Colonial erasure of Indigenous stewardship: How museums can restore lake sturgeon as sacred ecology and law
Original framing: “Grand Rapids Public Museum connects lake sturgeon to Indigenous culture” — bing news
The exhibit must center **Anishinaabe legal frameworks** like the *Dakota Access Pipeline protests’* invocation of the *Fort Laramie Treaty* (1851), which guaranteed fish rights. Sturgeon are *mishomis* (teachers) in oral histories, their migrations marking time for ceremonies like the *Maple Syrup Festival*. The museum’s framing erases the **sturgeon’s role in Anishinaabe land reclamation**—e.g., the *Nottawaseppi Huron Band’s* 2020 lawsuit against Michigan for violating the *1836 Treaty of Washington*, which guaranteed sturgeon harvests. Indigenous knowledge here is not folklore but **a operational legal and ecological system** that predates colonial science by millennia.
The museum’s exhibit, while well-intentioned, risks **replicating the colonial archive**—presenting Indigenous relationships with sturgeon as a *past* rather than a **living legal and ecological system**.
The solution lies in **three interconnected moves**: (1) **Restoring Indigenous authority** over narrative and resource management, as seen in the *Bad River Band’s* legal challenges and the *Mille Lacs Band’s* hatchery; (2) **Reclaiming sturgeon as sovereign entities** through treaty amendments and personhood arguments, mirroring the *Whanganui River* precedent; and (3) **Disrupting the trickster’s theft** by funding tribal-led science and education, ensuring that the ‘connection’ to sturgeon is not a museum’s gift but a **reparative act**. The historical parallel to the **19th-century fur trade collapses** warns that without these steps, the exhibit will be another chapter in the **extraction of Indigenous knowledge**—this time, under the guise of ‘cultural appreciation’.