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Monday! Who doesn’t need some tunes for a Monday? Take some time and update your documents in your car! The advice I give for free! Tip your waitress!
Hope you are hanging in there this Monday!
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Things have been running a bit slow here in babble-land. I won’t lie, I’ve been a nasty, neglectful, Moderatrix. I’ve been working on a project that I wanted to devote full attention to in order to make sure I had something I could present and of which I could be very proud.
So, I would invite you to check out my series on video games and gaming over at Bitch Magazine’s blog, called The Games We Play for the next eight weeks. Hopefully now that things are a-go-go I may be able to attend to your needs as well. I love being able to schedule my time, but I hate overwhelming myself, so in the name of self-care, I decided to focus on one thing at a time.
Please do check it out!
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Thought I would dust off a Monday Random Ten with a not-so-random sampling of what I was listening to this morning to get me jazzed and ready to start my day today. I have had a lot of early mornings and long days. Enjoy!
Have a good week, peeps!
I had an interesting experience the other day at the 8-10 year old basketball game here on the USAG. We were watching the game of the son of a friend of our family at which The Kid was cheering with her cheer squad. It was the second game we had attended that day, as Kid cheers at any or all of the games that happen during game days.
During the halftime period of the games the squad does a dance routine that they have been working on to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”, a favorite of mine, I don’t mind saying. It looks pretty sharp, and I am hoping to get a vid of it up soon(ish), and the Coach has really done a great job putting it together. Of the six and one half minutes of the halftime period they use about two or three. Most of the teams have been gracious to clear the court to allow them their two minutes to perform.
During the last game of the age group, however, one of the teams decided to run layup drills. During the cheerleaders performance the coaches of the basketball team were shouting to their kids, and the kids were running and yelling and dribbling and running back and forth from half court to the hoop. It was really distracting to the team, and in my opinion, it was incredibly disrespectful to the girls.
I took the opportunity to mention it to the director of the Child and Youth Sports Services, a man who is usually sitting in the corner of the gym. With my coffee in hand, I walked over to him at the end of the squad’s routine and leaned to him so as not to be heard by everyone, and mentioned that I just wanted to let him know that I though the team on the court had shown poor taste and disrespect to the cheerleaders.
The director kind of chuckled, and told me that he had no problem focusing on the girls, and that he didn’t think the team was disrespectful at all. I felt that this was beside my point, and a bit dismissive, but I restated my opinion, and told him that I just wanted to let him know what I thought.
He said to me, more sternly, that this was just my opinion, and that I needed to watch how I was talking to him, that it was inappropriate for me to talk to him the way that I was. I asked him what was wrong with voicing an opinion.
He stood up from his chair and leaned over me, being much taller than I am (and I am not a short woman at 67″ tall). He told me “I am the Director of this program, and you are just a parent. You will not speak to me this way, waving your hands about.”
For the record, I do gesticulate a bit when I speak, but I turn my hands in small circles, and for crying out loud, I had a hot coffee in one hand.
He proceeded to tell me just how disrespectful I was being to him, walking up to him and talking to him in front of everyone this way. No matter that he was now yelling at me in front of a gymnasium full of parents and children. He mentioned that we could continue this in his office, to which I agreed, but he never took me to his office. Instead, he moved towards where the cheerleaders and coaches stood, who were now staring at us as he yelled at me.
No matter what I said, he had a dismissive remark to silence me. If I said I had a right to voice a complaint, I was using a disrespectful tone. If I said that the cheerleaders were enrolled in an athletic program just like the basketball players that parents also came to see, he said he had waived the Winter fee (only true for some of them). When I tried to explain that I was merely advocating for them because cheerleading as a sport is disrespected from early on through professional level, he yelled that he has a 20 year-old daughter, that I don’t need to tell him about respect.
My partner came over and extracted me from the situation at this point, because we had to go relieve our friends’ babysitter soon, and my other friend had come over to make sure I was OK, but this man was already storming off, shouting about my attitude and that I could talk to his supervisor. (Believe me, I will) He left me there shaking, glad that I hadn’t agreed to go into an office alone with him.
