Apartheid. USA 1988

May 16, 1987:

In February a Federal District judge ruled that the Wisconsin Indian Chippewa tribe has virtually unrestricted hunting and fishing rights extending far beyond the Lac du Flambeau Indian Reservation near Minocqua. The ruling pitted American Indians against white sportsmen. Tensions have marred the everyday relations between Indians and whites in the schools, stores and restaurants they share in Minocqua, a resort town of 3 300 people, ever since. ‘They are just jealous,’ said the Lac du Flambeau tribal Chief, Mike

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Allen Sr. ‘They are mad because we can hunt and fish before their season opens.’ The northern Wisconsin region, with dense forests, contains white-tailed deer, black bear, mink and beaver and is endowed with hundreds of clear lakes with walleye and muskie, and has long been popular with tourists.

The dispute dates to a treaty signed in 1837 when the Chippewa sold roughly one-third of what would become the State of Wisconsin for about a nickel an acre. The Treaty contained a provision ensuring unrestricted hunting and fishing for the Chippewa Indians on their former land, public and private. In his ruling in February, Judge James Doyle, sitting in Madison, upheld the accord. ‘Basically, the ruling gives the Indians the same hunting and fishing rights they enjoyed before the white man,’ said John D Niemisto, an assistant State Attorney-General. The Chippewa leaders say the conditions of high unemployment and poverty among Indians make hunting and fishing a necessity for survival. Moreover, the Indians say that tourism on the reservation - at the bingo hall, in crafts shops and restaurants - has slumped because of a perception of Indian hostility against whites.^99.

Just after midnight, June 13, 1985, Edmund Perry (17) a black youth from 265 West 114th Street in Harlem, died in a nearby hospital. He had been shot by a white plainclothesman, Lee Van Houten, who claimed self-defense. Two black men had assaulted and beaten him in a robbery attempt. He had fired at one of them. Meanwhile, the other had escaped. It was another brutal encounter between blacks and the police, and one that might have well gone unnoticed by the world at large were it not for Perry's educational background. He had graduated with honors 11 days earlier from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the nation's leading private schools. He had already received a full scholarship to the College of his choice, Stanford University. Soon enough newspapers across the

99. The New York Times, from a report by Dirk Johnson

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nation, radio announcers and television reporters were telling Americans Perry's story - his brief successful life and this quick, violent death.

Robert Sam Anson, a free-lance magazine writer and the author of a biography on George McGovern, had a son that also attended Exeter and who knew the Harlem youth. Mr Anson's son spoke for many when he doubted the policeman's assertion that he had reacted to an attempted mugging and severe beating and that he had feared for his life. Anson's son said, ‘Could not be true. Eddie was too smart for that. The cop must just have killed him.’ Random House now publishes Robert Sam Anson's findings on the case in a new book, ‘The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry’ (221 pages)^100.

100. The New York Times, Literary Review, by Robert Coles