A Cloud Over the Land

On October 15, 1900, the people living peacefully in Indian Point, Cheboygan County, Michigan, were suddenly and violently thrown from their homes by white settlers. Their village, held in trust for them by a government treaty, was burned to the ground.

Efforts to right this wrong, still on-going, are chronicled by author Richard A. Wiles in this book.

In March of 1836, the leader of the Cheboiganing Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians, Chingassimo, signed the legal document known as the 1836 Treaty of Washington which guaranteed the small, northern Michigan band a reservation of 1,000 acres on the peninsula of Indian Point (later called Colonial Point in Cheboygan County. With this signing, the United States recognized the Cheboiganing band as a political unit in a one-to-one relationship with the federal government.

This relationship was further affirmed by the 1855 Treaty of Detroit, which the Cheboiganing Band also signed. Only an act by Congress or a Presidential Executive Order could terminate this relationship with the band.

However, in the late 1930s, the Department of Interior's Office of Indian Affairs arbitrarily terminated the 100-year-old federal relationship with the Cheboiganing Band. The reason used by the Indian Affairs Department at the time was that the Cheboiganing Band no longer held any tribal land.

This set up a catch-22 situation which had resulted from two earlier historical events. First, the United States never officially set up the band's 1,000-acre reservation on Burt Lake as was promised in the Treaty of 1836. It was a broken promise negotiated by the band when they signed the treaty ceding their long-held ancestral land. Second, by the late 1930s, the band had been stripped of their 375 acres of "in trust" land on Burt Lake by the Burn-Out of their village. Yes, they had no ancestral land, but it was only because of this nefarious act.

By Richard A. Wiles, 110 pages. 6" x 9". Paperback – December 8, 2023.