More so than him yelling at me I was angry at the things that he had yelled at me. Dismissing my concerns outright was infuriating. He could have even simply placated me, a common military tactic (Yes ma’am, I’ll pass that along, or I’ll take that under advisement would do).
Firstly, this man’s job here at USAG would not exist if not for the parents that he seems to hold such contempt for. I got the feeling that what he meant was “mother” who dared to speak out of turn, as he had no problem chatting up the dads, either in uniform or who were volunteer coaches. Obviously I have no real worth after spitting my kid from my loin, but I really was gobsmacked by the way he spit “parent” from his mouth like it tasted bad.
Parenting is an important job. I am not going to go on about the holy sanctity of it being the most sacred of jobs, but it is not to be scoffed at. Daily, when I want to rip my hair out, or actually do, wondering if I am doing a good enough job, or am scrutinized for the job I am doing, or when I have some pre-pubescent behavior issue I am sidelined by, I know that my work is cut out for me.
But, I also know that this man looked at me and decided that I was worthless and that he was automatically nothing. He knows nothing about me, or the other hats I wear despite my womanhood holding me down. How on Earth could I be a Sailor while having ladybits? Veterans don’t have anything but good and sturdy penises, surely. I couldn’t be active in the DAV, or on the PTO (Oops, is that too close to parenting, and therefore not a real thing?) I am a writer, a blogger (but depending on who you ask that doesn’t count either), and a political/social justice activist. I am a disability rights advocate both online and off. All of these things and more, and he waved it away with the narrowing of his eyes at me, and looking down his nose at me as if my State College sweatshirt somehow put me beneath his shoes.
We are not the sum of our titles. We are people, who beings comprised of many things, and we wear titles. It is what we do that matters, how we treat the people around us, ultimately, that matters. Being a director of a program over people you hate somehow doesn’t de facto make you better.
I think I am most angry because for a few fleeting moments I let this man convince me that he was right, that I didn’t matter and that I had done something wrong. But luckily there are good people surrounding me who reminded me that standing my ground the way I did for the right reasons was in no way wrong. That is a relatively new experience for me, and at its most basic, the crux of what I was trying to accomplish. I wanted those girls to know that they have a right to be respected.
*sigh*
My brain has been staging what I believe to be a very violent coup for the last couple of days. I have a hunch that it involves an exit of some sort from somewhere around my right eye. Oy, my stars it hurts, and Great Loving Ceiling Cat I have been tempted to help it along over the last day or two.
Pain drives to you ends that you wouldn’t normally be willing to seek. Even more interesting, I discover as I move through some of my worst days, the fear of pain can be just as motivating, as I find myself in a panic, sometimes losing my cool at the pharmacy when being told that my script for one thing or another needs to be delayed or can not be filled as per my doctor’s directions due to one policy or another. Fortunately I have been through several meetings with various administrators at our hospital about the “singer provider” programs, which I know to be nothing more than devices contrived to catch drug seekers, so I survive in the web of rules. Barely.
Not everyone knows how to navigate the system as I do, to ensure providers that they are legitimately living with chronic conditions requiring actual care.
But still, I find that even with all of this administrative understanding, and one offer to be a Patient Advocate for my eloquence and fierceness of fighting for patient rights, I still find a simple thing like filling a prescription that allows me to live my life in a manageable manner a trying affair.
My doctor attempted to write my script to allow me sixty days of medication, both because it would allow me to not have to come in every three weeks, and because our evacuation books require it. The hospital pharmacy and the policy won’t allow me to obtain this much at one time. Only thirty days, and that is it. The pharmacist took the time to tell me that the policy could be set aside if I had a real condition, like a seizure disorder, but not for me.
Funny, because my medication is specifically approved for my specific condition, which is a pain disorder, and going off of my medication for even one day causes a relapse of that pain, and side effects that aggravate that pain.
