By Charlie Otto Rasmussen, Editor
For the Ojibwe tribes, native fish, plant, and wildlife species restoration are priorities. Helping return balance to northwoods ecosystems fosters wide reaching benefits to food webs and relationships between all beings. From the St. Croix Band’s Clam River System to Lake Superior tributaries, Ontonagon and St. Louis Rivers, tribal natural resources programs are stocking young lake sturgeon, or name (nuh-MAY) in the Ojibwe language.
The annual work bolsters existing populations and returns the great fish to Ceded Territory waterways where namewag have been eliminated through a century of human impacts.
“The tribe has formally classified lake sturgeon as a species of concern and as culturally important,” said Jeremy Bloomquist, St Croix Band Natural Resources Dept. “Spring ceremonies used to coincide with the spawning runs and traditional harvest of sturgeon.”
St Croix Band officials and natural resources staff have their eye on expanding regional sturgeon populations by building on the small numbers that still exist in the interconnected Clam System, which encompasses the Clam River, Upper & Lower Clam Lakes, and Clam River Flowage. The goal is to achieve a similar stable population like the one that exists nearby in the Yellow River and Yellow Lake. With funding provided from the St. Croix Tribe, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a State of Wisconsin Department of Administration Tribal Assistance Funding Award, St. Croix hatched their first wave of next generation lake sturgeon in 2025—all destinated for the Clam River System to help restore self-sustaining numbers.
“We started sampling on the Clam in 2022 with results indicating a remnant sturgeon population,” Bloomquist said. “By the time we’ve completed annual stocking over the next eproducing on their own.”
Sturgeon females reach spawning maturity at around 20 years or so, and males around 7-8 years, Bloomquist said. The project represents a long-term commitment to a being that can live longer than other creature in the Ceded Territory. Recent upgrades and additions to St Croix’s fish hatchery and rearing facilities will support not only lake sturgeon propagation but help maintain the band’s ongoing walleye output far into the future.
North of St. Croix’s homelands into the Lake Superior watershed, the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwe continues to enhance lake sturgeon populations in the Upper St. Louis River. Since 1998, the band has collaborated with federal and state fishery managers to return namewag to a river that’s been polluted by the timber products industry and fragmented by hydrodams. The work is paying off as Fond du Lac fishery specialists can now track and monitor stocked fish that carry radio-transmitters as they grow into young adulthood.