Dean Crist was born in 1948, and spent his youth in the working class Chicago suburb of Blue Island, Illinois. In 1960 he graduated from Blue Island Elementary School; in 1966 he graduated from Culver Military Academy; during the tumultuous ''60s, he attended Iowa State University; in 1971, he graduated with degrees in Zoology and Bio-Chemistry. After graduation from ISU, Mr. Crist chose a lifestyle which allowed him to pursue an avid love of the outdoors and wildlife conservation. To that end, in 1972, he became a successful restaurant owner in the small town of Minocqua, Wisconsin. His idyllic existence in the beautiful northwoods experienced a radical demise in the late 1980s, when a Federal Judge began segregating the use of Northern Wisconsin''s natural resources between Indian and non-Indian American Citizens. Recognizing the polarizing effects to Northern Wisconsin''s population such segregation would cause, as well as understanding the depravation to the natural resources the court awarded Treaty Rights were causing, Mr. Crist became deeply involved in the Treaty Rights Conflicts which engulfed Northern Wisconsin in the late ''80s and early ''90s. In 1988, Mr. Crist became the spokesman for Stop Treaty Abuse Wisconsin, an anti-treaty rights organization composed of sportsmen, conservationists and residents of Northern WI. The purpose of STA/WI was to:
a) help fight the rape the Northern Wisconsin''s natural resources being conducted under the guise of Treaty Rights, b) raise public awareness to the court''s segregation of Northern Wisconsin, and c) illuminate the violation of Constitutionally guaranteed equality which is violated by Treaty Rights. During his fight for equality in Northern Wisconsin, Mr. Crist interacted with all levels of the American Political System. In his decade of legal battles, he was tried several times on the state level, took a federal case to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and eventually got the issue of Wisconsin''s Treaty Rights before the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. In that Supreme Court case, Wisconsin''s Treaty Rights were decide by a 5-4 decision in favor of the Indians -- an extremely contentious decision, with the justice who wrote the decision for the majority being exposed for blatant conflict of interest. Mr. Crist now resides in semi-retirement in the beautiful, and now segregated, northwoods of Northern Wisconsin.