Summary
The Beaver Island archipelago lies within the homelands of the Anishinaabek (Odawa/Ottawa and Ojibwe). That presence is continuous: it precedes every other settlement described in this knowledge base, it ran through the Strang period and the Irish period, and it is present now. The federally recognised tribe whose service area includes the outer islands is the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (LTBB); the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB) also holds a long history and constitutional rights on Beaver Island. Garden Island — Tagoning in the earliest name recorded here — was the centre of the archipelago’s Anishinaabe life and holds a significant burial ground.
This is a short article on purpose. The corpus this project holds is thin on the subject and hostile where it is not thin. It was assembled around the Strang literature, and the Strang literature is written by and for settlers. What follows is what the sources actually support; the Open questions section is longer than the History section, and that is the honest result rather than a failure to write more.
A note on the concept, and on the sources
The SKOS concept this article surveys, c:era-indigenous, carries an explicit
scope note: “Not a closed period. Framing this as an ‘era’ that ended would be
wrong; Anishinaabe presence is continuous.” Nothing below should be read as a
chapter that closes.
The documentary problem is specific and worth stating plainly:
- The 19th-century sources held here were written by settlers with interests
adverse to Anishinaabe people, and they use derogatory vocabulary as ordinary
register. The concordance’s
peoplesgroup records 2,818 uses of “Indian” across 304 documents against 44 of “Anishinaabe” across 8 — and nearly all of the latter are from the modern island newspaper. - The one pamphlet in the collection whose title promises Indigenous content, J. C. Wright’s The Ottawan (1895), is a tourist souvenir book. Its two Beaver Island passages are both about Strang and were supplied by Strang’s son Charles; its Indigenous material is Little Traverse-region “legends” packaged for visitors, opening with a photograph captioned in the slur of the day. It is evidence about 1895 resort culture, not about the archipelago’s Anishinaabe communities.
- Federal enumeration excluded Anishinaabe people outright. Strang’s own paper reported the Mackinac County census of 1 June 1850 as 3,598 and noted, without further comment, that this “is exclusive of Indians.”
Where a claim below rests only on a settler source, it is attributed to that source rather than asserted.
What the sources support
Garden Island as the centre. Strang’s 1854 gazetteer gives the island’s name and a population:
The Indian name of this Island is Tagoning, signifying garden or cultivated land. It is now inhabited by about two hundred Indians, who subsist by fishing and raising corn and potatoes.
He adds that “Tagoning is considered the best Island for Cultivation in the group.” In the same volume he lists Garden Island among five Indian villages in Emmet County — with Cross Village, Middle Village, L’Arbre Croche and Bear Village — totalling about two thousand people.
A displacement, recorded in passing by the party that benefited. The same
gazetteer states that “The Garden Island Indians formerly resided on the North
end of Beaver Island, and have removed to Garden within six years.” Six years
before 1854 is 1848 — the year Strang’s colony established itself at the north
harbour. Strang records the move as a fact and offers no cause. confidence: probable for the coincidence of dates; the causal reading is inference, not
source.
Political resistance to the kingdom. Strang’s own account describes chiefs Kimmeoue, Peaine, Watanesa and Chenotin, with thirty men and two interpreters, confronting him; he reports that Peaine, speaking on behalf of the Odawa and Ojibwe, threatened war on the Mormons should any of them sue a Gentile at law, and he records his own dismissal of the chiefs — “Your voice is like a scolding woman. I will not hear you. March on.” Told by a hostile witness against himself (the wording throughout is Strang’s, in Strang’s register), the episode is good evidence that the archipelago’s Anishinaabe leadership acted as an independent political power against the colony. The township that covers the south of Beaver Island still carries Chief Peaine’s name; it was erected in 1847.
Anishinaabe people in the island economy. Elizabeth Whitney Williams, who grew up on the island through the Strang years, records Anishinaabe fishermen gathering “at Beaver Harbor to sell their fish”. Strang’s fisheries chapter describes Anishinaabe fishermen being systematically defrauded by traders — “on a fishery where a dozen Indians were engaged, they were often plundered in this way to the amount of one hundred barrels in a season” — and claims the Peaine township liquor bond of 1851 improved their position. That claim is Strang’s own and is not independently confirmed here.