I forget, though, that pain is not a real condition. Not one to be taken seriously, anyway. When I complain to the doctors about my migraines, almost certainly they tell me it is because I am taking too much pain medication, and I am experiencing snapback. But I am using the pain medication only for the migraines, because I have so much trouble getting it for anything else, and have to squirrel it away just in case of migraines. It’s a cycle, and one I am sick of explaining away.
It’s the reason that I have become adjusted to living with a certain amount of daily pain, that I hardly notice how it affects my daily life, so that when I get something abnormal, like a migraine that a normal person would consider a level “7″ or higher on a pain scale, I rate it a 6 (it’s super legit, right?), but really I think I may be experiencing the Stigmata, pound it with some pain meds, and try to sleep it off. I crack jokes about how it feels, about how I want to jump out a window or how I understand how someone one thought that drilling holes in heads actually cured headaches. I skip using pain meds on days I probably should use them so that I can use them more on high pain days. The migraine blinds me, it makes me see stars, it makes me dizzy when I stand, but I stave it off and push through with as much as my stomach can handle.
Then, the doctors and pharmacists can be kind of right, due to the stringent rules they set up.
It seems that pain is to be treated as if it isn’t real, and that those of us who live with pain are simply poor, suffering drug seekers.
So, according to the language of H.R. 3, the only way that a person would be able to have an abortion covered by any insurance covered under the new plan would be to prove rape, or incest if that person is still a minor.
This isn’t all that different from one of the military exeptioneer clauses, just strip down the uniform and still require the person to pay out of pocket. The only perk being that the rape survivor would still get to stride into a military hospital and slap the money down on the counter and say “one fetal ejection, please”. Odds dictate if this is the winning sitch, however, this servicemember has had a road, and is not in the normal range of people for whom this usually happens.
According to a Guttmacher report, the burden of unplanned pregnancy falls hardest on junior enlisted women. A junior enlisted person with three years’ experience makes about $23,000. (note: either Guttmacher is including Basic Allowances, or they are referring to E-5 personnel, according to a 2010 pay table. This is not, according to some branches, considered “junior enlisted”, but the pay amount still holds true. This would be, for some branches, a Non-Commissioned Officer, someone who holds responsibility in military rank structure, but who is still lower in the food-chain than the people above them. They are junior NCOs learning to be leaders. My point is, military people don’t make oodles of cash.)
The cost for an abortion increases with time, and a procedure that may cost about $450 dollars at 10 weeks may cost upwards of a military woman’s entire year’s salary by 20. Time is, literally, essential.
What H.R. 3 and the current policy on military abortions have in common is that they are going to (and already do) require a person to disclose and prove rape was a factor.
A military rape survivor must give up her right to a Restricted Report, telling people that she was raped in order to “prove” rape. “Forcible rape”. Whatever that means. Because you just can’t go around killin’ babies unless it was really “rape” rape. And all this time, her mental health and ability to do her job is all being questioned, and you can’t have a pregnant woman in certain places, so once she tells her commander that she was raped and is now pregnant with that rapist’s baby, she will be punished by losing her job and possibly being shipped back to the U.S. or some other unit. Maybe. Or she will just be set aside until someone can figure out “what to do with her”.
The cohesion of the unit will be disrupted, a replacement will have to be found (it costs about $50,000 to train a standard recruit from the ground up, provided they are not a specialist, like, say, a linguist!), and if that person is on a ship, or in a war zone, then they will have to be air lifted out.
If all of that manages to not happen, and she talks her commander, who is usually male and not trained in handling issues of the “lady nature”, she will be forced to disclose personal medical information to him, she will have to tell him who raped her. He will have to believe her. She will have to tolerate seeing her rapist questioned, and her whole unit taking sides (because, believe me, people talk), and she will be ostracized, even if the commander has the best of intentions.
And, undoubtedly, unit cohesion will be disrupted, and she will be trucked off to another place, because ladyfolk, we just screw up that stuff with our open legs.
Maybe she will get the chance to pay for her own abortion in a military hospital, maybe not.
