Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

Most people associate Mackinac Island with a Victorian-era vibe, the car-free joy of horse-drawn wagons and bicycles and shopping for candy and souvenirs along Market Street.

Which neglects a few thousand years of the island's history.

“You go out there today, and it’s fudge and horses and carriages, and that’s great,” said Eric Hemenway, director of archives and records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. “But 200 years ago, it was warfare. People were fighting on the island.”

The island known to Native American tribes in the Great Lakes as “Great Turtle” is poised for a deeper dive into the story of Michigan’s original peoples. A set of six markers are now in place at strategic spots on M-185, which runs around the island’s perimeter. They describe Native American history and trade, burial grounds and history through the present.

And Biddle House – the oldest structure on the Island which dates to about 1780 – will undergo a makeover to present history through the eyes of Agatha Biddle, an Odawa chief who married a Philadelphia fur trader and was a front-row witness to key events on the island in the early 19th century.

“She lived in the house, she did business in the house, and we really liked the idea that she’s such a fascinating character,” Hemenway said. “She was her own boss, essentially, and actually she had more pull at times than her husband.”

Both the roadside signs and the Biddle House makeover are part of an effort to talk more about Native American history in the Straits of Mackinac, said Phil Porter, director of Mackinac State Historic Parks.

“There is an effort to work with tribal liaisons to do a more authentic and accurate job of interpreting Native American history in Michigan,” he said.

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Fundraising efforts are underway on the project, which will cost between $250,000 to $300,000. It is expected to open in 2019, Porter said.

The Straits of Mackinac have a rich historic and spiritual significance to Great Lakes tribes, Hemenway said.

“We believe our origin is in the Great Lakes and the Straits of Mackinac plays a role in our longstanding history,” he said. “We went through all these changes and wars and went to extreme circumstances, in some periods, to stay in the Straits.”

In the early 1800s, the Mackinac Island was a hub of fur-trading and commerce in the summers.

The treaty of 1836, which ceded more than a third of Michigan from Indian hands to the U.S., was signed on the island, but things were contentious both before and after the signing, Hemenway said.

The U.S. plan was for the tribes to pack up and move to Kansas, Hemenway said.

“They sent scouts out there,” he said. “There was no water, no trees, and there already were other natives out there. They came back and said, ‘We’ve got to stay home.’”

When they arrived, 4,000 strong on the island to sign the treaty, they found an article had been added in Washington D.C., granting them the right to keep reservation lands for only five years, after which they could be removed at the discretion of the president.”

Indian agent Henry Schoolcraft promised that would never happen.

“Everybody signs it, but in 1838 Schoolcraft comes back and says, ‘Pack up,’” Hemenway said. Things were tense from then until 1855, when a separate treaty was negotiated.

“Agatha is watching all this. Without a doubt, she was right in the thick of it as one of the chiefs of the Mackinac band,” he said. “We want to show in the Biddle House that the tribes were not just these passive participants in history. They were making their own decisions, their own moves.”

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The markers, which were put in place last summer, cost about $50,000 with fund-raising help from local businesses, year-round residents and summer guests. They are equipped with benches so bicyclists can pull over and take a rest while they read them.

The panels cover six key concepts: the cultural significance of the island; the use of Mackinac Island, Round Island and Bois Blanc Island as burial areas; Native American fishing and trade in Great Lakes waters, and the significance of Mackinac Island as a gathering place; the struggles over the years for French, British, Americans and various tribes to control the Straits and Mackinac Island; the Treaty of 1836; the fight to stay in the 19th century and for cultural and civil rights during the 20th century. The Treaty of 1836, for example, was used in a federal court ruling in 1979 to preserve Native American fishing rights.

About 20 percent of Mackinac Island’s year-round residents are identified in U.S. Census figures as Native American.

“We get stuck in the 1800s and left there,” Hemenway said of native history. “The Ojibwa and the Odawa are still living in the Straits until this very day.”

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey.