Many Grand Portage families have ties to Isle Royale. The Corcorans, my wife’s family, are one of them. Jim Corcoran, my father-in-law, worked at Todd Harbor picking up pulp lumber washed up on the rocky beaches. Jim’s brother and cousins—Scott Family members—worked with him. Jim’s dad, William Corcoran, ran a successful logging company. And William’s father-in-law, Andrew Jackson Scott, spent many years on the Island. Andrew Scott raised his family there for a while, fished sturgeons, and was elected justice of the peace at the McCargoe Cove mining settlement.

Jim and others told me about this pulpwood operation....

Enthralled to be on Isle Royale the first time, and better yet have a job there, I was chastened to learn that it was a park without a recent Native American history. I listened to fellow ranger talks, plowed into the headquarters library on Mott Island, only to discover that there were, at best, few records of Ojibwe on the Island. Within that first week, while entranced by the archipelago, I wondered openly what its history of aboriginal use was. Later, as a new park historian, I was asked to review a park-commissioned history that did not include a chapter...

Ojibwe lived in a landscape made distinctive by islands, which marry their geography of lands and waters. Ojibwe frequently made camps on islands, and while there, collected bird eggs and harvested berries. Islands were places of safety when paddling in hard winds and growing seas. Certain islands were particularly important as Ojibwe homelands—and perhaps even Ojibwe capitals such as Manitoulin in Lake Huron and Madeline as part of the Apostle Islands. More locally, the Ojibwe of the North Shore paddled in the sheltered lee of islands strung along the coast from Grand Portage to Thunder Bay. Kinsmen lived on...

Islands play a seminal part in Ojibwe oral tradition. In a determining myth, after the great flood a muskrat retrieves soil from the bottom of the lake and in doing so nearly drowns, but struggles and brings the mud to the surface. From that small clutch of soil an island is formed. The Ojibwe trickster Nanabushu breathes all over the newly created island, growing the earth. In at least one version, the mud from the bottom that re-creates the earth comes from near Isle Royale. In another myth, the narrator states, “The place where Minnabozho descended was an island in...

Lake Superior was a precarious road to Isle Royale for Ojibwe of the North Shore.¹ It had also been a pathway for the precursors of the Ojibwe. But the road was not obvious to the latecomers, the Euro-Americans. The stir of finding ancient mining pits scattered throughout the Island gave whites a rationale for why people might venture over the sometimes ferocious watery road to isolated islands. An unvoiced logic was afoot; it was only worth it for people to venture to Isle Royale for copper. That logic bonded the Euro-American miners with their aboriginal predecessors. Initially it helped obscure...

A succession of external forces removed North Shore Ojibwe from Minong. The cumulative effects of treaties—the Copper Treaty of 1842, the 1844 Compact, those of 1850 and 1854—did impact Ojibwe traveling to Minong. But even more forces were afoot. Through time, cumulative national, regional, and local changes slowed, and nearly ended, the use of Minong in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Grand Portage coalesced from dispersed clan groups into an Ojibwe settlement—in part because of the advantages of being there to trade with whites and having control of the portal into...

The nadir of North Shore Ojibwe’s relationship with Minong came with the establishment of Isle Royale National Park. Much like before the 1842 Treaty, there is no evidence that the Grand Portage Band was consulted prior to the creation of the park in concept in 1931, nor when the park was dedicated in 1946. Instead, alleviating crushing poverty was at the forefront of Grand Portage residents’ minds at the time. Despite the park being created, initially there were few rangers on the archipelago. Increasingly, especially in the 1960s and later, more park employees, and more importantly the addition of seaworthy...