Or, she may choose to stay quiet about the whole thing, beg her commander for leave if she can be spared, and spend that whole year’s salary to travel somewhere that has looser abortion laws and hope she can afford it. Like, maybe Japan. Or maybe home to the States if she can manage to go to a state that has decent reproductive health laws.
But going to another country to procure your abortion puts your life at risk, because differences in culture, medical practices, all under language barriers could cause complications. Some women may be reluctant to ask for help or escorts, and may not have extra cash for translators.
She may even try to self abort instead, if she thinks she has no other options.
The policy as it stands humiliates servicewomen, by forcing them to give up dignity that they struggle to grasp to hold onto as survivors in a world where they are already treated like they don’t belong. It prevents them from maintaining privacy. It places undue burden on them financially, and adds stress to them when they should be focused on their jobs.
Doubly (or more) so if they are rape survivors trying to prove they were “really raped”.
H.R. 3 stands to do similar to civilian women living in the U.S. It stands to harm all of us, and urging congress to say “Not in my backyard!” could help us.
But don’t forget the rest of us. The 15% of the less than one percent of the nation who are serving in uniform.
A full range of medical services, up to and including abortion, allows military women to keep their reproductive choices private and safe, and between them and their medical professionals, allowing them to get back to work more quickly and safely. It allows them to choose to whom and when they report their rapes. It allows them to exist in their world free from the scrutiny of those who would not believe them about their sexual assaults and rapes. It saves the military money, which has always been a Conservative bottom line, hasn’t it?
Except, apparently, when they can stomp on women’s rights.
As pointed out in this NARAL Fact sheet (pdf), repealing the abortion ban under the Burris Amendment would have cost no extra taxpayer money but it was stripped away. Allowing TRICARE to cover abortions is the proper thing to do. All abortions would have been pre-paid in the hospitals, and all three branches already had existing refusal clauses for medical staff (who, by the way, are already trained in abortion procedures in order to save lives, so, no extra tax dollars there).
But not even allowing military women or military dependent to pay for their own abortions with their own money in military hospitals is cruel, absurd, and sends the strong message that women’s health doesn’t matter. And that the military would rather pay for more maternity care, up to and including 18 years of pediatric medicine for an unwanted child than a simple, safe, and legal procedure.
Civilian family members, who do not have restricted reporting options for sexual assault and rape would benefit from this also while living overseas, and if the military really believes that taking care of military families is a military priority, this is a part of that plan that must be implemented.
In order to prove that the new Congress cares about more than just stomping on women, the only proper thing to do is to strike down H.R. 3 and repeal the military abortion ban, fully.
Both plans hurt rape survivors. Both strip people of their dignity. Both are fiscally irresponsible. Both send a clear message that Congress is more interested in stripping people of dignity and making their lives more difficult than solving matters of financial hardship or health care iniquity.
Follow #DearJohn on Twitter.
Photo Credit: The National Guard
Sharing yesterdays cake recipe reminded me of a chocolate pudding recipe that I have yet to try, and since THE GUY’S BIRTHDAY is coming up, I think that I just may have to give it a go!
Sprinkle Bake has the most adorable set up for a Guinness Chocolate Pudding, served with the cap as an adornment in individual jars. Too fun!
If I give it a go I will have to take and post PIKTARS! But if any of you out there beat me to it, please let me know how it goes.
You may have heard of this act that is attempting to sneak its way through Congress right now, with my new BFF John Boehner (don’t worry, Elaine Donnelly, I haven’t forgotten ya! XOXO) taking up the gavel as the 2011 model of Speaker. If anyone were to ask my opinion, I would say we have gone from a nice comfy, family SUV that maybe didn’t always get us from point A to point B but worked out OK, to a gas guzzler that doesn’t have enough straps for car seats. Not family friendly.
Our Dear Mr. Boehner is trying to do to civilian women living in the U.S. what has been going on with U.S. servicewomen for a very long time, as well as woman and girl family members. For all the hemming and hawing I hear about how the military enjoys its great free health care (I don’t know how “free” it is, because we certainly earn it), I think that a lot of people don’t realize how limited the choices of that health care are for women.
