There was a professor at William Mitchell.

she was being interviewed and being asked about what I was doing.

And she said, well, Frank’s just using ancient law.

Frank Bibeau Well, I'm an attorney, what I call a tribal attorney.

I've worked at Leech Lake White Earth, a number of the, reservations around here.

And through time of working in tribal court I figured out a mechanism to protect the environment using tribal law in tribal court.

And that hasn't existed before.

And the mechanism that I was using or the vehicle to protect the waters was Rights of Manoomin, which is about wild rice.

you know, I don't use any I'm not using anything that's current.

I don't need to use what's current because our stuff is so old.

You know, our treaties, how those have evolved there's not much there.

You know, it's it's just what we have left.

There's 44 treaties that the Chippewa have with the United States, and they predate the actual creation of the United States after the Constitution was adopted.

You know, there's only a couple of ways to do treaties with Indians.

You either fight them or you make deals.

And they found that because of where we're at, especially in the wintertime, you just can't come in and take us.

And we were along all the shorelines and we were along about 800 miles of the Great Lakes.

So you couldn't just, you know, start a fight and not have more people involved.

So we had trade treaties with the United States.

They wanted our products.

They wanted the beaver pelts, things like that.

If they were in here logging or they were a railroad, then they wanted food.

They needed someone to be the grocery store.

So we had a lot of different roles.

We were entrepreneurs throughout the Great Lakes, and because the Great Lakes were so navigable, you have not only the, the Americans after 1776 you still have the French coming in, you still have the English coming in And as far as we're concerned, we're going to try to get the best deal that we can.

So we were trading with everybody.

And that's that's one of the things, I think that also made it different for us.

we have a lot of treaties, because you could come all the way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes.

And we were all Chippewa and other, related tribes along those ways.

And there's a lot of territory.

And so they essentially made a lot of deals along the way.

So there's 44 treaties that relate to the Chippewa.

Many of them, I think 12 of them deal with land right inside the state of Minnesota.

And the way things happen.

back in 1825 there’s the Prairie du Chien Treaty.

And what it did was it drew a line essentially from Lake Michigan over to North Dakota.

And, it kind of goes along 94 and north of that line, it says in the treaty that the Chippewa will decide who hunts and south of that line is the Lakota, Dakota, the Sioux that would decide who hunts.

There were some other bands and tribes over closer to the lake, but otherwise those were the two tribes.

And It was expected that we would cheerfully allow other people to hunt in our territory, if that's what they needed to do.

So then, because there were so few Chippewa there in 1826, they had what I call a ratification session.

And those same treaty people came up to Duluth.

Now, it wasn't called really Duluth, but it was, where Jay Cooke State Park is now.

And that's where old Fond Du Lac Reservation, used to be before it moved, to follow the fur trade.

And so and that's at the mouth of the Saint Louis River, and so when they came up, they say there was over 600 Indians there.

And in that 26 treaty, it says that we still hold title to the land and have jurisdiction over it.

Now, jurisdiction is not an old Indian word.

That's a word that white people use to say, hey, these are our people that we're dealing with and you don't.

And so in that moment of time, using that language from contract law, you're trying to set it up as those being the bonafide owners of the property that you can purchase in good faith, so that when you make your documents, you know you're dealing with the right people.

And so they waited about, I'll say, close to ten years for the 1837 treaty.

There's other couple of treaties in between.

But in the 1837 treaty, article five talks about that we reserve the right to hunt, fish and gather wild rice in the territories, the lands, rivers and lakes being ceded.

So that means every bit of the territory that we're ceding, we're not leaving.

We don't have any expectation of that.

There's not a reservation being created.

We're just ceding you guys the land.

You can come in and get some trees and stuff and so forth.

So there's a little, you know, disconnect on how things were maybe the deal was really about with Indian Country and who was getting what.

But at that time, that treaty really set the tone for the rest of the treaties after that.

So you've got after that, after the 37 treaty, you have the 42 and the 42 treaty.

That might be our most important treaty.

In a sense.

It was northern, Wisconsin and the U.P.

and because of what happened around the 37 treaty and the way the the United States was dealing with Indians, because we're entrepreneurs, we know we like to talk about getting more than the other guy got, making a better deal.

And so it became apparent by five years later, the treaty talks about to remove all jealousy and discontent amongst the Indians.

