On Dec. 20, 1974, Art Duhamel was arrested for commercial fishing with an illegal piece of equipment — a gill net — off the shore of Peshawbestown in Grand Traverse Bay.
Duhamel was born Buddy Chippewa in Peshawbestown in 1924. According to court documents, he was sent to boarding school in Harbor Springs at 5 years old. At 9, he was separated from his family and sent off into several white foster homes in Grand Rapids.
As a teenager, he lived permanently in a Big Rapids foster home with the Duhamel family, and his name was changed to Arthur Duhamel.
After WWII, Duhamel became a pipefitter and traveled around the world for work. But in the 1950s, he returned to Michigan to work as a welder during the construction of the new Mackinac Bridge.
Soon after, he returned to the Peshawbestown native community in which he was born years before: the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
It was around this time, amidst the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that tribal nations across North America began to reassert their sovereignty and rights, including for Ojibwe and Odawa tribes across northern Michigan.
Several Michigan tribes signed a treaty with the U.S. government in 1836, ceding millions of acres of land that eventually helped Michigan gain statehood.
In return, the federal government recognized the hunting, fishing and gathering rights that Anishinaabe people had long held and exercised in the Great Lakes.
But by the 1960s, tensions were high.
Commercial fishing, pollution and invasive species had depleted the lakes of valuable commercial species. At the same time, the state of Michigan was working hard to support a budding sport fishery, particularly with salmon.
The state argued it had the right to regulate its waters and fisheries, and it instituted several restrictions on commercial fishers, including native ones.
Native fishermen disagreed. They pointed to the treaty their ancestors had signed with the U.S. government, arguing the state had no right to regulate or restrict them.
And a handful of Ojibwe and Odawa fishermen in the Upper Peninsula, like William Jondreau and Big Abe LeBlanc, got themselves arrested in order to initiate test cases against the state.
Art Duhamel did the same in Grand Traverse Bay on Dec. 20, 1974.
“It was a snowy day, a storm. Art advised that he would be doing it,” said Jim Olson, an environmental lawyer and founder of the Traverse City-based non-profit For Love Of Water. Duhamel and Olson had made a plan ahead of time. “I was called by Art after he was arrested, and his … 14-foot fishing boat with a motor and 1,000 feet of net that he had put out that day – it was confiscated. I got a call that he was in the Leelanau County jail.”
Local courts found Duhamel guilty and sided with the state, despite precedents in favor of treaty rights in Jondreau and LeBlanc’s earlier cases.
Duhamel eventually went on to join a federal case that was going on at the same time; in 1973, the U.S. sued the state of Michigan on behalf of Ojibwe and Odawa tribes who had signed the 1836 treaty.
In 1979, a federal judge sided with the U.S. government and the tribes, recognizing their inherent right to fish and that right’s protection under a treaty.
Art Duhamel died in 1992.
“His story is the story of the rights of tribes of Ottawa and Chippewa in northern Michigan, the Grand Traverse Band,” Olson said. “And his story is the preservation of the fishing rights that to this day, are protected under various consent decrees.”
Duhamel’s involvement in the federal case also laid the groundwork for the Grand Traverse Band to become a federally recognized tribe in 1980. The tribe helps regulate and co-manage northern Michigan’s fisheries today.