Just last year women in uniform and their families were able to guarantee that they could access the emergency contraceptive pill known as “Plan B” in the U.S. at every military treatment facility world wide. It is now part of the formulary, or the list of medications that must be stocked wherever medications are stocked. And everyone over the age of 17 is able to get it over-the-counter as long as they have a military identification card.
But abortion is another topic altogether. And while the fight is going on at home, I think it might be a good time for those of us in social justice who have a hand in the fight for reproductive justice to know a few things about the access to abortion in military facilities.
While the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” is trying to hack away at your reproductive justice, our reproductive rights have been held hostage for a long time. Since 1979 to be exact. That is when Congress decided that military hospitals would not be allowed to provide abortions except in cases of rape, incest or if your life was really, really, in danger. That last one there is totally up for discussion, because it is really up to whatever doctor you get strapped onto to decide to declare if your life is in danger. And “abortion” is anything from evacuating an already still fetus that is causing you to start running an infection to an abortion that could allow you to start a treatment like dialysis or cancer treatment. The doctor’s word is the final say.
If you are a rape survivor who doesn’t wish to disclose the crime committed against ou to anyone and ou wind up pregnant, you are out of luck. No abortion for you. You not only have to admit you were raped, but finger your rapist, prove you were raped, and then maybe you can have your abortion. Oh, but you still have to pay for it out of your own pocket. Given the rate at which rapists in the ranks are actually referred for NJP (hint: it’s small — about 10%) and the threat of ostracization from peers, I don’t think that it is any wonder that some women have tried to take things into their own hands rather than go that route.
In the U.S. it is all hunky dory for some servicemembers, because there is a chance that you can access an abortion clinic or other facility that will accept your insurance or that you can afford. But if you are stationed in a country where abortion is outlawed, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, or even Republic of Korea, there is no off-base abortion access waiting for you. Instead, and holy Ceiling Cat I feel like a broken record, you must first obtain permission from your command and hope that they believe whatever excuse you have come up with, hope like hell you have funds for travel to the nearest country where it is legal, and that you make it all in a time-frame that makes it still safe and legal for you to obtain the procedure. All because you can’t even use your own money in a military treatment facility.
That’s right.
You can’t even use your own damned money to access an abortion if you are in the military and stationed overseas.
We keep trying to get this repealed, and every time Republicans block this, because military women don’t deserve a full range of health care, even if it is equal to that of the women in the country they are representative of. They are not allowed to receive a safe and legal medical procedure that is available in their home country from a medical team already trained to perform it from that country.
We petitioned. We called Congresspersons. We asked for support from the social justice community. We tried. And when it came time for the vote, the chance for a change was stripped away again.
So I am not exactly surprised to see more of the same ol’ from our Dear Speaker Boehner, trying to pass this H.R. 3.
What I want is simple.
I want access for everyone. What I really want is single-payer access with a full range of services for everyone, but I will be realistic.
I want Boehner to stop telling women what ‘real’ rape is. I want him to stop chipping away at our rights. I want the reassurance that if I want or need an abortion I do not have to fly to Japan or all the way back to the States to get one, on my own dime. I want women to stop killing themselves because they are desperate to not be forced into being incubators.
And I want to work together with those of you who want to convince your Congresscritters that this is a good idea.
Call your Congressperson. Tell them that Speaker Boehner has no right to make decisions on behalf of other people’s bodies. That his contempt for the lives of women is showing though loud and clear with every attempt he makes at stripping our rights away.
But when you call, or write, or however you communicate with them, telling them that they should not strip abortion access away, remember to tell them that disallowing servicewomen, who are serving their country every day and facing unplanned or unwanted or live-threatening pregnancies just like their civilian counterparts, to access abortion by paying with their own funds is absurd. It is beyond absurd. Tell them that it is unacceptable. At least as unacceptable as stripping abortion coverage from health insurance, because that is what it has been to us — having a medical procedure stripped from our health care coverage.
