Living legacy: Hank Bailey’s relationship to the land
Photos by Grace Johnson
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
About a block up the road from the old Cannery down on the shore in Glen Haven, Henry “Hank” Bailey gets out of a white Lexus in front of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century building that looks like it used to be a store. The whole village is deserted and sad. Glen Haven today is a bleak little shore-side ghost town in the bright sunlight. It’s the off-season, middle of May, the leaves on the trees are in delicate shades, fuzzy-looking and babyish in their newness.
Hank is an Indian man in his late 60s, recently retired from the Department of Natural Resources at the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. He moves easily, smoothly, sure of himself, but somehow humble, too, without arrogance. “This is what I want to show you,” he says when I reach him. He points to a trail behind the building, now marked with national park signs. “My mother’s family lived down this trail.” It’s cold suddenly, with a gust of wind off the lake and we instinctively turn that way to look at the water. Lake Michigan is blue-green, like an ad for a vacation in the Bahamas. It might be 40 0r 50 degrees but with the wind it feels colder.
“I knew you grew up around here,” Hank says, “so I wanted to start here.” I tell him that I used to walk that trail looking for arbutus. I’d heard there had been an Indian camp there. I’d also heard D. H. Day, one of the first lumber barons, had successfully lobbied the government in Lansing to create a public state park, a not-so-subtle way to push the Indians along when there was no more need for their labors. The former D. H. Day State Park is now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Hank explains that relatives on his mother’s side of the family, people with the last name of Jackson, would have worked in Day’s lumber business. D.H. Day came to Glen Haven in 1911, but there had been a lumber mill there before that, and as early as 1851, John Dorsey, a man born in Ireland and brought to America as an infant, had been teaching the Indians in Glen Haven and Glen Arbor how to make barrels so they could ship their salted fish to Chicago. Dorsey was a cooper, a barrel-maker, and spoke Ottawa fluently. Indians had camps all over Michigan and Hank Bailey’s family, in some fashion, was surely in Glen Haven before the mills or even the barrel-making. Hank says, “My people were here. We’ve always been here. We’re still here and hopefully will always be here.”
I’ve heard of the Jackson family. The Jacksons were friends with Frank Fradd in Empire. Fradd recounted visits to the campsite of the man called “Indian Jackson”, no first name, in the early 1900s in an area on the north side of Empire, near a little stream. This is now a Natural Area called Chippewa Run, with a small parking lot and some trails, owned by the Leelanau Conservancy, a land preservation group in Leland, and is open to the public.
When the man called “Indian Jackson” by the white people died, he was very old. The age listed on his death certificate is 115. When Mr. Jackson was buried in the woods out behind the Maple Grove Cemetery, Fradd was dismayed, not only because he’d been friends of the family, but because it seemed to be such an unnecessary and mean-spirited snub. In Some Other Day – Remembering Empire, a collection of oral histories, Fradd was recorded as saying, “No matter how poor, every white and nine black people buried there were always furnished a grave in a lot, and a casket to be buried in, and the cost was paid by someone. But [the Indians] were buried in the woods [in what] was called Potter’s Field. Webster’s dictionary says, ‘This means a burial ground for a person who dies poor or unknown.’ But who knows? All of these Indian ancestors were buried in the open land, so maybe they would prefer it that way.”
In its heyday, the timber mills in Glen Haven and Empire required as many men as they could get to do the work. It took 30 men three hours to load and unload a ship – first the schooners and later the steamers — and that doesn’t even get to how many men and teams of horses it took to get the timber in the first place. Michigan’s trees rebuilt Chicago after the big fire in the fall of 1871.
“The women would have cooked for their men,” Hank says. “Probably they cooked for the people who worked at the mill. It would have been cold on the shore, but they were back in this little valley, with the dune between them and the lake, and it would have been warmer.”
Hank says, “I have another place to show you,” and tells me to follow him in my car. He stops at the corner, where M-109 turns to go up the hill toward Empire. He gets out of his car and comes to my window and points to the northeast corner, “A school used to be there.” Hank’s Great Uncle Antoine Jackson attended the school there for a time when he was young. Antoine also matured into the logging industry like his family. Hank looks up toward the ridge and, making a sweeping gesture, says, “All through here, there’s burnt rock from ancient campfires. Our ancestors were here for centuries.”
Hank wants to show me another place, on Westman Road, the road that runs between the Homestead on Lake Michigan and Dunn’s Farm Road along Glen Lake. Mrs. Westman, the sister of Hank’s great-grandmother, lived on the road. “If you look,” Hank says, getting out of his car after we turn off M-22 near the Homestead, “You can see the dip where they had a root cellar.”
