Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point

Introduction: The War at Sugar Point

The Anishinaabe observed the miigis, the midewiwin spiritual shell, or cowrie, as a source of visionary presence in the northern woodland lakes. The Grand Medicine Society, midewiwin, is an association of Native healers and shamans. The miigis arose from the eastern sea and moved westward with the natural course of the sun. The Anishinaabe origin stories count the miigis for the last time in gichigami, the great sea, or Lake Superior. The Anishinaabe envisioned their associations with the earth by natural reason, by tricky stories, and by odoodemi, to have a totem, an imagic sense of presence in the time and seasons of the woodland lakes. The Anishinaabe trickster, naanabozho, is forever imagined by native storiers. The trickster, crafty or humane, is an uncertain, existential shaman of creation, a healer by stories, and a comic transformation in mythic time—comic in the sense that the imagic presence of a trickster is a Wgurative trace of survivance, not a tragic revision of dominance or misadventure in the racial sentiments of monotheistic civilization. The Anishinaabe created Wve traditional totems, the natural images of families and ancestry. The original Wve totems are the ajijaak (the sandhill crane), makwa (the bear), maanameg (the catWsh), waabizheshi (the marten), and maang (the loon). William Warren, the nineteenth-century Anishinaabe historian, wrote in History of Introduction The War at Sugar Point 3 the Ojibway Nation that the other totems, or “different badges,” are “only subdivisions of the Wve great original totems.” Natives of the ajijaak (the crane totem) are orators and leaders. The makwa (bear totem) are bold and brave warriors. The three other totems are Wgures of a communal presence in the natural world. Sugar Point is a trace of creation and the modern site of a war enacted by the United States Army in 1898. The Anishinaabe had resisted the arrogant and capricious federal marshals and then routed, by imagination, natural reason, stealth, and strategy, the imperious ofWcers and immigrant soldiers from the Leech Lake Reservation. That defeat is seldom mentioned in military histories. Sugar Point, or Battle Point, is near Bear Island, south of Portage Bay and Federal Dam in the eastern section of Leech Lake. The Mississippi River, or gichiziibi, the great river, runs through the Leech Lake Reservation in north central Minnesota. The reservation was established by federal treaty in 1855. Lake Winnibigoshish , Leech Lake, Cass Lake, Squaw Lake, and many other lakes are within the original treaty boundaries of the reservation. Onigum, a Native community, is located on the reservation between Walker Bay and Agency Bay. The Pillagers of Leech Lake are one of the original Wve clans of the Anishinaabe. The totemic families are makwa (bear) and maanameg (catWsh), and the warriors are admired for their courage , independent spirit, and resistance to federal agents and policy. The Pillagers and Dakota once competed for the buffalo hunting grounds on the peneplain at the western verge of the woodland, and their Native tact and diplomacy wavered for centuries between war and peace. Alexander Henry, the determined eighteenth-century fur trader, named the spirited Natives of Leech Lake and Bear Island the Pilleurs. Edward Neill observed in History of the Ojibways that on August 5, 1775, “at Rat Portage, some of the Ojibways asked for rum, but Henry refused, because they were the band of the 4 + Introduction Pilleurs.” The French word pilleur means “pillager.” That prejudicial designation was the Wrst historical notice of the Native warriors named the Pillagers. Chief Flat Mouth, one of the great leaders of the Pillagers, was mentioned in the journals of Zebulon Pike, a narrative on the source of the Mississippi River in 1805. William Warren noted that Flat Mouth Wrst met Pike at the Northwest Fur Company post at Leech Lake and traded his British standard and peace medal for the colors of the United States of America. Flat Mouth “ceased to be an Englishman and became a Long Knife,” or an American. Great Britain had sought the support and loyalty of Flat Mouth and the Pillagers against the Americans in the War of 1812. Warren wrote that crown agents were “sent by the British government to the principal villages of the Ojibways, to invite them to join their arms against the Americans.” The British agents presented wampum belts as an obligatory gratuity. Flat Mouth promptly returned the bounty and told the agent, “When I go war against my enemies , I do not call...