Please. If we work together, I believe we can be stronger. We let Republicans strip, again, a bill that would have restored medical services to servicewomen and family members, and I believe that somehow they have it in their heads that it means that we don’t care enough to stop them this time. We need to tell Dearest Speaker John that he isn’t getting away with this.
Find the information for your Congressperson here.
Read about how your rape just isn’t rapey enough.
Follow the excitement on Twitter by following the hash tag #DearJohn, or tweeting your outrage to @SpeakerBoehner.
Sady and Garland Grey, thanks!
Erm… bakes…
27 January was National Chocolate Cake Day, and I am going to go out on a limb and say that it was a U.S.-ian holiday. Well, me being all “abroad” and all, I figured that we shouldn’t be stingy with our holidays.
The Christian Science Monitor had this lovely recipe that it shared, a Mexican Chocolate Fudge Pecan Cake which looks good enough. Perhaps I might give it a try one of these days. It reminded me of the Texas Sheet Cake from my Junior and Senior high school days, the very same one that comforted me in my day of tragic grief. De-lish!
Of course, no celebration of chocolate cake would be complete without this hidden treasure, shared with me by my buddy and former roommate, P’s mom after meeting her at his wedding.
It is a little-known secret that I actually do not like cake. There are very few exceptions and they must be very specific, and not exactly cake-like. One is the Spiced Applesauce cake made by Deb at Smitten Kitchen. I can not believe I have ever loved a cake as much as I have loved this. I eat it for breakfast with a mug of chai tea, because the best part of being a grown-up is that you can eat whatever you want for breakfast. It is most coffee-cake like in its simplicity (but not at all as sweet), and full of applesauce (you really should make the attached applesauce recipe to make the cake), and the icing is very simple. Not pretentious like buttercream.
The second is really good red velvet cake, and that almost always requires ice cream, because I hate dry cake. I prefer it in cupcake form if I can from fancy bakeries, and often without its decor. I am high-brow like that, and only don’t make it because I wind up turning everything red in the process.
The obviously the third is the Texas Sheet Cake, which is practically a brownie, so I am not sure it counts.
But the winner is this treasure.
Guinness chocolate cake. It is like a clear Autumn night under the stars, lying back with the perfect someone and a four pack of Guinness… and chocolate. Maybe your Guinness ball is coated in a rich chocolate ganache, and every time you giggle and take a sip you get the creaminess mixed with that wonder. Or maybe that person, whose relationship with you is ambiguous, has lips coated in chocolate and you chat and sip and laugh and next thing you know you are kissing and looking at stars and holding hands and just enjoying your perfectly creamy beer… OH MY CEILING CAT IT IS PERFECT AND YOU COULD DIE YOU ARE SO DELIGHTED. Or, your lips could anyhow.
So, belatedly, why not share, today, this delightfulness with all of you, because you love me, right?
Right?
It also makes great cups. Continue reading
There are those who (wrongly) believe that when the Chippewa/Ojibwe, Huron, and Pottowotome tribes retained their treaty fishing rights from the State of Michigan as was laid forth in the Treaty of Ghent at the conclusion of the War of 1812 in 1814. In it, all that the tribes who allied with the British was to be restored to them, and since part of what was restored to the States was lands which would become known as the State of Michigan, and there were certainly Natives who lived here, who fished the Great Lakes, this was understood. But that certainly wasn’t what happened, and in 1836 the Natives of what is the Eastern Upper Peninsula and the Northern third of the Lower Peninsula wound up ceding their land rights in order to keep their sovereign fishing rights, though in an earlier post I mentioned that this wasn’t exactly the way of it.
A common misconception is that sovereign fishing rights will provide a way for tribes to dwindle fishing supplies down to nothing, because they go unchecked since there is no one who looks over their shoulders. It isn’t as if Natives haven’t fished their own lands for about 12,000 years or more before they had the White Man to make sure they didn’t eradicate their environment, and in fact prior to the settling of North America by American settlers the people of the Chippewa/Ojibew tribes existed on roughly two cycles of living, one where they fished as a larger village from Spring to Autumn, and one where they hunted through the winter, allowing both to replenish as needed. As large commercial industry fishing took over outlets of the St. Mary’s River, which affected Eastern Superior waters, they learned to accommodate that schedule to adjust for fish preservation.
Even now, tribal fishing boards work with the Department of Natural Resources to make sure that fish levels are maintained, with fishing seasons strictly adhered to. Because every person who exercises their tribal rights must have a tribal-issued license complete with registration number it is easy to track every person using a legal license. Any person caught without a license is subject to the same penalties that a non-tribal angler would be. If that angler is a net user, their registration number must be affixed to their nets, and the location of those nets must be on file. You are required to keep track of where you lay and leave your nets, which only makes sense for finding them. It helps both the fisher find their nets and the tribal board and the DNR watch for poachers.
The DNR is very strict in assessing their control. The lead “sinkers” that are used to weigh nets, and the anchor buoys used to keep them in place sometimes will drift, but they must be affixed with your registration number. If they drift, or if a storm were to toss your nets to a location where your nets don’t belong the DNR has full authority to seize control of your nets, equipment, and catch, and pull it. Because your reg. number is also affixed they will also come to your house and fine you for the infraction (and if you are tribal, which net users are, the tribal board can as well, but not the State itself). Your catch is sold off, or donated to a State or County home.
This has happened to us on more than one occasion, even though we do stick very carefully to the letter of the laws. Things happen.
But the DNR, even if it maintains otherwise, is a State agency at its lower level, and there is a long and heated history of tension between Indian and non-Indian fishing and those who believe that one side is being favored. In an area that is so dense with tribal fishing, and having people who have the exceptions to the “non-commercial” policy of treaty fishing rights around, the DNR has been known to keep an “extra vigilant” eye on net fishing. It isn’t hard, because Lake Superior fishing is almost (if not exclusively) that of the solely of the tribal fishery. If they go out and poke around a set of nets, odds dictate that they are going to pull of a gang owned by a tribal fisherman.
Things have become better in recent years, or so I am told, with the authority handed down by the State police to “deputize” local tribal police to watch out for non-tribal on tribal crime, but I don’t know if this has been affected. I do know that it has long been a tense situation, and if my impression of the DNR is colored by this, it is not without reason. Spawning season can be a long and hard couple of months without steady income, relying on frozen stores to get by in a good year, and to have your first nets of the season confiscated can be a tough pill. There is nothing saying the State doesn’t benefit from paying an inordinate amount of attention to tribal fisheries, but that doesn’t mean that tribal fishers don’t screw up.
There is oversight, though. We have our own boards and license commissions. We are required to file for a license through that bureau like non-tribal members. A license is held for life, though, and can be willed or handed down, even sold if you want to another member. My grandfather will probably give his to my brother who will benefit from it more than I would. I think there are even circumstances under which you can lose it, if you misuse it or abuse it. You also have to stick to treaty waters, waters governed by your own tribe, etc.
My tribe was lucky, and they fared better than those of the Pacific Northwest tribes in Washington State, or those in Minnesota, who had their rights poorly translated when disputes arose, but they weren’t come by easily. Of course, many can argue that no tribe has come by any of their rights easily.
But that is something for another day. The concept that tribal fishers are just not well governed is hogswash. Tribes are uniquely placed to know how many members they have and to cooperate with the DNR on the number of fish that can be safely harvested, and what measure will need to be taken to preserve it. It doesn’t do anyone any good to chase the last fish into a net, though I don’t hear too much talk of opening hatcheries and farming from leisure anglers, only that we treaty-rights anglers are taking up all the resources and getting so much “special treatment”.
random babble... by Ouyang Dan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
random babble... (randombabble.com) is © Brandann R. Hill-Mann (Ouyang Dan) 2007-2010
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