Returning to the Home of the Golden-Breasted Flicker, the Anishinaabe Homeland

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Each time I’m on the island, I look up and see the special bird and know that I am home. I see her nowhere else, although I live on my own reservation 200 miles away with a similar ecosystem. She shows herself to me only on this place, Mooningwanekaaning-minis, “Home of the Golden-Breasted Flicker,” the Anishinaabe homeland.

Madeline Island, as most call it today, is where the Creator and our prophets instructed us to move. Some of the most significant spiritual beings of the Anishinaabeg were to come here.

In this 21st century, it is also a place where the complexity of restoring a multicultural society in a sacred land is being revealed. The question is how to do so with grace.

Ten millennia ago, people walked and canoed the lands surrounding the island, fished the waters and lived in reverence. They had hands, not paws, but they existed as part of a larger community that included relatives with fins, paws, wings, hooves and roots. In our oral history, the Anishinaabeg remember the time of the great beaver. According to scientific carbon dating of fossil remains of these creatures, that was 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. People like us were here. We are returning again.

Akawe – In the Beginning

During the time of prophecy, the Anishinaabeg were told to follow the Migis shell that appeared in the sky and from our eastern homeland, along the great water. We would stop seven times along the migration westward, ending finally at Mooningwanekaaning-minis. On this island, we flourished, spread our wings as an Anishinaabeg people, grew in numbers, cultural and spiritual wealth, and as a military and economic power. The Anishinaabeg moved and traveled far. We were not a sedentary people; after all, our language is comprised of 8,000 verbs.

Our Mooningwanekaaning-minis became a center of our Midewiwin Society, our powerful religion, which connected us to the four layers beneath the earth and the four layers above it. Here on this island we refined our lacrosse game and the Anishinaabe women perfected our game of shinny, a sort of Ojibwe broomball. Here we launched our fishing, collected berries on the many islands of our territory and became the largest inland naval force in North America, dominating the Great Lakes with trade, agriculture and fishing. It’s no wonder that French fur traders sought our favor and ultimately our culture, as the Voyageurs would marry into our fine Ojibwe families, preferring our way of life to that which they left.

So, maybe it is that we lived on the island for 300 years before we were found. The French had found us, and, as European empires do, they built a fort. That was in 1693, and that fort was known as La Pointe. Later, our sacred Mooningwanekaaning-minis became known as Madeline Island. The English name comes from the English name of Madeline Cadotte, the daughter of Chief White Crane.

Mooningwanekaaning-minis served as the southern capital of the Anishinaabe nation that stretched among four American states and three Canadian provinces. Our treaties with the United States were signed here, allowing access to the Great Lakes for miners, loggers and settlement. It was cheaper in money and lives for the fledgling U.S. nation to treaty for land than to fight wars. (The western Indian wars after the Civil War reportedly cost the United States about a million dollars per Native casualty.)

The United States got a bargain for our land, although we retained hunting, fishing and gathering rights on them.

Victoria Brehm, an author from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, writes, “An Indian Agent at La Pointe once calculated that the nations there had sold 11 million acres in the 1837 treaty for less than eight cents an acre. The 1842 copper treaty paid the same Northwest Territory Chippewa seven cents an acre for 12 million acres.”

The value of the fisheries, maple sugar, agriculture and furs from those lands, let alone a way of life, was incalculable. Yet, a few tidbits remind us, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community to the east, produced 253,000 pounds of maple sugar in one year; Madeline Island produced 7,000 gallons of syrup; our furs and our wild rice were of immense value. The copper taken from our territory was worth $5.724 billion in 1971 markets.

When the La Pointe Indian agent reported this disparity to his supervisor in Michigan, he was terminated.

Wanishiniwag – They Disappear

Within a very short period, four treaties were signed by the United States and the Ojibwe nations, each providing for mining in Anishinaabeg territory. In 1850, La Pointe was the only port in the western portion of Lake Superior – the access to land, trees, copper, furs and wealth. These treaties – 1836, 1837, 1842 and 1854 – covered both the Keweenaw Peninsula and the Mesabe (“Sleeping Giant”) iron-ore belt in northern Minnesota. To receive their pittance of payments for those treaties, the Anishinaabeg would gather by the thousands for meetings, ceremonies and for annuity payments that included cash, food and everyday tools or materials.

America benefited heartily from Anishinaabeg wealth. By midcentury, more than 100 copper companies had been incorporated in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota territories. As early as 1849, copper production at the Keweenaw Peninsula led the world. Similarly, beginning in 1890, mining at northern Minnesota’s Mesabe accounted for 75 percent of all U.S. iron ore production.

The Anishinaabeg did not benefit from peacefully negotiating. Instead, corrupt U.S. officials conspired to force the Anishinaabeg from our homeland. In 1850, President Taylor illegally issued an order to remove the people from the island and nearby lands, counter to the treaty agreements. The Indian agents thought to initiate the removal by changing the place for annuity payments, moving it 121 miles from our island.

Four thousand Ojibwe canoed to Sandy Lake, southwest of Duluth, that autumn. They arrived on the payment date, fatigued and hungry, only to find no one there to distribute supplies. Wild game was scarce, fishing was poor and high water had wiped out the wild rice crop. Ill-equipped and confined to a waterlogged area, the Ojibwe people were soon ravaged by disease, exposure and starvation; three to eight people died each day. Months later, in early December and with more than a foot of snow on the ground and the waterways frozen over, the Ojibwe people finally received their annuities. With 170 people already dead, they started on a bitter trail back toward our land here at Gichi Gami, the Great Lake. Another 230 people died on that frigid journey, later called the Sandy Lake Tragedy or the Wisconsin Death March. Those who survived returned to our homelands and the public outcry forced the suspension of the removal order. Two years later a delegation led by Chief Buffalo, a man in his 90s, traveled to Washington, D.C., and secured the rescinding of that removal order by the new president, Millard Fillmore.

Despite this, we were sent away from our beloved island. Three decades after Sandy Lake, most of the island was privately held and we had been removed to designated locations. Our word for “reservation” is ishkonjigan – leftovers. It is not a homeland. That was the beginning of a immense trauma for the Anishinaabeg.

Edith Leoso, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Bad River Band of Ojibwe, told me what is remembered about the island during a midwinter interview.

“We left that island with the understanding that we would never hold lodge there again. Eddie Benton (of the Three Fires Midewiwin Society) talks about how the old people who had to leave built this huge bonfire and then we left. They say that when we got to Bad River … we could still see the fire. … We wanted to remember where our homeland was at, so that when we did ceremonies, we would always know this.

“That fire, it was also a part of letting go. Yet … knowing our connection. Perhaps it was part of the detachment – to try and forget and cope with the trauma of leaving.”

The Ojibwe were sent away, many to Bad River and others to Red Cliff and beyond. Our people moved to reservations throughout the region, but never forgot, our place, the Place of the Golden-Breasted Flicker.

Noongom – Today

This is what I hope you remember: The Ojibwe are not mythical beings, nor are we vanished Phoenicians. We were and are a living community of 250,000 people in North America, in the least.

Our island homeland was divided into homesteads. In 1850, 40 residents of the island year-round population were Cadottes, largely Métis, French and Ojibwe fur-trading families or their descendants. In 2013, around 40 of the 250 or so full-time residents of the island were Nelsons, families of enterprising Swedes who with some relatives own the Madeline Island Ferry Line, construction companies, acres of land, Tom’s Burned Down Café and many other points of interest. The residents are all, by and large, really nice people.

These days only a handful of Anishinaabeg live on Mooningwanekaaning-minis. When we visit our homeland, most of us must travel by Madeline Island Ferry from Bayfield. Driving there from the west along Highway 13, you pass the Red Cliff reservation, where the median household income is about $8,000.

The new casino, Legendary Waters, does bring new money and jobs and more tourists. Meanwhile, on Madeline Island a really nice house recently listed at a $1.79 million price tag. We notice the irony.

There is Madeline Island land still owned by the Ojibwe people.

On the north end of the island, 200 acres were reserved for our fishing grounds. A dozen or so seasonal homes were built there after the land was first leased out in 1967 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a tribal money-making enterprise. Those leases expire in 2017 and Bad River has indicated it will not renew the leases, held by the Amnicon Bay Association. That invariably is a heated topic of discussion.

