Farmers, hunters and members of Indigenous Tribes gathered Thursday night to discuss plans for an ambitious five-year plan to restore elk populations in northern Minnesota.

During the meeting there were some tense back and forth disagreements on how some of the elk herds that migrate near the Red Lake band hunting grounds in the northwest part of Minnesota would be relocated to the northeastern region of the state.

“All of a sudden we start hunting elk, all of a sudden Fond du Lac is coming to take some. And we don’t go into Fond du Lac’s area and bother stuff,” Allen Pemberton, a member of the Red Lake Nation’s Tribal Council said Thursday night.

Makenzie Henk, an elk biologist with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa said elk are important to the forest ecosystem. “They have intrinsic value,” Henk said. “Just the fact that they’re a native species that was once part of this landscape, it makes this an important conservation effort.”

Members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have been coordinating with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to start by relocating between 12 to 20 elk to northeastern Minnesota.

Kelsie La Sharr, an elk coordinator with the Minnesota DNR said elk are a sturdy and resiliant animal. “They can survive in pretty much any habitat that you put them in,” La Sharr said. “So we have really high expectations that they will do very well over here in the northeast. The plan right now calls for 100 to 150 elk to be established in the northeast. But that’s going to be gradual,” she said. “We don’t want to do anything that negatively impacts those northwest herds.”

The Minnesota DNR will be monitor the relocated elk through gps collars and tracking their movements over the next five years.