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This archive photo provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows a gray wolf. (photo AP)
Six Native American tribes sued Wisconsin on Tuesday in an attempt to stop its gray wolf hunt scheduled for November, saying the hunt violates their treaty rights and endangers an animal they consider sacred.
The Chippewa tribes say treaties give them rights to half the wolf quota in the land they ceded to the United States in the mid-1800s. But rather than hunt wolves, the tribes want to protect them.
The tribal lawsuit comes three weeks after a coalition of wildlife groups filed a lawsuit to stop the Wisconsin wolf hunt this fall and overturn a state law requiring annual hunts, arguing that the statutes give wildlife managers no leeway to consider population estimates.
Hunters exceeded their limit during a court-ordered hunt in February. The state’s natural resources department set the quota at 119, but hunters killed 218 wolves in just four days, forcing the season to an untimely end.
Environmentalists then inundated the department with requests to cancel this fall’s hunt, fearing it could devastate the wolf population. Agency biologists recommended setting the fall quota at 130. But the agency’s board last month set the slaughter limit at 300. The tribes claimed their half, but as they will not hunt wolves, the work quota for state authorized hunters would be 150 The lawsuit alleges that the board’s decision to set the quota at 300 was a deliberate decision to cancel the tribes’ share and was not based on science.
The latest DNR estimates put Wisconsin’s wolf population at around 1,000. Opponents say hunters have likely killed at least a quarter of the population if poaching is included.
“In our treaty rights, we are supposed to share 50-50 of our resources with the state and we believe that we are not doing due diligence because of the wolf slaughter in February,” John Johnson Sr., president of the Torch Lake Band of the Chippewa Indians of Lake Superior, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The Ojibway word for “Wolf” is Ma’iingan, and the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region are often called Anishinaabe. The wolf holds a sacred place in their creation story.
“For the Anishinaabe, the Ma’iingan are our brothers. Legends and stories tell us that as brothers we walk hand in hand. What happens to Ma’iingan happens to humanity ”, Marvin Defoe, an official and elder of the Red Cliff Band of the Chippewa Indians of Lake Superior, said in the statement.
Hunters, farmers and conservationists have fought over how to deal with Wisconsin wolves. Farmers say wolves kill cattle, while hunters look for another species to stalk.
The six tribes are represented by Earthjustice, which is one of many groups suing the federal government over the Trump administration’s decision last November to lift endangered species law protections for gray wolves in the United States. most of the United States and to return the managing authority to the States.
Gray wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan are considered part of the Western Great Lakes population, which is managed separately from wolves in the western states. The Biden administration said last Wednesday that federal protections may need to be restored for Western wolves, as Republican-backed state laws have made it much easier to kill predators. The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s initial determination that western wolves may be at risk again initiated a year-long biological review.
Dozens of tribes a day earlier called on the Biden administration to immediately adopt emergency protections for gray wolves across the country, saying states had become too aggressive to hunt them. They called on Home Secretary Deb Haaland to act quickly on an emergency petition they filed in May to put the wolf back on the endangered or threatened species list.
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