Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard Katrina Phillips (bio) Walking the Old Road: A People's History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe by Staci Lola Drouillard University of Minnesota Press, 2019 THE CITY OF GRAND MARAIS, nestled along the North Shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, sits two hours north of Duluth, less than an hour south of Grand Portage and the Grand Portage Reservation, and an hour and a half south of Thunder Bay. It is often called the gateway to both the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and to the Gunflint Trail. Grand Marais has been a popular destination for tourists, particularly those from the Twin Cities, since the early twentieth century. As someone who grew up in the region, I should note that the less charitable among us might say it's overrun with tourists, especially during the summer months. However, as Staci Lola Drouillard explains, not many of the people driving along Highway 61 would notice as they drove though Chippewa City, the small town just to the north of Grand Marais. In the nineteenth century, though, Chippewa City was an Anishinaabe community where its residents lived and worked, celebrated and mourned, worshipped and played. The Chippewa City Church—formally known as St. Francis Xavier, now under the domain of the Cook County Historical Society—played a central role in the community, a long-standing fixture alongside what locals called the "Old Shore Road," a well-trodden path to and from Grand Marais (10, 17, 1). Walking the Old Road includes a mixture of oral history and memoir, tracing Drouillard and her family's connections to the area while also including the voices of elders she began interviewing in the late 1980s. Her first interview with artist George Morrison, part of a class assignment at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, led to more questions and interviews and research. Drouillard's research, driven by the oral interviews, is like her search to find the road between Chippewa City and Grand Marais (2). Her goal, as evidenced by the book's subtitle, is to tell the story of the people of Chippewa City through the voices of those who lived there. The book reads like a conversation, the kind of conversation you have when you're sitting around a bonfire along the shores of Lake Superior, the words intertwined with the crackle of the firewood and the rhythm of the waves on the rocks. From recounting the history of the Ojibwe arrival [End Page 175] at what is known as the Pigeon River and intermarriage with French fur traders, through treaty signings and the Dawes Act to the Nelson Act and eventual Ojibwe dispossession, Drouillard underscores what Chippewa City meant to those who lived there. While its title might suggest that the book is simply a hyperlocal history, Drouillard draws on broader narratives of federal Indian policies while highlighting the devastating effects those policies had on the residents of Chippewa City. Drouillard and her sister do not meet the blood quantum requirement the federal government forced upon the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and so they could not inherit their father's parcel of reservation land at Grand Portage. "Not unlike our ancestors before us," Drouillard muses, "we had land only to have it taken away" (50). Drouillard's interviews—and the way she weaves them throughout the book—offer a rich recollection of Chippewa City. Jim Wipson, born in Chippewa City in 1918, shared stories of his grandmother, Kate Frost, and how the two of them would walk the Old Road. "Everybody in Grand Marais knew Kate Frost and her little grandson," he recalled (100). Others shared stories of old traditions like "Happy New Year-ing," of church services sung in Ojibwe and visits to medicine men, of selling homemade crafts to tourists along Highway 61 or in local shops and stands. People who lived in Chippewa City worked in Grand Marais or went to town for medical services, while Grand Marais proprietors relied on Chippewa City labor and wilderness skills to keep their businesses running. "So where...