Behind Wisconsin's hunting tragedy
By Greg Butterfield

On Nov. 21, eight deer hunters were shot during a conflict over a hunting stand in Sawyer County, Wis. Six of them died.

The accused shooter, Chai Soua Vang, is an immigrant from Laos and a member of the Hmong ethnic group. All of those shot were white.

Vang, a truck driver from St. Paul, Minn., told police that the white hunters surrounded him, assaulted him with racist slurs and fired at him first.

Vang says he was hunting on public land. He got lost and wandered onto property owned by Terry Willers and Robert Crotteau. Willers confronted him, called in others riding all-terrain vehicles, and then took the first shot as he was trying to leave, Vang says.

Vang, a U.S. Army veteran and sharpshooter, returned fire. Vang ran into the woods and later surrendered peacefully.

Survivors of the shooting denied any abuse of Vang.

Vang's statement was taken by Sawyer County sheriffs without a lawyer present. The authorities claim Vang waived this right.

On Nov. 29, Vang was charged with six counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. The state attorney general's office is prosecuting the case. A team of high-profile Wisconsin defense attorneys will represent Vang. They are expected to seek a change of venue from rural, mostly white Sawyer County.

While many details of the case are still unclear, the incident has put a spotlight on the issues of racism and national oppression, class division and property ownership, and the hunting culture in rural Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Racist backlash feared

The shootings have heightened fears of a racist backlash against the Hmong, who are concentrated in regional cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., and Eau Claire, Wis. St. Paul is home to 24,000 Hmong immigrants, the largest concentration in the U.S., and their U.S.-born families.

"People are afraid there's going to be some kind of revenge," Ying Vang, director of a Hmong community center, told the Associated Press.

Hmong community members have reported harassment on the job and in school, vandalism, threatening letters and other incidents since the shooting.

Fears of retaliation have been fueled by statements in the media. David Hecker, a friend of Crotteau and Willers, told the Min neapolis Star-Tribune: "Hmong hunters may not be as safe hunting. That could become a reality."

Hmong hunters were urged not to go back into the woods for the remainder of the nine-day deer season, which ended Nov. 28.

Since the shooting, many Hmong hunters have come forward with their own experiences of being confronted by racist whites in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

One man, Tou Vang, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that his hunting party was run off public land by white hunters who shot at them, just a few miles from the site of the Nov. 21 shootings. That incident was in 2001. A Hmong bow hunter was chased out of a deer stand by two gun-toting men earlier this year, AP reported.

While St. Paul business groups and politicians hurriedly called a news conference to denounce Vang, other people were skeptical and said they wanted to hear more about his side of the story.

Ilean Her, director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans, said many in the community empathize with Vang and wonder, "Why did he feel like he had to shoot them? If it's just one against so many, what did they do to him that made him a threat?

"The community would say they always knew something like this would happen," Her said. "They're shocked that it happened. But at the same time you're not that surprised."

Hmong used, then discarded by U.S.

The Hmong hail from Southeast Asia, primarily Laos and Thailand. During the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. courted Hmong leaders and recruited their people to fight against the national liberation movements in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Gen. Vang Pao, father of the alleged shooter, commanded a Hmong "secret army" organized by the CIA. (New York Times, Nov. 24)

After the liberation forces triumphed in 1975, Washington offered the Hmong special visas to emigrate en masse, as part of a campaign to destabilize the new socialist government in Laos.

Tens of thousands came, first to California, then to the Midwest. Once they reached U.S. shores, however, the ruling class no longer valued them as a tool of anti-communist propaganda. To the U.S. rulers, the Hmong were just another oppressed group to be exploited and scapegoated for capitalism's ills.

From their agricultural society, the Hmong were transplanted into mostly white cities devastated by corporate restructuring and ill-equipped to provide for the needs of a non-English-speaking population. Thus the Hmong were a ready-made target for politicians and bosses eager to divert anger away from their own actions.

According to the 2000 census, 60 percent of Hmong in the U.S. live in poverty. A study by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire's Hmong Population Research Project states that the unemployment rate of Hmong in Wisconsin is five times the state average.

This, along with their homeland's hunting traditions, explains the growing popularity of deer hunting among the Hmong. Nearly a quarter of Wisconsin's Hmong residents took out hunting licenses in 2003.

Like many of their impoverished Native and white neighbors, Hmong families rely on hunting for survival.

The land problem

Conflicts over hunting, access to land, race and class have come to a boil in northwest Wisconsin since a precipitous decline in the timber industry, small farms and mining in the late 1970s.

The Wisconsin State Independent Living Council, an advocacy group for the disabled, notes that "Northwestern Wis con sin is a beautiful place ... [with] lakes and trees ... [but] in socio-economic terms living in Northwestern Wisconsin is less attractive." The council notes that in Sawyer County, where the shootings took place, 21.7 percent of households have an annual income below $10,000 a year.

Land ownership has been consolidated in the hands of agribusiness, timber companies, tourist resorts, land speculators and wealthy retirees. These landowners have drastically restricted access to hunters at a time when more people need to hunt to feed their families.

Public lands open to hunting are modest and overused. Options are limited for those who aren't family or friends of landowners or can't pay for the privilege, as many affluent "sportsmen" from outside the region do.

Privately owned lands often abut public hunting areas and are poorly marked, which can lead to tragedies like the Nov. 21 shootings.

The reality is that many poor and working-class hunters have no choice but to take the risk of trespassing in order to feed their families.

Just days after the Sawyer County shootings, another violent confrontation between hunters and a landowner was reported near Baraboo in central Wiscon sin. No shots were fired, but the landowner was hospitalized and one hunter jailed on assault charges. All those involved were white. (Capitol Times, Nov. 27)

While media attention focuses on the grieving families of those killed in Sawyer County, progressives in the region have also joined with Hmong community members in vigils against bigotry.

To build lasting unity among poor and working-class Hmong, Native, white and other workers in these areas will require a movement to demand jobs or income, health care, housing and education for all.

The have-nots of all nationalities have a common interest in demanding that those who hunt primarily for food should have first priority and access to uninhabited private land.

The writer grew up near the shooting site and hunted for food in the area during the 1980s.


Reprinted from the Dec. 9, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper.This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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