Catholicism and schooling. Williams records that she and her husband “remained on their island as teachers two years, from ’62 to ’64”, and remembers Chief Peaine; a 2025 Northern Islander profile of her adds that the post was a government teaching appointment on Garden Island beginning in July 1862. The modern Northern Islander also reports that Frederic Baraga visited Beaver Island in 1832 and, returning as Bishop in 1859, found a Native Catholic community on Garden Island with a school, a church and a post office.
The 20th century. Community sources report a village called Peshawbestown established on Beaver Island below Angeline’s Bluff in 1905, many of whose residents worked for the Beaver Island Lumber Company. The company’s departure is disputed: sources held here give 1915, 1916 and 1917. The same sources report a Native village on High Island abandoned after the November 1940 storm and a tradition that Pete Manatou was the last resident of Garden Island and died in the 1940s. These are community and planning sources, not a complete civil or tribal record held here.
The present. GTB’s federal recognition was restored in 1980 and LTBB was
federally recognised in 1994; LTBB’s service area includes the outer islands of
the archipelago. Both nations were consulted in the 2023 Master Plan; LTBB’s
Tribal Historic Preservation Office is engaged in identifying cultural resources
on the island; both hold non-trust property including docks in Paradise Bay; LTBB
produced the island’s 2010 land-use mapping and monitors the Lake Geneserath
fishery. The Beaver Island Historical Society’s newspaper carries a standing
Anishinaabek column, and Ghost Suppers (Jiibay Wiikongewin) are described there
as living practice among families on Beaver, Garden and High Islands. The
Anishinaabemowin name given there for Beaver Island is Amikwaganda — the
modern reflex of the name Frederic Baraga recorded in 1853 as Amikogenda
(“Beaver-Island, in Lake Michigan”, Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language,
p. 25; page image at data/books/page_evidence/baraga_1853_p25_leaf43.jpg),
which Wood’s Historic Mackinac (1918) prints as A-mic-wug-ain-dod, “Where
the beavers live, their home”. See docs/names.md for the full attestation
chain.
Garden Island burial ground
Garden Island holds a significant Anishinaabe burial ground. Its existence is attested by the island’s role as the centre of Anishinaabe life in the archipelago and by the LTBB Tribal Historic Preservation Office’s stated interest in the archipelago’s cultural resources; the 2023 Master Plan notes that most of Beaver Island carries state-assessed potential for archaeological features.
No location, extent, boundary or inventory is recorded in this knowledge base, and none should be. Burial sites are protected under tribal and federal preservation law, and the LTBB THPO — not this project — is the appropriate authority on what may be said about them. Nothing in the retrieved datasets (GNIS, NRHP points, OSM, the state cemetery layers) identifies it, and that absence should be left alone.
Significance
Every other theme in this knowledge base is dated: the settlement begins in 1847, the kingdom is proclaimed in 1850 and ends in 1856, the lumber company’s departure is disputed between 1915 and 1917, and the fishery declines in the mid-20th century. This one is not. Anishinaabe presence is the frame those episodes happened inside, and the archipelago’s two most conspicuous civil names — Peaine Township, and Ojibwa Island since 2022 — both point at it.
The practical consequence for research is that absence of evidence here is strongly not evidence of absence. The collection was built out from Strang, and a settler-built collection under-records exactly this subject. Filling the gap means going to sources this project does not hold: LTBB and GTB tribal records, the mission registers, the GLO field notes and patents, and oral history held by Anishinaabe families — the first of which requires the tribes’ own consent and participation, not archival access.
Open questions
- What is the archaeological and documented record of occupation before 1800? The Master Plan refers to ancient and sacred sites throughout the islands and to the archipelago’s use as a way-point on routes to the copper country of the Upper Peninsula. Nothing in the datasets held here bears on it.
