As I was researching the history of the Duluth Superior Harbor for my drawing of Park Point and learning details of the tragedy of broken treaties that I should have known more about lived in Minnesota my entire life, I was heartened to run across this article from the Duluth Reader: Chief Osaugie Gets His Wisconsin Point Home Back.

Chief Joseph Osaugie led the Fond Du Lac band of Ojibwe. He signed the second Treaty of La Pointe in 1854, which ceded most Ojibwe land on the northern and western shores of Lake Superior to the U.S. government. It also established the Grand Portage and Fond du Lac reservations. In exchange, the Ojibwe were to receive annual payments and a guarantee that they could continue to hunt and fish throughout this territory. The treaty appeared to have benefits to the Ojibwe people, whose livelihood was impacted by a decline of the fur trade. Many Ojibwe owed money to white or mixed-race traders and could no longer make enough from the fur trade alone to pay off these debts. Signing a new treaty appeared to provide additional income. (www.mnopedia.org Treaty of La Pointe)

Chief Joseph was laid to rest in a cemetery on Wisconsin Point in 1876. Osaugie’s descendants were forced out of Wisconsin Point starting in 1915, when U.S. Steel wanted to build ore docks. Tribal members fought their case in court, unsuccessfully. From 1918 to 1919, their burial ground was dug up and relocated to St. Francis Cemetery in Superior in what was essentially a mass grave, 198 graves in 29 plots. The graves were poorly maintained and bones ended up washing into the Nemadji River. (Duluth Reader: Chief Osaugie Gets His Wisconsin Point Home Back. )

In August 2022 the City of Superior signed over deeds to the Fond Du Lac band for both pieces of land: the site of the burial ground on Wisconsin Point, and nearly an acre and the St. Francis cemetery, the site of the mass grave. (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/08/19/fond-du-lac-band-celebrates-return-of-sacred-sites)

The band of 4,200 members believes many more bodies remain buried on Wisconsin Point, as only those with marked graves were removed. It hopes to restore more land, to connect what it owns on the end of the point with the cemetery. In 2017 it reclaimed about 12 acres of surplus land from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It wants to preserve and protect what is there, and find a way to educate those who come upon the site. (https://www.startribune.com/for-area-anishinaabe-a-piece-of-home-is-returned/600215975/)