Reino Rousu was on his way to harvest wild rice when they pulled him over.
It was September 5, 2024 — peak ricing season on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, when the beds on the lakes turn dark and the air smells like the earth remembering something. Rousu, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and a lifelong Anishinaabe rice harvester, had an airboat in the back of his truck. It was designed to harvest manoomin while reseeding — take and give back in the same motion.
At the intersection of County Highway 21 and County Road 110, three White Earth Conservation Officers stopped him. They seized the airboat. No warrant. No hearing. No charges. The officers, Rousu alleges, were acting on orders from Eugene Sommers, the District 2 Representative of the White Earth Reservation Business Committee.
The boat sat at tribal headquarters for twenty days. When they gave it back, they gave no explanation. But by then the season was over. The rice was gone.
Rousu and his co-plaintiff, Martin Guthrie Seeger — also Anishinaabe, also a treaty beneficiary — estimate the seizure cost them 5,000 pounds of wood-parched wild rice per day. That's not a commercial figure. It's a subsistence one. For Anishinaabe people, manoomin is not a commodity. It is a sacred gift, central to culture, community, and spiritual obligation. To harvest manoomin is to fulfill a responsibility handed down since time immemorial.
The White Earth Reservation Business Committee itself acknowledged as much. In 2018, it adopted Resolution 2018-05 — the 1855 Treaty Authority and Rights of Manoomin — which states that individual treaty beneficiaries have the right to harvest wild rice and that "no council may infringe individual self-government in sacred ricing."
They infringed it anyway.
The Court That Wouldn't Decide
In November 2025, Rousu and Seeger did what you're supposed to do. They filed suit. They went to the White Earth 1855 Off-Reservation Tribal Court — Case No. GC2025-00001 — and asked for declaratory relief, damages, and a ruling on whether the Reservation Business Committee had the constitutional authority to seize their property and interfere with their treaty rights.
The tribal court never answered the question.
On January 20, 2026, Chief Judge David DeGroat granted the defendants' motion to dismiss. Sovereign immunity. Case closed. The court did not address whether the RBC possessed enumerated authority under Article VI of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe Constitution. It did not reach the merits of the treaty rights claims. It did not rule on due process.
In its order, the court noted that Chief Judge DeGroat maintains a "continuing professional relationship and a friendly acquaintance" with defendants Michael Fairbanks (Chairman), Michael LaRoque (Secretary-Treasurer), Eugene Sommers, and Laura Lee Erikson (District 3 Representative).
Rousu and Seeger appealed. That appeal — AP2026-00001 — is pending before the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals. If the appellate court does not address whether the RBC possessed constitutional authority to act, Rousu and Seeger say they intend to seek relief in federal court.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
The appeal raises a question that goes beyond one airboat and one harvest season. It challenges the court itself — the institution that dismissed their case.
The argument goes like this:
The Minnesota Chippewa Tribe operates under a constitution adopted in 1936 under the Indian Reorganization Act and revised in 1963. It is a limited government — a creation of the people, not the other way around. The constitution grants specific powers to the Tribal Executive Committee in Article V and to the six Reservation Business Committees in Article VI. Powers not delegated are retained by the people.
The constitution does not establish a judicial branch. It does not authorize the creation of tribal courts.
Article XII requires that constitutional amendments go through a secretarial election — at least 30 percent voter participation and approval by the Secretary of the Interior.
No secretarial election was ever held to create the tribal courts.
What happened instead was this: around 1980, the Tribal Executive Committee passed a series of internal documents it called "Interpretations." Interpretation No. 1-80 declared that the TEC possesses "inherent powers of self-government" including powers not listed in the constitution. Interpretation No. 2-80 authorized the TEC to "create by ordinance a judicial system," reasoning that the power was "implied" in the preamble and Article V. Interpretation No. 4-81 declared the TEC "the only proper body to interpret the Constitution of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe."
In three strokes, the TEC gave itself the power to create courts, then gave itself the power to say that only it could decide what the constitution means. No vote of the people. No secretarial election. No Article XII.
The Department of the Interior noticed. In 1986, the Solicitor of the Interior issued an opinion concluding that the MCT Constitution's preamble language — "preserve and maintain justice" and "promote the general welfare" — does not delegate new powers absent explicit language in Articles V or VI. The Solicitor concluded that the constitution must be amended under Article XII before the TEC or any Reservation Business Committee may authorize tribal courts.
It was never amended.