- What did the Treaty of 1836 do to the archipelago specifically? Now
examined (text captured at
data/web/treaty_1836_washington.md): Article Third reserved “The Beaver islands of Lake Michigan for the use of the Beaver-island Indians” for a five-year term — filed under the Chippewa reservations article — and the annuity schedule names Kainwaybekis and Pazhikwaywitum “of Beaver islands”. The 1855 Treaty of Detroit (Art. 1, captured atdata/web/treaty_1855_detroit.md) assigned “for the Beaver Island Band — High Island, and Garden Island”. The LTBB Constitution (data/documents/ltbb_constitution.pdf) lists “the Beaver Islands” among the nine constituent bands and “Payzhickwaywedung - Beaver Island” among the Ogemuk — evidently the 1836 schedule’s Pazhikwaywitum. What remains open is how the five-year reservation term played out on the ground after 1841. - Williams says Garden and High Islands were “deeded to them by the government as their own.” The patent layer is now held. It includes 26 island-area patent records whose structured tribe field is populated (20 Chippewa and six Ottawa), with names, allotment numbers when present, dates, and legal descriptions. The next task is to map those legal descriptions specifically to Garden and High Islands and reconstruct later conveyances; the patents do not by themselves explain how land later passed into state or private hands.
- Who were Kimmeoue, Watanesa and Chenotin? Substantially answered by Charles Garrad, “Some Notes on the Ojibwa (Chippewa) of the Beaver Islands”, JBIH III (1988), pp. 7–11, and Sarah McKinley & Helen Collar, “Chief Peaine and the Mormons”, ibid., pp. 19–30 (both read via IA lending borrow, 2026-08-01): KIMMEOUE is probably the 1836 treaty’s KIMMEWUN, chief “at the Cross” on Little Traverse; Sarah McKinley names Peaine’s brothers An-den-e-my (“Ripe Corn”) and Wa-ton-a-saw (“Walk-on-Water” — evidently Strang’s WATANESA); Peaine = “Cloudy Day”, possibly the POUANAS of the 1781 Mackinac surrender, absent from the 1836 treaty but signing 1855/1856 as PE-ANE/PE-AINE. His descendant John Antwine was still acknowledged chief in St. James (Freesoil Avenue) in the early 1920s. Garrad also cites an 1840 census of the “Beaver-island Indians”: 199 people (39 men, 51 women, 109 children; 120 cleared acres, 35 agriculturalists; Schoolcraft 1851–54), and the McKinley memoir describes the c. 1849 Garden Island community: log houses, the mission priest Father Zorn, and a school taught in Anishinaabemowin. CHENOTIN remains unidentified. (The Antwine-photo caption’s “36-star flag — a gift at the Treaty of 1836” is anachronistic — 36 stars date 1865–67; a family tradition, not a treaty artifact.)
- What is the Anishinaabemowin toponymy of the archipelago? Beaver Island’s name is now attested back to 1853 (Amikogenda, Baraga — see docs/names.md); Garden Island’s Tagoning (Strang, 1854) remains the only other recorded island name. Blackbird (1887, 1897) and Schoolcraft were checked and give none; the neighboring islands’ names remain unrecorded here, and GNIS records none of them.
- What happened between the 1856 expulsion of the Strangites and 1905? The sources held here jump from Baraga’s 1859 visit to the Peshawbestown village of 1905 with almost nothing in between.
- Where are Anishinaabe voices in the pre-1930 record? Andrew J.
Blackbird’s own histories are now held (1887,
data/books/gutenberg/; 1897,data/books/internet_archive/completebothearl01blac/) — but neither mentions Beaver Island beyond Strang’s 1856 assassination, so the question stands: no source held here narrates the island itself in an Anishinaabe voice before the modern Northern Islander.
See also
- Garden Island
- High Island
- Township of Peaine
- Ojibwa Island
- Strang's biblical toponyms
- Commercial fishing
- Historiography
- James Jesse Strang
- Elizabeth Whitney Williams
Sources
See the sources: block above.