NETT LAKE- The killing of a bear on the Nett Lake Reservation by a Bois Forte Department of Natural Resources officer sparked a protest and petition that has caused Bois Forte Band officials to consider how such incidents should be handled in the future.
The incident that sparked the protest happened in late June in the Palmquist neighborhood, with a brief video of the carcass of a dead bear lying in the woods that was posted to social media drawing comments of shock, sorrow, and anger, highlighting the sacredness of bears in Ojibwe culture.
Bois Forte DNR Natural Resource Programs Director Chris Holm confirmed the shooting in an interview with the Timberjay.
“That was an unfortunate incident – the bear had to be taken down,” Holm said. “The bear was a repeat offender in the area, I guess I’ll call it for lack of a better term. Officers had responded, multiple times and couldn’t catch the bear or chase the bear away, and the bear was getting aggressive.”
“Immediately after that happened, another bear call came in that that needed to be addressed, so the officer on duty went to deal with that other situation, and then came back and took care of the bear.” Holm said. “You have to get help when you do that to lift the animal up and remove it, so it took a little time. But it wasn’t left there purposefully.”
Activists took their concern to the internet in a Change.org petition on June 28 which has surpassed the original goal of 200 signatures with a current count of 239.
“To us, bears are not just animals. They hold deep cultural significance - they are Spiritual Guides, Protectors, and extended family in our cultural context,” the petition says. “It is unjustifiable to allow this senseless killing to continue without regards to the traditions of the tribal members who have lived in harmony with these bears for generations. It’s time for our voices, the voices of those that respect and live by the old ways, to be heard.”
The pressure on Bois Forte leaders to do something amped up on July 2 when a group of protesters gathered in the early morning hours along Nett Lake Rd. armed with signs waved at passing motorists with slogans such as “End the Murder of Our Bears” and “Save Our Bears.” The timing of the protest was designed to catch the attention of workers headed to the tribal government center in Nett Lake, as well as tribal council members who were meeting there that day.
“We’re standing out here to help our relative Makwa (the Ojibwe word for bear),” said protester William Peters. “We understand that there may be a problem up here with some of the relatives, and my understanding at this point is that they okayed the tribal DNR to kill some of these bears. They’re not allowed to harvest these bears, they’re not allowed to go near these bears. They’re leaving the bears to rot in the community. These bears should not be left out to be rotting – there are a lot of great medicines that we’re protecting with our bear relatives, he has that bear fat and hide on him and he has other items that we use in our ceremonies.”
“These bears have been protecting us for many, many years, and so we’re here to be that voice for Makwa,” Peters continued. “We’re here to stand up and stand in solidarity and unity with each other. We would like to see the bear harvested by our relatives here on the reservation.”
Bear incursions
Holm said reported bear incursions into residential areas around Nett Lake have increased greatly over the past decade.
“I looked back in records when we first started to see bump ups in calls, and about ten years ago in 2014, I think we had 13 or 14, and it’s climbed steadily to this year,” he said. “We’ve had 75 calls already this year. That’s the highest so far.”
Holm said that trapping nuisance bears is the tribal DNR’s preferred method of dealing with a situation. “The majority of the calls are handled by live trapping the animal and moving it off the boundary and letting it loose,” he said. “Or there’s no resolution because when they get there, they can’t find the animal, it’s gone somewhere else. It’s only in the instances where the animal is returning multiple times and acting aggressive where the officers euthanize the animal, and this has been going on a long time. This isn’t the first instance where animals or bears were euthanized. But 99 percent of the time we’re hauling bears away alive.”
Holm said that the tribal DNR did not receive any special directive from tribal leaders to euthanize nuisance bears, and added that the Band’s Conservation Committee had not authorized the practice, countering a claim by activists. Dealing with nuisance bears has always just been a part of the job for DNR officers, he said.
“In hindsight, it makes sense to me that some provisions might want to be put in place whereby the Conservation Committee authorizes that, but it’s never been done in the past,” he said. “It’s been a job duty of conservation officers here for public safety concerns to deal with nuisance animals. Unfortunately, we have to do it all the time with violent or dangerous domestic animals like dogs. I don’t want the DNR painted as animal killers. We do what we have to do, but we don’t want to do that, and we take as many steps as possible to avoid doing that.”
Holm declined to speculate on why this particular killing generated such a strong response, but comments by activists on social media and in the petition hinted at one possible motivation.
“The deeply heartbreaking part of this unfair treatment is the fact that the Bois Forte DNR Director and Lead Conservation Officer tasked with this responsibility are non-tribal, possessing little understanding of the cultural importance these bears hold in our community,” the petition said.
Holm suggested that the problem with bears in Nett Lake is associated at least in part to the activities at the nearby Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary, noted for feeding bears.
“We’ve got a huge population of black bears down the road from us, and they’ve been habituated, and those are the ones that are coming into the village,” he said. “We know they’re habituated because they don’t act like a wild bear would if you were to approach it and you hollered at it or banged a pot or something – it should run away, but these don’t run away. They’re looking, like any bear would, for food and they’re here a lot. It’s become an increasingly concerning issue.”
Holm was empathetic to the protesters’ concerns that bears that are killed should be harvested for their medicinal, nutritional, and ceremonial values.
“We’ve talked about that,” he said. “What’s going to have to happen is some plan or provisions are going to have to be made for meat or whatever to be collected, either on the government side or the community side. A bear that’s taken in July has to be processed immediately. It should be in our mind, it should be completely used, but there’s a lot of work involved that we don’t have the time to do, and there’s the cost involved. But it’s a relevant concern and there should be some kind of plan made in that regard.”
One possible solution, Holm suggested, would be to have a Band-sanctioned bear hunt to thin out the population.
“It happens on other reservations,” Holm said. “We haven’t taken that step because that’s an internal discussion that this community has to resolve, but it is a management tool and one way we could do something on the side of public safety.”
Another possible solution is more time and labor intensive.
“The other way to do it is to get a lot more conservation officers and a lot more live traps and just spend all our time chasing bears around and hauling them off reservation to be somebody else’s problem,” Holm said. “And a lot of them just come back anyway.”
“What we don’t have at this point is a long-term solution for this,” Holm concluded. “Outside of continued community awareness and notifications, we’re responding the best we can. We’ll have more meetings here and we’ll have more discussions, probably more arguments, about how to treat bears, but ultimately the community will come to its conclusion. All we can do here is provide for public safety at the moment. The community is going to have to figure it out as a group if they want a different direction taken.”