A Turning Point in Place and Time

Madeline Island, or Mooningwanekaaning Minis, the place of the gold-breasted wood-pecker, is an ancient Native settlement where the Anishinaabe, also known as the Ojibwa or Chippewa, lived long before white explorers began arriving in the 1600s. The island became a center of the fur trade for a century and a half, and the Treaties of 1842 and 1854 were negotiated at LaPointe on Madeline Island. Mooningwanekaaning-minis also served as the southern capital of an Anishinaabe nation that stretched across four American states and three Canadian provinces, and for ten millennia people walked and canoed the lands around the island, fished its waters, and lived in reverence as part of a larger community that included relatives with fins, paws, wings, hooves, and roots.

Bayfield, Wisconsin · United States