BRUTUS — About a dozen men set off from the town of Cheboygan on Oct. 15, 1900. They were armed; some on foot, others on horseback.
As historic accounts attest, they were heading southwest toward a place they called “Indian Village.” They carried buckets of cheap and flammable kerosene, which was typically used for lighting lamps at the time.
Not that day.
The village where these men were heading was the home of the Cheboiganing Band – now called the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
On that day, most of the men of the Cheboiganing Band would have been walking to town where they were picking up their paychecks. Most of them worked for the nearby lumber mills.
The women, children and elders would have been carrying out their day like it was any other. Their village was on a small peninsula on Burt Lake, a peaceful place surrounded by white birches and maple trees. Accounts describe the village as having 20 cabins, several barns, a Catholic Church, places for livestock and space for farming.
At about 2 in the afternoon, the white men from Cheboygan arrived and hid in the woods near the village. They waited with their torches and rifles for a time that looked right. Then, one of the men approached the cabins and read from an official-looking piece of paper. It said the local court had ordered all the villagers to clear out – immediately.
Some people might have refused to leave at that moment. Historic accounts don’t say, but it wouldn’t have mattered. That afternoon, the Cheboygan men went from cabin to cabin chasing people out. The residents could only gather what they could carry – maybe some tools, blankets or clothes.
Then the men doused the cabins with the kerosene, struck their torches and burned the settlement to the ground. Centuries of Native residency went up in flames.
Dusk fell, some of the Cheboygan men rode off and it began to rain. The Native American men returned and took their families away from the smoldering ruins.
On that day in 1900, they lost their village, an important part of their heritage, and the land that was part of their identity. They vowed to seek justice. But, to do so, they had to prove they existed in the eyes of federal officials.
The aftermath
News of the village burnout traveled fast, but the reaction wasn’t always sympathetic. That week, an article was published in the Cheboygan Democrat Newspaper titled “Lo! The Poor Indian.”
It used a slur and said, “…the Indians, from the old down to the children, sat and watched the burning of what had been their homes and at last realized the seriousness of the law of the white man.”
In this case, the white man was John McGinn, a local banker and land speculator.
Even then, the inland lakes of Cheboygan County were high-value real estate. And John McGinn wanted that land, specifically on the Burt Lake peninsula.
He had a problem though. The Burt Lake Band were signatories of the 1836 Treaty of Washington. This treaty recognized the tribe and gave them reservation land and other benefits.
The peninsula on Burt Lake where their village had stood belonged to them.
To add to their standing, the Band had actually purchased the peninsula – 375 acres – and placed it in the trust of the state. They thought it would double the assurance that no one could take their homeland.
But that ended up being to John McGinn’s advantage. The reason? Taxes.
Because the land had been purchased by the tribe, a sovereign nation, local officials were confused. Should the property be taxed or not? So, some years it was taxed, other years it wasn’t. It all depended on who was serving in office at the time.
John McGinn seized on that inconsistency and went to the local court.
While the tribe had understood the land could not be taxed because it is a sovereign nation, McGinn argued the families in Indian Village had dodged paying taxes for years. And the local court agreed with him.
In addition, John McGinn began buying up the delinquent tax titles without the Band’s knowledge. He bought title after title until that day, Oct. 15, 1900, when he and the other Cheboygan men burned down the village.
Immediately after they were chased away – most of the villagers took shelter with nearby friends and family. Others may have traveled farther and moved in with other tribes in the Great Lakes region.
It was around this time, too, that Native American children were sent to residential boarding schools where they were punished for practicing Native culture, religion and language.
Ken Parkey, a Burt Lake Band elder, remembers how his family members were taken to these schools.
“My dad got taken to Holy Childhood, my dad and my uncle,” he said.
Holy Childhood was a boarding school about 15 miles away from Burt Lake. Parkey said it was so bad, his dad and uncle tried to run away. But the priest found them back near Burt Lake.
“So what they done is send my dad and my uncle to Mount Pleasant boarding school,” Parkey said. “Got ‘er down there and figured it’s too god-darn hard to run away from that school, you know.”