We're going to make all lands that have been ceded and all lands yet to be ceded above that 1825 line, to be held in common amongst the Chippewa of Lake Superior and of the Mississippi.

Well, that's like 400 miles of Indians.

the now all of a sudden, our whole territories in common, and they're going to pay the other Indians that didn't get paid.

And they're going to make everybody start having the same amount, because they could see that it was just going to be a fight.

And we were all going to try to one up each other.

They weren't going to get nowhere for a while.

You know, it's just some crazy stuff.

So that treaty is what gives us probably the broadest power of hunt, fish, and gather over a large territory, large fishery.

after the 42, you've got two 47 treaties that are in between the Sioux and us where they were trying to relocate the Menominee.

And the the Ho-Chunk, to have a place for them.

But they didn't want to get between us and the Sioux because we were already fighting all the time anyway.

And then after the 47, you had a 54 up in the Arrowhead, Grand Portage, Nett Lake, Fond du Lac, and then, north part of Wisconsin, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac Du Flambeau, you know, Red Cliff, Bad River, a bunch of those, tribes up there, they’re in the 54 And they got reservations and the 55 was just the next treaty in line out of those 44.

And in there You had Rabbit Lake, Gull Lake, you had Sandy Lake, you had Pokegama, you had Leech Lake, you had Winnibigoshish you had Cass Lake, and then they made Mille Lacs And that was in part, they say, because Mille Lacs realized that they might have missed their chance, to make a reservation in the 54 treaty because they were in the 37 territory, but they were able to reserve their reservation in the 55. there was like 8 or 9 of those little reservations that they put us on to.

And those were where our permanent homelands are.

And when you look at most of those reservations, they're all on water, basically, but a lot of them right on the Mississippi River.

And that's why we’re the Chippewa, the Mississippi, we knew where the places were that we wanted to permanently live.

So in those two treaties, they should be looked at as sister treaties because you're dealing with the Chippewa over the same treaty territories, in the same places 63, 64, you had Red Lake had 63 you had 67 for White Earth.

And so they were you could see where they had gotten the land.

talk to us in to, I say talked us into reservations, territory we wanted to keep for ourselves.

And then after they used up whatever parts of the resources, the trees that they were looking for, then they wanted the land and the timber that we had reserved already for ourselves.

And, you know, ultimately they wanted it all, always whittling down whatever the prior deal was.

And of course, the deal was like 20 year annuities.

And so there's a whole bunch of treaties that have all these annuities are constantly rolling over.

But when you get to the last treaty, even if it's got 20 year annuities, say 1867, well you’re only going to get to 1887, and then all of a sudden you're out of money again.

And, you know, that's that's when the Nelson Act came around and the General Allotment Act.

And that's when they started figuring out how to make allotments out of the land on the reservation.

They always had a deal.

They always had a deal that they to get all the land that we had, you know, and they're still working on getting it, you know, so that part hasn't changed.

And so what happens is treaties are different, treaties are different in different places.

And like I talked about, we have trade treaties.

The treaties out West is usually the ones that they try to use against all the Indians out in Washington state where the fisheries were.

And a lot of those cases came up in the 60s and 70s.

And those treaties are different than our treaties.

And we had to explain that in federal court.

four times before the court got it.

And so when I was describing that the Chippewa of Lake Superior and the Mississippi would own all those lands in common with each other, with the same 55 treaties out West, they call them Hell Gate’s treaties.

They got other names for those treaties along the Columbia River.

And in there it talks about the Indians reserving the right to fish in the customary and usual places in common with the citizens of the territory or of the United States.

And so what that means is two things.

One is you're in common with white people instead of other Indians, even though you're in common with other Indians.

And then you automatically have to co-manage that resource because you're sharing it on a piece of paper, and now you're fighting over it.

And so, you know, how are things going to go?

So we don't have that our our rights are amongst each other and shared with each other.

And so we had to explain to the Federal Court that our rights haven't been been woven in with non-Indians, and there isn't anybody who really has a right to tell us how to do this.

And they finally understood that our rights are independent of the state, independent of the federal government, but that Congress can change that.

Well, that's an arm's length away from most Indians have, because most Indians have a treaty or two.

They have a territory.

It gets whittled down to a reservation.

They say, adios, we'll see you later.

And they go on to the next tribe and do the same thing.

Or they put a bunch on the same tribe.

So we have a different set of concepts to work from, if you know what they're about and how to use them.

