Archie Miller, a cantankerous Mack truck of a man who would walk calmly past the “No Indians” sign in the Hotel Northern, spent decades of his life in the Manitou Straits. He was a caretaker of the lighthouse, a lumberjack and one of the most sought-after hunting and fishing guides.
I heat with wood. Most of us up here do. Wood is still cheaper than any other fuel, and it’s available. Some of us cut our own wood, but to do that you have to have a woodlot, a truck, a saw in good condition, and time. My husband and I cut our own wood one winter, but in retrospect it seems like that’s all we did.
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.
One of the most puzzling marriages in Michigan history, perhaps in American history, has to have been that between Henry Schoolcraft and his Native American wife, Jane. Henry, whose name now graces roads, schools, and counties in Michigan, was an explorer who worked for the United States Department of War. He was the Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie from 1823 to 1833. Jane was the daughter of an aristocratic Irish fur trader, John Johnston, and his wife, Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay, daughter of a powerful Chippewa chief.
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.
This essay originally appeared in Stocking’s book Letters from the Leelanau, University of Michigan Press, 1990. We’re reprinting it to launch a year-long series in the Glen Arbor Sun about the living and present-day legacy of Native Americans in Leelanau—one that survives beyond history books and museums.
Each summer, while traveling through Michigan’s lake country, I notice a wide and depressing variety of roadkill, evidence of creatures not equipped for encounters with large, speedy machinery and an ever-increasing dissection of pavement across former habitat. I usually also encounter some few fortunate creatures like turtles, which have somehow avoided being struck or smashed — yet who are trapped in the roadway, trying to negotiate their ponderous way across alien terrain.
When I spoke on the phone recently with Derek Bailey, current chair of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and now Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, he was crossing the Mackinac Bridge and returning home to Traverse City. The tires on his 2005 Saturn VUE hummed loudly as he passed over the rumble strips on the majestic arch that connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas.