How Grand Portage Anishinaabe was erased from Isle Royale National Park — and fought for inclusion

CATHY WURZER: If you've visited Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior about 50 years ago, the story you heard about what makes that place special would have left out quite a bit-- specifically, the site's connections to Ojibwe people, past and present. We heard about that history in a past episode of the award-winning podcast It Happens Here by WTIP Radio, North Shore Community review. In this next episode, producers Staci Drouillard and Leah Lemm explain how the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and allies in the National Park Service worked to rectify the erasure of Ojibwe people from the National Park.

LEAH LEMM: [INAUDIBLE]. Hello. I'm Leah Lemm, a citizen of the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe and co-host and producer of the Native Lights podcast.

STACI DROUILLARD: And this is Staci Drouillard, a Grand Portage Ojibwe descendant and WTIP producer. It Happens Here is an ongoing series that explores the history of racial inequality in the communities that live in far Northeastern Minnesota. In this segment, we continue to explore the cultural history of Minong, or Isle Royale, which was first recognized as the traditional cultural property of the Grand Portage Ojibwe in July of 2019.

Anna Deschampe, Grand Portage Band member and Public Information Officer at the Grand Portage National Monument, spoke with WTIP's Rhonda Silence when the Grand Portage flag was raised on the island after many years of work by tribal officials and allies within the National Park System.

RHONDA SILENCE: What does that mean to you to have that flag there?

ANNA DESCHAMPE: To me personally, it's really powerful. And it speaks to the relationship that the Grand Portage Anishinaabe have with the water, with Minong or Isle Royale. This is for the people of Grand Portage-- and not just us who are out here, but everybody and our families and those who are related to our children and our grandchildren, but also those that came before us.

And to me, that's really important, and that's really special. I've had a lot of my teachers in my life who aren't here anymore who were very connected to this place and worked for many, many years for us to be able to take the joy that we're taking today in actually having this celebration. So it's been a lot of years of a lot of work of people for a long time from Grand Portage, and that, to me, is what's special. It's us carrying on the vision and the wishes of our ancestors.

STACI DROUILLARD: Tim Cochrane is the author of Minong, The Good Place. A retired employee of the National Park Service, Tim worked closely with Anna's father, Norman Deschampe, who served as Tribal Chair of the Grand Portage Ojibwe for 28 years and was one of the key figures in securing traditional cultural property designation.

In the forward he wrote to his friend Tim Cochran's book, the longtime chair wrote that, quote, "One thing that has stayed the same is the Grand Portage peoples' economic interest in the island. We are interested in how we might work there and make a living. Years ago, it was the economics of living and finding your food there-- fish, caribou, and maple sugar, or maybe a job.

Food from the island was traded or bartered. We were a part of the economic system then and remain interested today. But it is different now because other people make up the rules of being there. Some rules are good, but they remain other people's rules." I asked him what he thought the former chairman may have meant by that.

TIM COCHRANE: Norman is basically just acknowledging that there were rules there before the present, before the modern era, and they, the Grand Portage people, were the makers of those rules, and they abided by that.

LEAH LEMM: When the Treaty of 1842 was signed at La Point, Wisconsin, it ceded a vast amount of traditional Ojibwe homelands to the US government. The language of the treaty describes the desired territory as beginning at the mouth of Chocolate River of Lake Superior, thence northwardly across said lake to intersect the boundary line between the United States and the province of Canada, thence up said Lake Superior to the mouth of the Saint Louis or Fond Du Lac River, including all the islands in said lake. It should be noted that representatives from the Grand Portage Band were not invited to the treaty signing.

TIM COCHRANE: The Indian agent at the time, Robert Stewart, did not invite the Grand Portage people to the 1842 treaty. And in fact, if you look at the record, he wasn't even sure whether he was going to include Isle Royale at the time, but he did, and the Grand Portage people weren't there.

It was incredibly duplicitous because at the same time, he was paying for a Catholic missionary to have a school taught in Grand Portage. So in that case, it was an erasure of the people who knew the most about Isle Royale and had the most to lose on Isle Royale.

LEAH LEMM: The primary motivations at the time? A legendary amount of copper.

TIM COCHRANE: There was legends of an island that was made of so much copper that you could tap it, and it would ring like a bell. It was called copper fever at the time in the upper Peninsula of Michigan. Eventually, that spilled over into Isle Royale. So it was the hope that people could make money, and they could make a lot of money if there was access to Isle Royale and the ability to mine it.

STACI DROUILLARD: Let's go back to the first episode and Merriam-Webster's second definition of racism, which is, quote, "Racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, or political advantage of another." I asked Tim Cochrane how the process of land acquisition at Isle Royale did or didn't fit into this definition, and he said--

TIM COCHRANE: It was institutional racism in the sense of not inviting the Grand Portage people to the treaty making, and then it was also institutional racism where you get, basically, kinfolk fighting amongst themselves and working their pressure to get, in this case, one tribe to eventually sign or eventually agree to it, which is what happened two years later in the 1844 Isle Royale Compact. So it's a pretty prime and horrible example of that.

LEAH LEMM: When the Treaty of 1844 was signed, representatives of other Lake Superior bands, as well as the very large Mississippi Ojibwe bands, were invited to treaty negotiations as a strategic way to pit one group of Ojibwe against the other-- a way to divide and conquer without ever drawing a weapon. According to Tim Cochrane, the incentive for Western or Mississippi River Ojibwe was treaty annuities, even though no one at La Point doubted that Isle Royale belonged to the Grand Portage Band.

STACI DROUILLARD: And years later when the National Park was established in 1931, again, no one at Grand Portage was consulted. Here's how Tim views the systematic erasure of the Grand Portage peoples presence at Isle Royale.

TIM COCHRANE: When the park was created-- the National Park-- in the 1930s and then the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, there was basically a non-story about Indigenous people on Isle Royale. And so what is that all about? Why was there this erasure that you talk about, this making, not acknowledging?

If you don't acknowledge that there was a historic Indigenous past, then one, it's a simpler story, and two, you're not starting the story about a park with a horrible act, with a usurping act of taking it.

It ends up being a more palatable story for folks where they don't have to go through any guilt that they're visiting Isle Royale and knowing that it was taken from Indigenous people, from Grand Portage and Fort William.

STACI DROUILLARD: When Minong was designated the traditional cultural property of the Grand Portage people, the old rules of cultural conduct created over 2,000 years ago or more are still secondary to other people's rules. Given this reality, I asked Tim Cochrane if he felt that the designation was purely symbolic or if it made steps toward a more equitable relationship between the US government and the Grand Portage nation, and he said--

TIM COCHRANE: There's a fair bit of informal conversations that are going on between Isle Royale and Grand Portage that never used to happen before. That to me is sort of the best indication that there is the seeds for more bold steps towards equality, yes.

STACI DROUILLARD: For WTIP, this is Staci Drouillard.

LEAH LEMM: And this is Leah Lemm. It Happens Here is produced by WTIP, North Shore Community Radio, and is funded in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

CATHY WURZER: Staci Drouillard and Leah Lemm are producers of the podcast It Happens Here from WTIP, North Shore Community Radio. You can find all the episodes at wtip.org. By the way, special shout out to Staci Drouillard for winning a Minnesota Book Award for Memoir for her book Seven Aunts. Congratulations, Staci. It's an excellent book, and we talked to Staci about it last year. You can check out the Minnesota Now archives at mprnews.org for that interview.