It’s the last in a row of private properties along M-109. To the immediate east lies the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Behind looms Alligator Hill. The Fourth of July had come and gone, and things were relatively quiet; the doors to the house were left open to allow the breeze to pass through. An old retriever lay sound asleep in the front of the house. Near him, a pet bunny was safely caged in another room.
JoAnne Cook of the Grand Traverse Band will speak on the “History of the Odawa Anishinabek people from the Grand Traverse Region” on Tuesday, July 25, at 4:30 p.m. at the Leelanau Historical Society’s Norbert Gits Family Gallery (inside the museum), located at 203 E. Cedar Street in Leland.
This year in the Glen Arbor Sun we’re publishing a series on the living legacy of the Native Americans. A desire to push back against the rise of xenophobia in contemporary America is not the only reason we chose to examine the living legacy of the local Odawa and Ojibwe among us. Across civil society in Northern Michigan, and throughout the nation, it seems that more and more people are interested in learning the Native perspective on this land and the human history it has witnessed.
Ruby John, 26, is a jewel of a girl. Her name fits her. She’s also a gifted and versatile fiddler. One balmy Friday evening in mid-June she’s entertaining families at the Little Traverse Inn, fiddling in the Ruby Sky Band with some of her friends: Dane Hyde, who sings and plays guitar; Katie O’Conner, a singer and Irish dancer; and John Driscoll, a flautist and singer. The next week she’ll play for a staff dance at the Interlochen Arts Academy’s opening of summer camp. And after that, Saturday July 15, from 7 p.m.-1 a.m., Tucker’s in Northport. She’s known for playing a Métis-style of fiddle as well as Celtic, and standard country-and-mountain-style.
“So like, what do you guys do out there?” We get this question a lot, often loaded with presumptions of who we are and what we like to do. Which is fair. Let me be clear, my wife and I, a young married couple in our mid-20s, are outliers.
The Bay Area Transportation Authority (BATA) is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its successful Bike-n-Ride program. BATA’s Bike-n-Ride service has been helping cyclists enjoy bike trails in Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties for five years. This years’ service started Saturday, May 20 and runs through the summer and fall until October 22.
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.
The League of Women Voters Leelanau County (LWVLC) will host a forum entitled “Towards an Age Friendly Leelanau: How do we get there?” at noon on Wednesday, May 3, in the lower level of the Government Center in Suttons Bay.
2015 was the year of the storm. The “wind shear” on Sunday, August 2, packed 100-mile-per-hour gusts, toppled thousands of trees in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and around the Glen Lakes, rendered Glen Arbor impassible for days, caused millions of dollars in damages and cast a national spotlight on our rural town.
The road to our own personal ‘Tour de Leelanau’ started, in a grand sense, around the summer solstice, when we and our bikes pedaled out of the Chicago area with the intention, like so many others, of getting ‘out to the country’ to celebrate the warm months. Earlier, in the spring, while living and working in Los Angeles, we used a program called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) to get in contact with a number of farmers situated up and down the western coast of your great state.