Another cause for current tension is at the site of the marina. The marina adjoins the cemetery where Chief Buffalo is buried, in a modest grave, among perhaps l00 other Ojibwe people in the St. Joseph’s Mission Cemetery. The initial marina was dredged prior to any regulation. Brad Johnson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers explains: “The marina was dredged into a village site and a cemetery site. It’s an extremely sensitive topic in a very sensitive area. That dredge, or ‘sediment,’ had history and some remains. When the owner wanted to move the sediment, we worked through that process with the Bad River Ojibwe because of the concern for human remains.”

This shows, in part, the complexity of building on top of a still living culture.

Madeline Island has been acknowledged as a significant cultural site for more than a hundred years by authorities in the non-Ojibwe governments. Some mid-1990s studies by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers referred to the island as a “Traditional Cultural Property” for the Anishinaabeg. That designation, from an Ojibwe perspective, will afford more protection for tribal history there.

Brad is the Army Corps of Engineers representative with regards to these issues on Madeline Island. “ You know that Madeline Island is significant, you know the reasons,” he told me. “I’m not going to try and pretend that this is something I understand. … It is a larger traditional cultural place. … It’s a place that is significant because of the role it plays in the continuation of community practices and continuing identity.”

According to Edith, “Tribes are saying this is a traditional cultural property, and we need to be involved in the development process on the island. From our perspective, this means that in the initial planning stages of developments, the tribe should be included.”

This has worried some landowners, but Edith suggests that this will enhance, not harm, property values.

Giiwedinong – Coming Home

Two summers ago, our family built the first residential summer wigwam seen on the island for probably a hundred years or maybe more. From an Army Corps of Engineers perspective, perhaps, we built a new cultural property on a traditional cultural property.

Called Giiwedinong, or the “place we come home to,” it also is affectionately nicknamed the Ojibwe Time Share Wigwam. The home is not on the tribal land in the far north of the island. It is built on the edge of La Pointe, in bike riding distance for young kids. That is because we, too, are a part of the community and we like the community.

It was an interesting night with the zoning board and with the zoning department when we sought approval – all nice people, many of them Nelsons.

“I am not sure this complies with the uniform building code,” Jennifer Croonberg, the zoning director, earnestly explained to me about the wigwam’s form.

I smiled. “I believe it precedes the uniform building code.”

The tribal presence is stronger now on the island. Tribal treaty meetings, the Native American Graves and Reparations Act, historic preservation and ceremonial gatherings all have been held with increasing frequency, all supported by many local residents who have cooked for, housed or just exhibited an interest in things Ojibwe.

The Madeline Island Museum itself has hosted a number of events and holds a wealth of Ojibwe cultural heritage – much of it collected from island excavations by Al Galazin or collected at the Buckthorn Bar near the Lac Courte Orielles reservation by Leo Capser. It is a hefty collection of cultural and ceremonial wealth. Ojibwe people who visit the museum and see these items often feel sensitive, experiencing the genetic memory of a great loss.

“When I was in the museum, and saw all those parts of our culture, it evoked historic trauma,” Edith says. “It’s the heart-wrenching sadness … sadness of seeing them, and leaving them … those ceremonial items.”

On the island, she continues, “I also feel really good. I went to the cemetery with my migis on. I walked into this gate and this huge wind came by. And I wondered when the last time was that a migis was here with our relatives. When I went over there, I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to stay there and reconnect.”

Some might ask the rhetorical question, “Why does it matter in this millennium, in this time of climate change, affluence and multiracial societies, why does it matter that the Ojibwe giiwewag – come home?”

The answer is because when we come home, we are all healed and the land is healed in the process.

Denied a homeland, we are without a compass. Where we were forced to live is not the place the Creator has instructed us to move. It is why we are sad.

And that is why niwii giiwemin – we are coming home. The golden-breasted flicker awaits. She remains there, watching centuries of humans come and go, and she remains.

Winona LaDuke, an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg, lives and works on the White Earth Reservation. The environmental activist, among other projects, has been a strong proponent for protecting wild rice from genetic alterations.