Lac Vieux Desert: Ojibwe Homeland at the Headwaters

In the far western reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the state nearly touches Wisconsin, a small lake sits at the source of the Wisconsin River. The Ojibwe people called it Lac Vieux Desert, the Lake of the Old Clearing. They had been here for generations, the southern branch of the great Ojibwe Nation that had spread westward from Sault Sainte Marie following the ancient water highways of the Great Lakes.

The Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa originally lived on South Island in the lake itself, moving to the south shore around eighteen eighty. Their chiefs had signed the Treaty of Saint Peters in eighteen thirty-seven, the Treaty of La Pointe in eighteen forty-two, and a second Treaty of La Pointe in eighteen fifty-four, each one ceding more of their ancestral lands to the United States. That final treaty also established the Lac Vieux Desert Reservation. The Band had given up a vast homeland in exchange for twelve hundred sixty-nine acres of federal trust land.

Beginning with the Indian Reorganization Act of nineteen thirty-four, the Lac Vieux Desert Band was treated administratively as part of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community rather than as a sovereign people in their own right. That changed on September eighth, nineteen eighty-eight, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians Act, the legislation that officially recognized the Band as a separate and distinct tribe. It had taken fifty-four years to correct.

Today the reservation near Watersmeet, Michigan sits near the Wisconsin border, surrounded by the Ottawa National Forest, and the Wisconsin River, one of the great rivers of the Upper Midwest, begins its journey south from this very lake. The Ojibwe were here first, and they named it well.