There still exists a lot of hostility between Indians and whites in northern Minnesota—especially between Red Lake and its white neighbors. But the waters Mueller was fishing on were troubled for other reasons, too—related to Red Lake’s sovereignty. Sovereignty means that you can determine your own lives, but it has a downside: you also have the latitude to destroy them. The one industry that Red Lake could claim in an otherwise economically depressed region was the commercial fishing of walleye pike. The walleye pike is unique to North American waters. It is the Minnesota state fish, and by the 1990s Red Lake was the last remaining natural fishery for walleye in the United States. The Red Lake Band had overfished the lake, and the effect was catastrophic, both economically and culturally. Until that point, the walleye was the principal resource of Red Lake and its dominant cultural icon. Much of Red Lake’s material and social culture was based on the harvesting and use of walleye. This continued slowly until the fishery collapsed and was shut down in 1997.
A distinctly New World species, walleye are found throughout Canadian and northern American waters. They can be found in lakes and rivers in cold northern areas and get the name “walleye” because of the way their eyes reflect light, like the eyes of cat. They school during the spring spawning, which usually occurs in late April or early May in Minnesota, and a little later in colder waters farther north in Canada. The rest of the year they hunt alone, though groups of walleye will congregate in productive habitat like sandbars, rock piles, and the edges of weed beds: places where small bait fish congregate. Their eyes allow them to see in cloudy or disturbed water, giving them an advantage over their prey. They are not fussy fish, like brook trout or brown trout. You don’t need to be an analyst to catch them, worrying over presentation, lure color, or insect. They are, however, excellent fighters and are considered by many to be the best-tasting freshwater fish on the continent. Moreover, they don’t grow to an impressive size and aren’t even really a “pike.” Walleye belong to the Percidae family—technically, this makes them perch. They live, on average, nine years and grow to a weight of about five to seven pounds and a length of twenty-four to twenty-eight inches. The largest walleye ever caught was forty-two inches long and weighed twenty-five pounds. The oldest walleye on record (age is determined by measuring the layers of bone—like the layers of a pearl—on a special bone in their head called an otolith) was twenty-nine years old at the time of its capture.
These statistics don’t really compare to those of true pike—known as northern pike and muskellunge—which are found in northern waters across America, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia. These monsters can grow up to six feet long and weigh well over thirty pounds. The largest pike on record weighed seventy-seven pounds. They are ferocious fish that will attack and try to eat just about anything—from their own young to frogs, mice, and ducklings. They have teeth, like walleye, but bigger. One friend of mine describes them as being 50 percent teeth and 50 percent appetite. They are also, unlike the walleye, a storied fish. The hero of the Finnish epic the Kalevala made a musical instrument out of the jawbone of a pike. The U.S. Navy named a total of five submarines after the pike, and an entire class of Russian submarines from the Soviet era, the Victor III Class, was nicknamed “Shchuka,” Russian for “pike.”
Nor does the walleye measure up to the sturgeon, which still surfaces from time to time in our larger and deeper lakes. This prehistoric fish is found throughout America, Europe, and Asia and can grow up to eight feet long. Some sturgeons caught in America are estimated to be more than 200 years old. Frederick the Great released a great number of sturgeons in Lake Gardno in Pomerania in 1780. Some of them were still alive in 1866. John Tanner, during his travels in the 1790s, was canoeing up the Mississippi with a party of Ojibwe warriors when they all leaped out of the canoe and charged through the shallow water. He thought they were under attack. Rather, they had spied a sturgeon grounded on a sandbar. The warriors beat it to death with their clubs. It took four men to lift it into the canoe. Once back in the village they cut it up and fed an entire village of over 200 Ojibwe for a week.
But Minnesota loves its walleye. Minnesotans and nonresidents came together in 2006 to buy 1,371,106 fishing licenses and used them in Minnesota’s 5,493 fishing lakes and 15,000 miles of streams. Although panfish like bluegill, crappie, perch, and sunfish are the most commonly caught fish (with an annual harvest of 64 million pounds), most people come to Minnesota for walleye. Sport anglers take 35 million pounds of walleye annually. And the state of Minnesota restocks its 3.8 million acres of fishable waters with 250 million walleye fry (newly hatched fish), 2.5 million walleye fingerlings (infant fish), and 50,000 walleye yearlings every year. The financial statistics are staggering: more than $1.58 billion is spent every year by anglers, most of them trying to land a walleye or two.
Walleye also appears on most menus in the state, usually fried, sometimes herbed, rarely baked or poached. It is delicious, even if you don’t like fried fish. It has a clean taste, and firm, white, flaky flesh that comes off the spine in thick, moist shingles. The meat near the tail, where the rib bones and other substructures disappear, is the best part—the firmest, sweetest, most delicious freshwater fish this side of trout you will ever taste. It is difficult to buy the fish anywhere outside the state, and expats often order it from online retailers just for a taste of home.
The walleye has also been implicated in a high-level culinary intrigue that some have called “Walleyegate.” In 2004, Minneapolis-based KARE 11 News went “undercover” to expose a “walleye scam” being perpetrated in restaurants near Minneapolis and St. Paul. Evidently, the news program had been tipped off that many of the restaurants advertising walleye on their menus weren’t serving walleye at all.
Walleye retails at about five dollars a pound, but a European fish called zander—which has the same texture, size, and flavor—sells for two dollars less per pound. For a restaurant like, say, the swanky Tavern on Grand in St. Paul, which sells 50,000 pounds of walleye a year, the switch could mean more than $100,000 in savings. KARE’s reporter ordered “walleye” at about twenty restaurants in the area and sent samples to a laboratory in New York that specializes in testing fish and animal DNA. In half the cases, the results came back as zander, not walleye. One wonders if the switch is important enough to merit such careful undercover work; after all, no one could tell the difference. But according to their DNA, zander and walleye went their separate ways at least 12 million years ago, and “species substitution” is illegal under U.S. law. Restaurant managers mostly refused to talk on film, saying