Northern Historically

FROM: St. Paul Pioneer Press - April 4, 2003
Ancient Burial Site May Revert to Ojibwe - Superior

TRIBE HOPES TO BRING REMAINS BACK TO WISCONSIN POINT
By Steve Kuchera - Duluth News Tribune
  Nearly 90 years after their forbears were evicted from Wisconsin Point, Ojibwe Indians may regain control over a small part of land.
  If successful, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa may use the former U.S. Army Corp of Engineers property at the end of Wisconsin Point as a cemetery for human remains removed from the point in 1918.
  The remains were reburied in a mass grave in Superior's St. Francis Cemetery.
  "If we are successful in getting the property back, we would give due consideration for a reburial back on Wisconsin Point for those individuals who were put in the mass grave," said Band Chairman Robert 'Sonny' Peacock. "And we would like to keep that area as a historical site, probably educational as well."
  The Army declared the 18.2 acres property on a coastal barrier formation between Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, to be surplus late in 2002.
  Earlier this year, the General Services Administration, which will dispose of the property, asked other federal agencies if they wanted the land.
  The Bureau of Indian Affairs responded in March that it wants to obtain the property and hold it in trust for the Fond du Lac Band.
  The bureau will submit a formal application for the property to the General Services Administration later this month, BIA environmental scientist Herb Nelson said.
  The General Services Administration will review the application when it arrives.
  "If it's complete, we approve it, and the property is transferred," said General Services Administration reality specialist Arthur Ullenberg.
  The property includes two houses, a four-bay garage and a dock that were part of a former U.S. Lighthouse Station built about 1912-13. The Corp would reserve and easement on 3.33 acres of land to allow for work on the road and shipping channel.
  The federal government has owned the property since it condemned it in 1901. The Ojibwe lost the rest of Wisconsin Point about 1918 in a dispute with the Interstate Railroad Company.
  In 1914, area Ojibwe petitioned President Woodrow Wilson and Indian Commissioner Cato Sells for help in the ownership dispute.
  "We do with horror contemplate being torn from the property of our fathers on Wisconsin Point, our dear honored dead removed and the sacred cemetery desecrated," they wrote. "Seven generations and more lie buried in this cemetery, including Chief Osagie."
  But corporate interests prevailed, and the Ojibwe and some of their graves were moved.
  "We found one paper that was written by a young man who was a water boy out there when they were moving the cemetery," Superior Area Indian Center President Robert Miller said, "They only moved the graves that were well marked. Out of about 300 graves that were out there, they moved about 180. My grandmother knew where a lot were."
  Miller's grandmother was raised on the point. He said there were around seven homes in the village and its residents were evicted.
  Today, some people still consider the area to be sacred. Graves remain under the point's road and one of its parking lots, and Miller, who opposes talk to either expand the road or extend the Osagie Trail to the Point.
  The paved bike trail is named for a Fond du Lac leader, the Chief Osagie of the 1914 petition.
  Peacock said there's no timetable for the possible movement of graves back to the point if the band regains control of the land.
  That's a technical point, a cultural religious point that I can't even approach," he said. "I don't know what the medicine people would say on something like that. I don't know what the process would be."

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