So those are the things that you have to learn about the independence of tribal sovereignty and rights, because, you know, a tribe is sovereign and it's really a federally created corporation.

You know, under the Constitution.

But the Indians are really the sovereign people.

They're the only ones who eat.

They're the only ones who can really exercise things.

You know, the corporation regulates things and keeps track of things.

And so one of the cases that I learned about when I was working with Legal Services, one of my favorite cases in the world was about Smiskins.

And it's like S, M, I, S, K, I, N. And they were a father son, team running cigarettes from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, into Yakima, Washington.

And they were selling them without any state tax on them.

And Washington didn't like that.

And so ultimately, one of the times that they were running cigarettes, I imagine was the highway patrol or the county pulled them over, seized their load and went to federal court.

And one of the things that came out of that case was that article three of their treaty, the Yakama Treaty, says that they reserve the right to bring their goods to market on the public roadway.

Well, how did the police stop them for that?

Right.

Those, that was their goods.

And it's because the terrain is so fierce out there.

All the Rocky Mountains and the different mountains and the terrain, you got to rely on roads, here the roads were canoe trail canoe travel is all the waters.

So it's a different concept.

So we wouldn't have even thought in that way about reserving maybe those kinds of rights that way.

And and so when they start saying about that, you get to the West Coast, you got to have it in common with the non-Indians.

Well, that's because there isn't any more to go.

And that's all the resources that are left, you know, and it's not as abundant like around here Now, ultimately, we were still being ripped off in several ways, and we still had to go after things and all But we were, I think, treated a lot better.

And I would say the Sioux were treated a lot worse.

those concepts aren't the thing most people look for, and they don't know when to use them, and they don't have a target rich environment.

So when you have a whole bunch of people that are impoverished, there's always a bunch of little things that happen.

And you can do a lot with those things.

You know, whether it's a fishing case or a speeding case or where it happens, how it happens.

And then you start learning the differences of treaties and the mechanisms, the way they're used.

Then you start learning, you know, as a as a lawyer, as a, as a tribal attorney, and you start learning about how would you try to make laws that would make it different, how would you bring it into tribal court so you have the right to decide, as opposed to the state court or the federal court and those mechanisms, I mean, they should exist, but no one teaches this stuff.

No one really has figured it out, you know, in the ways that I have.

And and part of it's just for being a tribal attorney on Leech Lake Reservation that all we have are simple laws.

You know, we have the natural resource laws, we have Indian child welfare, family law, housing, you know, just the simple basic stuff.

But it's all the same in terms of how do you make a law, how do you get it passed by the tribal council, you know, make it part of the code.

And, you know, in some places you can do that in a day if you need to.

You know, this isn't like Congress in other places, you know, so, like when we were putting our stuff to it you do it in a day, but it doesn't mean you can persuade them in a day.

because Manoomin under federal law, because it appears in the 1837 treaty, the right to, hunt, fish and gather wild rice, that means that we have a property right.

A property right is protected by the Constitution and Congress.

And that's the only place.

Congress is the only place that you can change our our property rights or our treaty rights and things like that.

And so we were able to build off of that concept of a property right, if you if you have a car, if you have a house, then you have a right to defend your car and your house.

we had adopted our rights of manoomin.

2018, and then, White Earth Reservation, they adopted it, right, like the end of December of the same year.

And we had that law for probably three years before we sued the DNR.

The reason that we have that law is not just for the rights of manoomin, but to have a law, a tribal law to use in tribal court to bring in whoever it was.

I didn't expect it to be the state, necessarily.

Enbridge in January of 2021, they breached two aquifers, but they didn't want to disclose it what these two aquifers that were gushing up millions of gallons of water every day before the DNR figured out what was going on.

and they said that they wanted to issue a 5 billion gallon dewatering permit retroactively.

Well, that's who I sued.

We threw them right under the bus.

Man, you don't have this kind of a right.

I don't know what you're thinking.

The case that I filed was called Manoomin Versus DNR would be the short title, And so that's when the DNR, you know, the first their first reaction was to go to federal court and file for an injunction against us.

And basically the injunction says they don't want to have to go to trial court and face tribal law and that they're sovereign.

And so I was at federal court and the DNR attorney and I'm just going to paraphrase, but, you know, he's in court and he's asking the judge, you know, Your Honor, we need an order that says those Indians can't use their tribal law against us in their tribal court because we're sovereign.