The first legal challenge
Word spread, letters were sent to legislators and some members of the Band were able to build new homes not far from Burt Lake. It took a decade, but the Band launched a legal fight in 1911.
Deborah Richmond is the Burt Lake Band tribal historian.
Richmond said the villagers would have known their eviction was wrong; they just had to prove it in court. “It couldn’t have been that confusing at the time…,” she said. “There was a treaty, they were given land. It was to be theirs forever. Why was it such a gray area?”
It took six more years for the case to get on the court docket.
Richard Wiles has researched the Band for almost five decades. He’s non-Native but is an honorary member of the Band.
He said, even after the case was on the docket, there would have been a lot of turnover – judges, attorneys, tribal leadership – and it all made matters more confusing.
“After a couple of years of one person trying to deal with the case, they’d be gone, and a new person would come in, and they’d have to start over getting up to speed on what was going on,” Wiles said.
When it finally came time for the Burt Lake Band to present their argument, Wiles said the members would’ve been excited and optimistic.
“We assumed like, absolutely, finally they’re gonna understand,” Richmond said. “Show the different things legally you need to show so a judge will understand it and say, ‘OK, this is ridiculous. And this is their property.’”
But John McGinn’s defense had an ace up their sleeve: Their strategy was to argue that the Burt Lake Band didn’t exist. It all came back to the treaties.
The Band had actually signed onto two treaties. The 1836 Treaty of Washington and another one about 20 years later.
Matthew Fletcher is a professor of tribal law at The University of Michigan and a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians.
Fletcher said the first treaty – The Treaty of Washington – created a fake tribe – the Ottawa and Chippewa nation. In reality, there were individual bands – with their own unique identity and sovereignty.
So, the second treaty was intended to correct that. It dissolved the fake Ottawa and Chippewa nation. But, in dissolving it, it allowed some lawyers to argue that certain tribes no longer existed.
“The problem with that – for every tribe in Michigan has signed this treaty, most notably the Michigan Ottawas – was that everybody looked at and said, ‘Oh, your tribe you agreed to terminate, self-terminate, you’ve abandoned your tribal relations. You have no treaty rights. You’re out,’” Fletcher said.
In 1917, after years of waiting, it only took the judge 12 days to issue his verdict in favor of McGinn. He essentially ruled that the Band wasn’t a tribe.
According to Richmond, the Band’s historian, it was the first of many devastating losses.
“Justice was not served,” she said. “I’m sure they were just crushed. And, again, that would just open the wound up all over again.”
New laws, new goals
Even though John McGinn died before the judge’s decision was handed down, the Burt Lake Band still could not return to their land – 17 years after being burned out. One of the only village buildings McGinn left standing was the Band’s Catholic church. In the years after the burnout, records show he used it as his pig barn.
McGinn sold off individual parcels of land. Other people bought them and built their own homes there. The peninsula was later renamed “Colonial Point” after a hotel that had been built by the lake.
After the judge’s ruling in favor of John McGinn, the Band’s identity in the eyes of the federal government was up in the air. Federal recognition is vital for a tribal community. It’s what unlocks money for healthcare, education, and the preservation of culture and history.
The judge’s ruling was not the end. The Band wasn’t going to stop there. The 1920s went by.
It wasn’t until the Great Depression that the tribe saw a new way forward. In 1934, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act. It allowed tribes to petition to be officially recognized by the federal government, to secure their own land and laws.
In Michigan at the time, with the passing of the IRA, four Native American tribes became sovereign nations.
But the Burt Lake Band was caught in what historian Richard Wiles calls a “catch-22.” Federal recognition was only granted to Native communities that were living on their ancestral land.
“But, guess what, the Burt Lake Band had lost their ancestor land because it had been taken from them,” Wiles said. “The federal government said, ‘Well, you have no land. We can’t reaffirm you.’”
A petition to be recognized was signed and sent by all the Band’s membership at the time. Burt Lake, along with many other tribes throughout the country, never even got a response.
“Those are the things that just pile up, generation after generation,” Deborah Richmond said. “Just makes you think, ‘Thought we were going to get past this, but we are still, it seems, to be getting worse – as far as the ridiculous nature of how we are viewed and treated.’”