Norman Deschampe, who served as MCT President, confirmed this repeatedly in correspondence over the years — the constitution remains unchanged, and no Article XII amendment has authorized a judicial branch.
When the Tribe Sues, the Court Has Power. When Members Sue the Tribe, It Doesn't.
There is an irony in the tribal court's dismissal that Rousu and Seeger's appellate brief does not let pass.
In Manoomin et al. v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Case No. GC21-0428, the White Earth Reservation Business Committee — the same defendants — filed as plaintiffs in the same 1855 Off-Reservation Tribal Court. They invoked its authority to enforce treaty-reserved rights and protect manoomin off-reservation in the 1855 ceded territory. It was a landmark case. The court accepted jurisdiction. The RBC argued the court had the power to protect the rights of manoomin against the state.
When Rousu and Seeger tried to use the same court to enforce those same treaty rights — this time against the RBC itself — the Committee moved to dismiss. The court granted it.
The court exists when the Committee needs it. It does not exist when members need it.
Not the Only Case Raising This Question
Rousu and Seeger are not the only White Earth members challenging the constitutional foundation of the tribal court system.
In a separate matter, the Minnesota Court of Appeals recently reversed a cannabis possession charge against Todd Jeremy Thompson, an enrolled White Earth member, finding that the state of Minnesota lacked jurisdiction to prosecute him on tribal land. Thompson prevailed on sovereignty grounds — but as High Times reported in March 2026, his seized property has not been returned. White Earth tribal police participated in the raid, and the tribe has not accounted for the property.
The Thompson case surfaced the same Article XII question now at issue in the manoomin appeal. Andy Jack Auginaush, a White Earth member and candidate for District 1 Representative, has publicly argued that the tribal court system was created by TEC Interpretation 2-80 without the constitutional amendment process required by Article XII. Auginaush has filed formal requests with the TEC and certified letters to the Secretary of the Interior and the Solicitor's Office seeking review. He says the TEC has not responded.
Auginaush also raises Article 13 of the MCT Constitution — "Rights of Members" — which guarantees band members equal participation in tribal economic resources. He contends that White Earth's cannabis codes exclude individual members from an industry the tribal government has monopolized through compacts with the state, compacts he says band members were not consulted about.
The pattern across both cases is the same: tribal members assert rights grounded in the constitution and treaties; tribal institutions decline to address whether tribal officials possessed authority to act; and the members are left without a forum that will reach the merits.
What Happens Next
The tribal appeal is pending. If the White Earth Court of Appeals affirms the dismissal — or if it declines to address whether the RBC had constitutional authority to seize the airboat — Rousu and Seeger say they will file a federal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.
Their planned federal case would not sue the White Earth Band or the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe as entities. It would name individual officials and seek relief under Ex parte Young — the doctrine that allows courts to enjoin officials who act beyond their lawful authority without implicating sovereign immunity.
Among other things, they would ask a federal court to declare that the TEC Interpretations are invalid, that the tribal court lacks constitutional authority, and that the seizure was unlawful. They would cite the 1986 Solicitor Opinion, the Deschampe correspondence, the 1976 Burris historical report, Montana v. United States, and Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band. And they would argue that because the tribal court was never constitutionally created, it is structurally incapable of providing a remedy — making exhaustion futile.
But for now, the case remains in tribal court. The question is whether that court — whose own constitutional foundation is being challenged — will answer the question it avoided the first time around.
Who Does Sovereignty Protect?
Thompson won his case. Sovereignty shielded him from the state. But when the tribe itself took his property and the tribal court's own constitutional foundation is in question, sovereignty becomes something else — not a shield for the people, but a wall between the people and accountability.
Rousu and Seeger went to the tribal court and the tribal court said: you can't sue the government. It didn't say the government was right. It said you can't ask.
The RBC went to the same court in Manoomin v. DNR and the court said: yes, we have jurisdiction; yes, the treaty protects manoomin; yes, we can enforce those rights off-reservation against the state of Minnesota.
The question is not whether tribal sovereignty matters. It does. The question is whether it belongs to the government or to the people who created it. Whether a constitution that the people adopted can be rewritten by interpretation, without their vote, to create institutions they never authorized. Whether those institutions can then be used to foreclose the very rights the constitution was meant to protect.
Rousu, Seeger, Thompson, and Auginaush are all asking the same thing. They are asking it in different courts, about different plants, through different procedural doors. But the question is the same:
Who gave you this power?
Nobody has answered yet.