Lake County Historical Society hosts Michael Risku on North Shore fishing history

With only 25 licensed commercial fishermen working Minnesota waters of Lake Superior, the North Shore fishery that helped build harbor towns is now a tightly regulated remnant of a much larger industry. On May 28, the Lake County Historical Society will host Two Harbors author Michael Risku from 5 to 7 p.m. at the museum, with admission free to the public at 5 p.m. for the event.

Risku will speak about his new book, Following the Fish: A History of Commercial Fishing along Minnesota’s North Shore, which was published May 12 by Minnesota Historical Society Press. The book is being billed as the first comprehensive history of commercial fishing and fishing settlements along the North Shore, tracing the story from 1650 to the present day. Bowker lists the paperback at $32.95 and gives the ISBN as 978-1-68134-306-8.

His background fits the subject closely. Risku was born into a commercial fishing family, served in the U.S. Navy, holds a Coast Guard captain’s license and is professor emeritus from the University of the Incarnate Word. He also lives in Two Harbors, a detail that gives the talk a distinctly local weight in a county where the harbor, the shoreline and the economy have long been tied together.

The book draws on oral histories and years of research to examine Indigenous fishers, Nordic immigrants, the geography that shaped the trade and the industry’s eventual collapse. Another event listing says Risku also looks at overfishing, logging, mining and invasive species as forces that helped push the fishery into decline. Copies of the book were available at its May 12 launch in Duluth, and the Lake County appearance will extend that conversation closer to the working waterfronts that helped inspire it.

The history reaches deep into Lake Superior’s commercial past. The Minnesota Historical Society says the American Fur Company established a fishing operation on the lake in 1834, but that effort collapsed after the Panic of 1837 and the company’s bankruptcy in 1842. Commercial fishermen did not return in significant numbers until the Duluth fishing boom in the 1870s. State history material also notes that the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe ceded most Ojibwe land along the northern and western shores to the U.S. government, established the Grand Portage and Fond du Lac reservations and guaranteed Ojibwe hunting and fishing rights in that territory.

For today’s North Shore, the past is still visible in regulation and in the tourist economy that grew around it. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources fisheries staff oversee about 2,300 square miles of Lake Superior, tracking sport, charter and commercial harvests to keep the fishery sustainable. Commercial fishing in Minnesota waters is limited, and permitted species include lake trout, ciscoes, chubs, alewives, lake whitefish, round whitefish, pygmy whitefish, rainbow smelt and native rough fish.

That mix of history, regulation and local identity is why the Lake County Historical Society’s mission matters here. By preserving artifacts, documents, photographs and historic sites, the society keeps the shoreline story connected to present-day Two Harbors, where harbor culture, tourism and memory still overlap.