Glen Arbor Indians escaped being force-marched west during Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal, but Indian villages, both those that were well-established and those that were impromptu, were often burned down by white settlers who laid claim to the land. Sometimes white settlers said the land had been sold to them, and they had title to it, and other times they claimed the land had been lost through back taxes. The government’s rules regarding Indians were an ever-changing checkerboard: as non-citizens, they were sometimes told they couldn’t’ own land; other times they were told they didn’t have to pay taxes since the land had been reserved to them by treaty. And the rules kept morphing. Hank’s father Henry Bailey was born in 1917 and was not an American citizen until 1924.
On French Road in Leelanau County, an Indian village was burned one night in 1881. In Vonda Belanger’s book, Heritage of Provemont, the people who lived there are named: Keduenachgud, Kewayguiscum, Louis O-Kin-pewan-O, NeChquay, Jos. Shema Kaw, Saw ne quay, C. L. O’Kinwan, Way Waysemah, An naw no quay, F. Kimp Wano, Say hego bay, Ne Bahne geshik, Mutch wetah, Eliz Muskotass uqua, Wah be mingo, and Etowe gezhick. “The combined properties of this group,” Belanger writes, “totaled about 1160 acres.” October 15, 1900, during the day, the Indian village at Burt Lake in Cheboygan County, was burned down by a sheriff’s posse, reportedly because the Indians hadn’t paid any taxes. Another way white settlers had of pushing Indians off the land was by creating a town dump where they were living. Westman Road used to be where the Glen Arbor town dump was located, and the same was true of the area near the Indian village on French Road.
Hank sits down on the ground with his back to a log, “My great-grandmother’s sister married a Westman.” He points across the road to the east. “There was a crippled guy in a nearby house and they took care of him.”
Some of the most desirable places to live in the Glen Arbor area – the Homestead, Dunn’s Farm, the Dorsey Trailer Park – were traditional Indian campsites. At the Homestead, they came every spring to fish and make reed sleeping mats. At Dunn’s Farm, they were there all summer: Michigan State University anthropologists have found burned wild rice seeds there dating back 4,000 years, and Mike Dow, whose family has a 100-year-old cottage nearby, said he has found arrowheads. The Dorsey Trailer Park, according to Jim Dorsey, was shown to his great-grandfather, John Dorsey, by an Indian friend who thought it one of the most beautiful and peaceful places on Glen Lake. As recently as the 1930s, summer people could remember Indian women going by canoe around Glen Lake, selling baskets to the houses on the shore. Nan Helm, in Burdickville, recalled Indians coming to sell baskets at her father’s little store.
It’s warm out of the wind. There are few leaves on the trees, a time for quail to build nests in the dry leaves on the ground and for partridges to drum in romantic quest. There are no insects yet. “My grandmother and her sister were great basket-makers,” Hank says. “There’s a photo of them. The hills [in the photo] were bare.” The entire peninsula had been clear-cut by then. “It might have been here.” He looks north and east as if trying to see the hills here and recall the ones in the photo. He could be talking about the rooms of his house.
Sitting at the edge of Westman road where some of his mother’s relatives once made baskets and took care of a crippled man, Hank says that the source of his spiritual strength is his relationship to the land. “I see people who come to this country. They don’t care about the land. They don’t know who they are. I know who I am so strongly. I’m part of this. I’m black wolf clan. A wolf is a natural hunter.” A hunter is a problem solver. A hunter works with reality, with complexity, with contradiction. And must correlate, compare, and cross-reference countless pieces of information: about the weather, the color of the sky, the way the wind is blowing, the animal signs, the endless scents, the seasonal habits of all creatures, the sounds, the lack of sounds.
“As a young kid, out in the woods alone, I felt right at home,” Hank says. “When I was in public, I knew Indians weren’t looked at in a good way. But in the woods, I knew I was good. When you feel the [natural] environment around you, and know you are a part of it — when you feel that, you know you aren’t more or less and you know you’re just part of it — that’s a good thing.” The earth is an extension of his own being and he is an extension of the earth; to foolishly or wantonly, to deliberately hurt the earth would be to wound and possibly destroy himself, and that would be a sacrilege.
“Let’s step back a few years,” Hank says. “President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of the 1830s. Everyone knows about the Trail of Tears. But no one knows about the Trail of Death [down through southern Michigan]. So, we were running and hiding, just hiding out in the forests. This was going on for years.” Some Indians retreated to the areas back in the swamps and dunes, land the Europeans didn’t want because it couldn’t be farmed, some went north to Canada and stayed on Manitoulin island, where there have been Ottawa people for at least 10,000 years and possibly for 30,000 years. Manitoulin, with a year-round population of about 12,000 people, is the only unceded Indian land in North America.
