A North Shore Homeland: The Archaeological Landscape of the Ojibwe Village at Grand Portage, Minnesota.

Summary

As co-signatories on the 1854 Treaty of LaPointe, the Grand Portage Band was placed on a reservation within their traditional homeland where they continued to maintain a tribal identify directly tied to Grand Portage Bay on Lake Superior. During the reservation era, the Grand Portage Band lived within a changing cultural landscape created out of the multi-cultural milieu that had existed since the arrival of the French in the 1660s. This paper explores cultural landscape aspects of mobility and place within the Grand Portage community that are reflective of a multi-cultural community and the larger assimilative pressures exerted by the U.S. Government during the reservation era. Archaeological investigations combined with historic documents, oral histories, and community discussions, are used to better understand the role that this landscape has played in the life of people living at Grand Portage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Reservation Archaeology: Culture Change, Historical Trauma, and Community Resilience in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Native North America

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 592