Lake Superior Chippewa

Welcome to The Best of Ourselves with leadership and life coach, Marcia Hyatt.

In response to the closing of our local Coast Guard station, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa created its own search and rescue program.

And that alone is impressive.

But what really caught my attention was a line tucked into an article in our local paper.

Testing revealed a 70% chance the canoe was created between 992 and 1049 CE, an era known to archaeologists as the Late Woodland Period, when the Mississippian culture was flourishing, and indigenous groups were building effigy mounds and growing maize.

Did you know? Woodland period? Around this same time, the Cahokia people were expanding into Wisconsin, where they established trading posts and fortified settlements like Aztalon To better understand the canoe, the Society's experts are consulting with Larry Pluchinsky, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and Bill Quackenbush, a retired Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Both are longtime tribal partners on the Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey Project, which is being spearheaded by Thompson and Cicel Schroeder, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Today, the canoe rests on the lake bottom, roughly 15 feet below the surface.

There are also plenty of larger reservations without any permanent population.

For example, the Ontonagon Indian Reservation in Michigan's Upper Peninsula is mainly used by a branch of the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe as hunting and fishing lands, and the small Snoqualmie Reservation is almost entirely composed of the tribe's casino.

But of course, a majority of reservations are inhabited by anywhere between one and 174,000 people.

At the upper end of that spectrum, there's the physically largest, most populous, and by many measures, most politically developed Indian reservation, the Navajo Nation.

And it wasn't until I read about, um, a band of, of Natives in northern Wisconsin.

They're, they're a band of, um, uh, Chippewa Indians, Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.

Um, they had-- I don't know if you, if you want all the details here, but I'll try to keep it-

Yes

If it's real.

Yeah.

So yeah, um, that part of the story is, is definitely based on, um, the, uh, Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whi- which is a, um, a part of the Oj- Ojibwe tribe.

And, um, yeah, other, other parts are loosely based on, on real things that have happened.

In reaching the decision, the DNR applied all relevant state [laughs] statutes and rules and, and evaluated the proposed project against Minnesota's environmental review framework.

The DNR also considered input received from the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and from some environmental organizations.

Well, of course they did.

What, would you expect any less from the DNR? The Department of Natural Resources-

Being out here and receiving the monoman, I think is pretty powerful in itself.

Project partners include the 1854 Treaty Authority, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, St. Croix Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Douglas County, Ducks Unlimited, Lake Superior Research Institute, Minnesota Land Trust, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

That's a lot of people getting their hands in that cookie jar to help out with this.

And it's good.