“The Jackson family, all my relatives, they really didn’t have any place to work, so taking out the trees, was the only work they had. My mother grew up on Craker road near Northport. This would have been a little bit of a trip in those days [for members of her family], but I’m sure this is where they were because this is where the work was.”
The Treaty of Washington 1836, in which the Ottawa people with their backs against the wall because of the Indian Removal Act were forced into ceding their land, allowed Michigan to legally become a state in 1837. One of Hank’s great-grandfathers on his father’s side, Cobmoosa from the Little River Band of Ottawa, was a signatory to the treaty. Cobmoosa died at the age of 98 near Lowell. In old age he lived with one of his daughters who had a husband named Joe Bailey, one of Hank Bailey’s relatives on his father’s side. Fifty-four Ottawa and Chippewa chiefs were involved in the 1836 treaty.
The cutting of the virgin timber, which began as soon as the treaty of 1836 was signed, made Michigan one the richest states in the union. The clear-cutting destroyed the fish, the game, the rivers, the forests. That treaty, theoretically, gave Indians the right to stay in the state, but like many treaties it was more honored in the breach than in the observance. “We never got any of the things they said we were going to get,” Hank says. There was supposed to be approximately $540,000 in cash, but most of that went to white negotiators. Henry Schoolcraft, one of the negotiators, was accused by the United States government of absconding with funds, but was never prosecuted. During this period, Schoolcraft, who had been married to an Indian woman from a prominent family at the Soo, changed his name to Colcraft (in what today would be recognized as an identity crisis), and moved back to New York State, marrying a southern spinster who was wealthy from selling her slaves.
“We lost everything,” Hank says about the dirty deals in the treaties. He doesn’t enumerate. He’s quiet for a while, then says, “Hitler did what he did in a short time. What happened to Indians happened over a long time.” Indian children were taken from their parents and put in orphanages where they were beaten for speaking their own language, abused physically and sometimes sexually. “My father ran away three times. He survived by escaping into alcohol. My parents both spoke the Ottawa language. The language stopped — in one generation, my parents’ generation.” He pauses, “I think it’s just human nature [the genocide of the Indians]. It’s a cruel world out there.”
Classes in the Ottawa language are now taught at the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians by a native speaker from Manitoulin Island. The language is also taught at Northwestern Michigan College. Hank says the re-learning of the language is part of an Indian Renaissance that’s happening all across the country. In a country to which Europeans came, in part, for freedom of religion, the Indian religion was illegal until 1974 with passing of the Indian Freedom of Religion Act. Hank says, “The idea of calling our way of life a religion is incorrect anyhow. The way we lived our life was a way of living in harmony within our universe. We understood we were not the best part of our environment. Just a part of the Circle of Life.” Now, the Indian people and culture, once on the brink of extinction, are experiencing a rebirth.
“Luck. Perseverance, my DNA,” Hank says, is what has saved him from suicide and alcoholism. “I’m not sure who my spirit protector is, but I’ve got a beauty. I sailed on the freighters. It was late fall, 1975. We’d been up on Upper Lake Michigan. It was cold. Miserable. The decks were iced over. I just wanted to be back on shore.” Hank’s ship, the Joseph Young, was on its way down to Chicago, to go into dry dock for the winter. While they were waiting in the Chicago River, the bosun, in charge of the everyday running of the ship, lost his mind for a spell, attacking imaginary beings with a fire ax, and setting off flares.
“I was on the steamship Joseph Young; the Edmund Fitzgerald was across the [Chicago] river. The flares were landing on their deck. Someone must have called the police or ambulance [to take the bosun]. The Edmund Fitzgerald’s crew was preparing for another trip up the lakes. Heading for a western Lake Superior port. I remember waving to three men on the deck of the Fitzgerald as they left the south side of Chicago port. The whole crew went down to the bottom of Lake Superior on the return trip. I could have been on the Edmund Fitzgerald instead of the Joseph Young.” Twenty-nine men went down on the Edmund Fitzgerald. Hank says that while he was sailing on the Great Lakes, his marriage foundered. Married at 18 and a father at 19, with finally three children, the marriage break-up was “not a happy thing for my kids.” He loves his children, and loves being a grandfather and great-grandfather, and is grateful now for having been restored to a good relationship with his children, but that rough early time in his life, after he got off the boats, “sent me into a spiral,” and he became a roustabout and a traveler.
