Zoltan grossman why wisconsin

Professional cartographer and map editor since Lecturer on Map Reading and Interpretation, U. Map editor at Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Maps published in numerous books and journals. NW Fossil Fuel Ports map. Co-founder of Midwest Treaty Network to support WI Ojibwe spearfishers attacked for exercising their treaty rights, and then to bring together the tribes and white sportfishing groups to protect the fish from mining projects, Support for Standing Rock blockade of ND oil pipeline, Hosted radio talk shows.

Recent articles: U. The same largely white fishing groups in that region that used to aggressively protest treaty rights now back the tribes in protecting fisheries from oil and coal shipping , and in restoring fish habitat damaged by development. The Lummi Nation , near Bellingham, Washington, led the fight that staved off a coal terminal in a sacred burial ground. The Quinault Nation on the Pacific coast led an alliance that helped kill plans to build oil export infrastructure that would have threatened salmon and shellfish.

The mostly white working-class residents of former logging towns in the area, who have strongly opposed timber industry regulations, have worked more easily with local tribes than with urban environmental groups to protect their local economy from fossil fuels. In Wisconsin and Michigan, Ojibwe and Menominee tribes are fighting to prevent new mining projects, joined by their rural white neighbors, because those projects threaten fishing streams, wild rice beds and burial sites.

As recently as the early s, many white anglers in northern Wisconsin were violently protesting Ojibwe treaty rights to spear fish, harassing and physically attacking Native Americans after anti-treaty groups led to them to believe that tribal fishing threatened the local tourism economy.

But the tribes presented their treaties as a legal obstacle to the mines that both groups viewed as a threat to the fishery. The Midwest Treaty Network convinced many anglers to cooperate with tribes and environmental groups to join in the effort to stymie plans to build a copper and zinc mine near Crandon, Wisconsin.

They won a protracted fight in The anglers had realized that if they kept arguing with the tribes over fishing rights, there might not be any fish left. More recently, the Bad River Tribe on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior led an alliance that stopped the Penokees iron mine in , upstream from wild rice beds culturally valuable to the tribe.

One advantage that sovereign tribal nations have in these battles is that they can draw federal agencies and courts into the fray in a way that local and state governments cannot. Tribes are in the fight for the long haul, because the survival of their cultures is at stake. Some areas of the most intense treaty conflicts, where the tribes most strongly asserted their rights, developed the earliest and most successful tribal alliances with white farmers, ranchers and fishers.

In these areas, rural populists have begun to see the tribes as more effective guardians of their local economies from large corporations than their state, local or federal governments. Wisconsin fishing guide Wally Cooper had spoken at rallies against Ojibwe treaty rights.

Photo: Joe Brusky. The success of these unlikely alliances challenges political stereotypes. Some progressives tend to dismiss rural whites as recalcitrant and unwilling to treat people who are different as equals.

Many conservatives — along with some liberals — presume that highlighting cultural differences through identity politics gets in the way of unifying people who otherwise share economic or environmental goals. But celebrating differences and unity can be compatible. Native sovereignty can protect land and water for all rural people, and help build an anti-corporate movement that crosses cultural lines. If even cowboys and Indians can find common ground, maybe there is hope for what I call cross-cultural populism.

Zoltan Grossman is a member of the American Association of Geographers. Seventh Generation Fund , a charitable organization, gets all the royalties from from Grossman's book about these unlikely alliances. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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