¹
The State of Minnesota and the Mille Lacs Band argued their cases to the U.S. Supreme Court in December, 1998. In March, 1999, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor delivered the opinion of the Court: “The Chippewa retain the usufructuary rights guaranteed to them by the 1837 Treaty.”¹²
Under Marge’s leadership, the tribe was able to use profits from two different casinos that had opened on their reservation in 1991–92 to fund the legal work for this case, as well as social programs and facilities, healthcare clinics, and schools for the Mille Lacs Band.¹³
The Band also hired more conservation officers, who worked with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to implement “a conservation code and a management plan to regulate hunting, fishing, and gathering,” which involves “the issuance of hunting and fishing permits to Mille Lacs Band members, requires band members to present band-member identification cards upon the request of enforcement officials, and allows regulation enforcement by both the Minnesota DNR and the Band’s conservation commissioner and tribal courts.”¹⁴
Throughout the Band, Minnesota, and the country, Marge became known for her leadership style of “consensus building and standing firm in the Band’s position.”¹⁵ She founded the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes and served as its first president,¹⁶ and served on the Board of the National Congress of American Indians.¹⁷
Marge was also known for her dedication to preserving the language and cultural history of the Ojibwe.¹⁸ “Let me tell you this, without the language, you don’t have a culture,” she said. “The language has a lot to do with our culture, and (now) we are seeing a renaissance in our culture.”¹⁹
She passed away on June 29, 2013 at the age of 81. A few years later, the Mille Lacs Band officially changed the name of the government center to the Biidaabinookwe Government Center, honoring her legacy, a lifetime of leadership and more than 30 years of tribal government service.²⁰
“Our culture and the fish, our values and the deer, the lessons we learn and the rice we harvest — everything is tied together. You can no more separate one from the other than you can divide a person’s spirit from his body.”²¹
— Marjorie Anderson, March 5, 1999
Visit Marge’s life in person:
- Mille Lacs of Ojibwe — Minnesota (birthplace)
- Mille Lacs Reservation Map
- United States Supreme Court — Washington, DC
Discover:
- Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe website
- Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe: History
- Mille Lacs Ojibwe Social History Project: Interview with Marge Anderson — 1992
- Looking Through our Window: The Value of Indian Culture — Address by Marjorie Anderson, 1999
- Mille Lacs Ojibwe leader Marge Anderson dies at 81 — Star Tribune, 2013
Media needs to regularly represent the innovative work of diverse individuals and teams in an empowering manner in order to shift the public mindset to one that respects that there is innovation talent in all people, including in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics). Surfacing diverse talent will help empower current solution makers to learn or team up with colleagues who can create and use these tools, thereby accelerating progress on societal challenges.
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19. Begay, Sararesa, Ojibwe Akiing, A one-on-one interview with Marge Anderson: A strong and wise Nokomis guiding the Mille Lacs Band, 31 Mar 2000.