Hank says he saw Mt. St. Helen’s erupt in 1980 from a plane window. “If you ever think you’re somthin’, just look at a mountain blowin’ up. There was thunder and lightning. It had its own weather in there.” He chased the rodeos out west and fished in the Columbia River of Washington. Hank also worked as a wildfire fighter in the mountains of Washington. It was dangerous work and he had a few close calls. He credits a childhood close to nature, and his Indian ancestors, with his survival. He grew up in Benzie County, near big Platte Lake. “We were poor, but we didn’t think we were poor. We had the lake.” He liked school, especially high school where he was a star athlete. He’s proud of the fact that his father, Henry Bailey, for whom he’s named, was a grandson of the great Ottawa leader, Cobmoosa, from the Grand Rapids area.
“Cobmoosa was a great orator. He was called the great walker. He could be on one side of the state at a meeting one day, and on the other side just a few days later. My cousin John [Bailey] calls him the Luke Skywalker of the Ottawa, because of his ability to get quickly from one side of the state to other.” Hank pauses. “Way back when, the people of this country called me a savage. Then I became known as an Indian. That was okay, we got used to it – so long as, you know, they said it with respect. Then somewhere along the way, I became a Native American. Now I look at the way people [in other countries] see this country. If I were to leave here, if I were to say that I’m a Native American, that’s dangerous. Someone might want to shoot me because I’m an American. Is this another way to get rid of us?” The word Indian, according to some, was coined by Columbus who thought he had reached India when he landed in Florida.
Hank was one of nine children. “We were bringing game home all the time. We knew how to set snares [for rabbits]. I speared a 19-pound Northern Pike when I was 10. It was 43-inches long and I was only 56-inches tall.” He was in a fish shanty on the ice at the east end of Platte Lake. His father had just left to run to nearby Honor to get lunch for them. “I could hear his footsteps walking away,” Hank says, when his spear struck the huge fish. “He was so strong, he was swimming away with the spear.”
Ultimately, Hank had to stick his arm in the water up to his arm pits to push the spear back into the fish before pulling it up and dragging it backward out of the ice shanty onto the ice. A small battle had ensued to get the pike out of the shanty with everything inside the shanty being knocked every which way. A Northern Pike is a predator with eyes situated on top of its head for sight. It is that fish with the underslung jaw. “My gal [Amy Russello], she’s incredible. She knew the Northern Pike is my favorite fish. She commissioned a painting of a Northern Pike as a present. The pike is still my mother’s favorite eating fish.” Pike tastes like sole, but with firmer flesh. Because of the Y bones, a Northern Pike must be expertly filleted and eaten with care. Hank’s mother, Betty (nee Franklin) Bailey, now Edwards, a woman he describes as “quiet, resourceful,” is very near to 90 and lives at Omena. This is a mile south from where she grew up on Craker Road which is located south of Northport, the place she was born.
Hank, now that he’s retired, speaks to youth groups in churches and schools about the importance of taking care of the earth. He works with Jon Aylsworth at the Grand Traverse Band on a project called The Edible Forest. He’s also part of a program at Dartmouth College called Indigenous Confluence, with partners from the Grand Traverse Band, First Nations of Canada, and the Maori people of New Zealand, all working to restore the earth.
At a recent Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council (NMEAC) event, Hank Bailey received an award for his work to save the environment. Aaron Payment, the head of the tribe at the Soo and the keynote speaker at the NMEAC event, is also passionate about preventing environmental degradation. Both Bailey and Payment have been active in leading their respective tribes to protest the Canadian pipelines, liable to break due to age and poor engineering practices, undermining Michigan waters. The Canadian company, Enbridge Energy, with an outdated and increasingly controversial pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, was responsible for the disastrous 2010 contamination of the Kalamazoo River. All of the company’s pipelines are old; in many places, if they rupture, the rivers and lakes of Michigan will be irrevocably damaged. In Kalamazoo the company’s carelessness sickened people and killed fish and wildlife for miles.
“This was all predicted in our prophecies,” Hank says. “They said we would have everything taken from us: our children, our land, our language. But that then the eagles would come back, the bison would come back – and that is happening — and the white people would come to us and ask us how to save our mother.”
Hank is a traditional dancer and says, “My spirituality stepped in [for me]. If I know in my heart that what I’m doing is a good thing, I’ll push forward and let the Creator sort it out.” After speaking about the importance of taking care of the earth at the NMEAC event, he used a sacred eagle-bone whistle to call to the four directions – north, south, east and west – in a prayer with all of those attending, white and Indian, standing in quiet reverence.