(gentle music) - There's an Ojibwe leader named Madjeckewiss who was part of the band that summered down in Sheboygan about 15 miles east of here.

In 1763 he was one of the leaders of the Ojibwe attack that actually captured Michilimackinac as part of Pontiac's war, the Anglo Indian War of 1763.

So 1763, he's very much looking out for his community's best interest.

And at that time that involved capturing this place, literally getting rid of the British.

By the 1770s, he realized that the easiest way to accomplish that goal for his community, for his band, was to align with the British.

And so he was a war leader, taking war parties out from Michilimackinac and going and fighting alongside British troops in other places, including St.

Louis in 1780.

You know, as part of a massive expedition, about 1,000 people going to attack the Spanish at St.

Louis.

They were looking out for how best to serve their communities, and if that meant allying with the British at this point, they did that.

But not everyone did.

One of the other leaders of that attack in 1763, another Ojibwe named Minweweh absolutely wanted nothing to do with the British for the rest of his life, and did not decide to lead war parties or anything like that.

And that's what he felt was the best course of action.

Madjeckewiss felt that aligning with the British was the best course of action for him, and in some ways it did work out.

You know, there really is not an American presence or any kind of American hegemony here until really after the war of 1812, and that's primarily because of Indigenous resistance.

They're able to keep the Americans from really establishing a presence here until the 18-teens.

So, you know, we're talking about the revolution, and it's not really until 1815, 1816 that the Americans are firmly able to establish themselves out here.

The primary influences here in terms of Native Nations would've been the Ojibwe and the Odawa, and those are still our most local Native people today.

There are, you know, other Anishinaabe groups, particularly Potawatomi, they typically, and still today, live maybe a little bit down further south from here, but there were still Potawatomi people, you know, visiting Michilimackinac.

But there were people from nations all over the place, really all around the Great Lakes watershed, visiting here in the summertime, especially from the West, coming from places like Wisconsin and Minnesota, as far away as the Dakotas, maybe even up on the Canadian plains.

One of the major groups that the British actually worked very hard to align themselves with were the Dakota.

So people who lived in Western Minnesota, what's now North and South Dakota, those people had to travel hundreds of miles to get here, but they still did, to come and both trade with the British, but also to reinforce economic alliances and military alliances.

So for instance, in 1780, that expedition to St.

Louis I mentioned, that's under the overall command of Wapasha who was a Dakota leader.

So he had made a very long journey to get there to St.

Louis as at the head of this 1,000 person force.

So again, there's Native people from really all over the Great Lakes watershed here in at least some numbers throughout the 1770s.