Treaty of Detroit with the Ottawa and Chippewa (1855)

Summary

The Treaty of Detroit was signed on 31 July 1855, ratified on 15 April 1856, proclaimed on 10 September 1856, and published at 11 Statutes 621. It is the later treaty in this corpus that names the Beaver Island Band’s island holdings with precision.

Beaver Island provisions

Article First’s schedule includes this entry: “For the Beaver Island Band—High Island, and Garden Island.” The wording is evidence for the treaty’s allocation of those islands; it is not by itself a complete history of occupancy, title, or present-day jurisdiction. The Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago article places the provision alongside the much thinner local and settler record.

Article Fifth says that the “tribal organization” is dissolved in most respects under the instrument. That is quoted treaty language, not a timeless description of Anishinaabe political life or of current tribal sovereignty. The present knowledge base retains this distinction because later federal recognition and contemporary tribal governments are separate subjects requiring their own authoritative sources.

Open questions

• The corpus needs a page-image or National Archives transcription checked against this treaty-text capture.
• The legal history connecting the 1836 Beaver-island reservation, the 1855 island schedule, and later federal recognition is not yet modeled as a chain of legal proceedings.
• The treaty’s full schedule and all provisions should be indexed as structured evidence rather than represented only in this summary.

See also

• Treaty of Washington with the Ottawa, etc. (1836)
• High Island
• Garden Island
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago