Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago

Summary

The Beaver Island archipelago lies within the homelands of the Anishinaabek (Odawa/Ottawa and Ojibwe). That presence is continuous: it precedes every other settlement on the archipelago, it ran through the Strang period and the Irish period, and it is present now. The federally recognised tribe whose service area includes the outer islands is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (LTBB); the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB) also holds a long history and constitutional rights on Beaver Island. Garden Island — Tagoning in the earliest name recorded here — was the centre of the archipelago’s Anishinaabe life and holds a significant burial ground.

This is a short article on purpose. The record here is thin on the subject and hostile where it is not thin. It was assembled around the Strang literature, and the Strang literature is written by and for settlers. What follows is what the sources actually support; the Open questions section is longer than the History section, and that is the honest result rather than a failure to write more.

A note on the concept, and on the sources

The SKOS concept this article surveys, c:era-indigenous, carries an explicit scope note: “Not a closed period. Framing this as an ‘era’ that ended would be wrong; Anishinaabe presence is continuous.” Nothing below should be read as a chapter that closes.

The documentary problem is specific and worth stating plainly:

• The 19th-century sources held here were written by settlers with interests adverse to Anishinaabe people, and they use derogatory vocabulary as ordinary register. The concordance’s peoples group records 2,818 uses of “Indian” across 304 documents against 44 of “Anishinaabe” across 8 — and nearly all of the latter are from the modern island newspaper.
• The one pamphlet in the collection whose title promises Indigenous content, J. C. Wright’s The Ottawan (1895), is a tourist souvenir book. Its two Beaver Island passages are both about Strang and were supplied by Strang’s son Charles; its Indigenous material is Little Traverse-region “legends” packaged for visitors, opening with a photograph captioned in the slur of the day. It is evidence about 1895 resort culture, not about the archipelago’s Anishinaabe communities.
• Federal enumeration excluded Anishinaabe people outright. Strang’s own paper, on 9 January 1851, reported the population of Mackinac County “by the census of June 1st, (including the unorganized counties attached,) 3,598” and noted, without further comment, that this “is exclusive of Indians.”¹

Where a claim below rests only on a settler source, it is attributed to that source rather than asserted.

What the sources support

Garden Island as the centre. Strang’s 1854 gazetteer gives the island’s name and a population:

The Indian name of this Island is Tagoning, signifying garden or cultivated land. It is now inhabited by about two hundred Indians, who subsist by fishing and raising corn and potatoes.

He adds that “Tagoning is considered the best Island for Cultivation in the group.”² In the same volume he lists Garden Island among five Indian villages in Emmet County — with Cross Village, Middle Village, L’Arbre Croche and Bear Village — totalling about two thousand people.³

A displacement, recorded in passing by the party that benefited. The same gazetteer states that “The Garden Island Indians formerly resided on the North end of Beaver Island, and have removed to Garden within six years.”³ Six years before 1854 is 1848 — the year Strang’s colony established itself at the north harbour. Strang records the move as a fact and offers no cause. confidence: probable for the coincidence of dates; the causal reading is inference, not source.

Political resistance to the kingdom. Under the heading “Indian Hostilities”, Strang’s own account places the episode in the winter of 1850–51 and describes chiefs Kimmeoue, Peaine, Watanesa and Chenotin calling on him “accompanied by thirty braves, thirteen white men and two interpreters”. He reports that Peaine, speaking for the Odawa and Ojibwe, “denounced war and annihilation against the Mormons, in case any of them sued a Gentile at law, warned him out to work a highway tax, attempted to arrest him, or cut any steamboat wood, except what was purchased by McKinley” — and he records his own dismissal of the chiefs: “Your voice is like a scolding woman. I will not hear you. March on.”⁴ Told by a hostile witness against himself, and framed by that witness as something traders had put the chiefs up to (the wording throughout is Strang’s, in Strang’s register), the episode is good evidence that the archipelago’s Anishinaabe leadership acted as an independent political power against the colony. The township that covers the south of Beaver Island still carries Chief Peaine’s name; it was erected in 1847.

Anishinaabe people in the island economy. Elizabeth Whitney Williams, who grew up on the island through the Strang years, records Anishinaabe fishermen gathering “at Beaver Harbor to sell their fish”.⁵ Strang’s fisheries chapter describes Anishinaabe fishermen being systematically defrauded by traders — “on a fishery where a dozen Indians were engaged, they were often plundered in this way to the amount of one hundred barrels in a season”⁶ — and claims the Peaine township liquor bond of 1851 improved their position. That claim is Strang’s own and is not independently confirmed here.

A mainland-facing market connection. In a local history first read in 1895 and revised in 1897, N. A. Parker says that people he calls “Indians, hunters, trappers, fishermen” travelled to Frankfort from Leelanau County and the Manitou, Fox, and Beaver islands to sell baskets, other self-made wares, and seasonal berries. The passage documents a regional connection including both island groups; it does not identify the travellers, specify a date or quantity, or show that any one transaction began on a particular island. Its terminology and mainland-settler point of view remain attributes of the source. Michigan Historical Collections, volume 28, 1898

An 1815 regional administrative attestation. A letter from Robert McDonall reprinted in volume 23 names Ottawas of L’Arbre Croche and Chippewas of Grand Traverse and the Beaver Islands among the Indigenous communities associated with British clothing distribution at the former post. The letter is a mediated, colonial administrative source; it supports regional presence and connection, not a population count or Indigenous-authored account.⁷