And the judge looked down at him and she said, can you point to any law that gives me the right to tell them they can't do that?

And the DNR didn't know what to say because there isn't such a thing that crossroad had never come.

And so she dismissed their case and they didn't know what to do.

They had to go back to trial court, and all of a sudden, you know, that they wanted to like, get out.

Well, they couldn't get out.

And that's what the federal court tells those people, whoever they are, that you got to go through tribal court and exhaust your administrative remedies.

You get indoctrinated.

You think you know it all.

You might even be an A student, right?

I'm not an A student.

I'm not sure I'm a B student.

But I know what I hear and listen to, and I see how it works.

And if I can even just do it for tribal members on that basis, then the overspill effect protects everyone.

So in a sense, the non-Indians and I think even the courts, the judges and some of the prosecutors are looking for somebody else to have some other way because we're boxed in with laws that don't work.

I mean, rights of fish is my next step, but it's going to be other young people who come after me who will figure out what to do with this.

the ultimate goal by using fish is almost, you know, fish are almost everywhere, at least wherever there's rivers usually that haven't been over polluted and everybody knows what a dead fish looks like people know when they see a thousand dead fish in the water, they go, wow, must be something wrong with the water.

You don't have to have a scientist, you just have to call it in.

you got to be able to call, and you need to know that there's a place you can call and someone's going to figure it out and see what can maybe be done with it, because the rights of those fish, you know, are being, you know, taken away.

You know, there's a lot of little pieces to all those organisms and things, but they still have those rights and they're just helping us.

They're just helping us.

So we have to figure out how to do that.

And the theme for the National Congress of American Indians this coming fall, I was asked to put in a proposal is how to unify all this amongst tribes, because our treaties are all different and our agreements and all.

But my professor who he's passed on now, he talked about like the usufructuary tribes of North America or of Turtle Island.

And if we all use rights of fish, then it's a different concept in treaty rights because we have different treaties.

So it's going to be used in other ways.

All I'm doing is showing that it's a tool.

And in the greatest sarcasm of law I've taken what might be called a frivolous law in some places wild rice suing the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources when the salmon sued the City of Seattle Power and Light.

City of Seattle Power and Light was in a FERC renewal process, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

And so what was happening there was they were saying, hey, you know, we got these three dams up on the Skagit River that we want to get, you know, permitted for again for like another 50 years.

And the Indians that are up past those three dams, the Sauk-Suiattle who have the salmon treaties, they said, well, yeah, but the salmon aren't getting here.

And so the salmon sued the city of Seattle in tribal court.

And then FERC's off to the side from federal court.

And they're looking at this like, you know, we have federal recognition of these guys.

We have a treaty with these guys.

What are you going to do for these guys?

And within a few months, they were able to work up three passageways for the fish, but they weren't going to do it on their own.

They had to be sued by the fish.

It's a crazy world.

So call it a fiction of law.

You know, it's sarcastic in some ways, but that's the world we live in.

One of my attorney friends, he says, Frank, I don't know if I get all this.

And I said, look, it's just like corporate law.

I said, except my clients are alive.

And that's the difference.

They're fish, they're wild rice, they're birds.

They’re other things, things that matter, you know.

So that's kind of the the story of the analysis of how you get to where it's at, you know, then it's just how you stand up and use it.

So all I'm doing is opening the door with that concept of manoomin, salmon, what other word or topic can you substitute and make a process work the way you want.

So it's just a map.

It's just opening the door.

Opening a window.

friend of mine, Orlando, explained to me that, what it ultimately boils down to on the creation story is, you know, how we got to live here.

The Creator petitioned all of creation to see if we could come and live and essentially use them for food sources and things like that.

And be, have a corporal physical being and that and that in that agreement, you know, we're always, remembering who our relatives are, all the plants and animals and everything else, and watching out for him and, you know, including him in our ceremonies and so forth.

And so, Orlando, he explained to me that that the first treaty that we have ourselves as a person is with the Creator and how we're going to live here.

I think we all know that in Indian country, but I don't think other people know that.

And so if that's your start point, it changes what your outcome is going to be.

It's weird what you have to learn.

And it's weird how you have to kind of, like, translate it into the modern day to use it, but that it's still applicable and still has a place.

So, you know, our stuff has lasted a long time it’s good, good stuff.

It's just you got to remember how to use it or find out how to use it.

Production costs for this program have been made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and the members of Lakeland PBS.