An 1816 regional agricultural attestation. A report by Michillimackinac Indian agent William Henry Puthuff, printed from an Indian Office letter book, groups Odawa communities at Cheboygan, L’Arbre Croche, the Beaver Islands, and Grand Traverse. Puthuff reports that the villages had advanced in agriculture and supplied corn, potatoes, and vegetables into the Mackinac and fur-trade economy. The stated 12,000-bushel figures are his aggregate estimate for the named regional communities, not a count for the Beaver Islands, nor a neutral account of Odawa life. Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910

An early-1815 colonial classification. A British officer’s Drummond Island letter, printed with the date “10 Jany. 1815-6,” discusses the people previously supplied through St. Joseph’s in the course of seeking instructions on postwar trade and contact. It groups the Ottawas of L’Arbre Croche with “the Chippawas of the Grand Traverse and of the Beaver Islands.” This makes the Beaver Islands legible in a colonial administrative network spanning Grand Traverse, Mackinac, and the former British post. The wording is McDonall’s, in service of British patronage and geopolitical interests; it is not treated as an Anishinaabe self-description, a population count, a treaty-rights conclusion, or a direct modern nation/band identity. Michigan Historical Collections, volume 23, 1895

A mediated Catholic-mission attestation. A 1915 Michigan Historical Collections footnote says that Verwyst’s Life of Bishop Baraga quotes a mission list naming “Beaver Island, with fifty-five Christians” and calling it Castor Island in manuscript. This extends the archival trail for a Catholic mission, but its multiple editorial layers and undated list mean it is neither a population total nor a substitute for the underlying Baraga record. Michigan Historical Collections, volume 39, 1915

An early published account of the 1832 visit. Verwyst’s 1895 Baraga sketch prints a first-person account of a Beaver Island visit, describing a village of eight bark huts, a council, and 22 baptisms on May 11. Its surrounding chronology places the episode in 1832. It is a later missionary-biography rendition, not a mission register or Anishinaabe testimony, and its terminology and framing belong to that source. Michigan Historical Collections, volume 26, 1895

Catholicism and schooling. Williams records that she and her husband “remained on their island as teachers two years, from ’62 to ’64”, and remembers Chief Peaine;⁵ a 2025 Northern Islander profile of her adds that the post was a government teaching appointment on Garden Island beginning in July 1862. The modern Northern Islander also reports that Frederic Baraga visited Beaver Island in 1832 and, returning as Bishop in 1859, found a Native Catholic community on Garden Island with a school, a church and a post office.

The 20th century. Community sources report a village called Peshawbestown established on Beaver Island below Angeline’s Bluff in 1905, many of whose residents worked for the Beaver Island Lumber Company. The company’s departure is disputed: sources held here give 1915, 1916 and 1917. The same sources report a Native village on High Island abandoned after the November 1940 storm and a tradition that Pete Manatou was the last resident of Garden Island and died in the 1940s. These are community and planning sources, not a complete civil or tribal record held here.

The present. GTB’s federal recognition was restored in 1980 and LTBB was federally recognised in 1994; LTBB’s service area includes the outer islands of the archipelago. Both nations were consulted in the 2023 Master Plan; LTBB’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office is engaged in identifying cultural resources on the island; both hold non-trust property including docks in Paradise Bay; LTBB produced the island’s 2010 land-use mapping and monitors the Lake Geneserath fishery. The Beaver Island Historical Society’s newspaper carries a standing Anishinaabek column, and Ghost Suppers (Jiibay Wiikongewin) are described there as living practice among families on Beaver, Garden and High Islands. The Anishinaabemowin name given there for Beaver Island is Amikwaganda — the modern reflex of the name Frederic Baraga recorded in 1853 as Amikogenda (“Beaver-Island, in Lake Michigan”, Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, p. 25),⁸ which Wood’s Historic Mackinac (1918) prints as A-mic-wug-ain-dod, “Where the beavers live, their home”.

The held Ojibwe People’s Dictionary entries for amik (“a beaver”) and minis (“an island”) supply modern lexical context for that name-attestation chain. They do not independently reconstruct or normalize the historical forms, and are not evidence of a historical Beaver Island community or place-name use on their own.

Garden Island burial ground

Garden Island holds a significant Anishinaabe burial ground. Its existence is attested by the island’s role as the centre of Anishinaabe life in the archipelago and by the LTBB Tribal Historic Preservation Office’s stated interest in the archipelago’s cultural resources; the 2023 Master Plan notes that most of Beaver Island carries state-assessed potential for archaeological features.

No location, extent, boundary or inventory is recorded here, and none should be. Burial sites are protected under tribal and federal preservation law, and the LTBB THPO — not this archive — is the appropriate authority on what may be said about them. No GNIS, NRHP, OpenStreetMap, or state cemetery record identifies it, and that absence should be left alone.

Significance

Every other episode in this island’s history is dated: the settlement begins in 1847, the kingdom is proclaimed in 1850 and ends in 1856, the lumber company’s departure is disputed between 1915 and 1917, and the fishery declines in the mid-20th century. This one is not. Anishinaabe presence is the frame those episodes happened inside, and the archipelago’s two most conspicuous civil names — Peaine Township, and Ojibwa Island since 2022 — both point at it.

The practical consequence for research is that absence of evidence here is strongly not evidence of absence. The collection was built out from Strang, and a settler-built collection under-records exactly this subject. Filling the gap means going to sources not held here: LTBB and GTB tribal records, the mission registers, and oral history held by Anishinaabe families. GLO patents and field-note volumes are held, but most are not transcribed or page-reviewed and neither can substitute for tribal records or consent. Work with the tribes requires their own consent and participation, not archival access.

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Added 28 July 2026 · revised 2 August 2026. Recent changes