Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Madeline Island, WI, USA

Ghosts Among the Apostles
By Kerry A. Trask

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In human places, especially those long inhabited by families, tribes, and communities, all of which demand considerable investments of effort and emotion, there accumulates and remains the residue of the moods and spirits that have been felt and expressed there. The places where people live are shaped and shaded by their hopes and sorrows, triumphs and failures, and made distinctive and significant through the stories told and retold about what has happened there. Therefore, everywhere human beings have lived, known love, worked and died there are layers and layers of narratives—stories, legends, poems, songs, and works of art—that set them apart and give them their special character.

That is certainly so for Madeline Island located near the far west end of Lake Superior. It is a part of the Apostle Islands, of which, despite of implication of the collective name, there are twenty-three islands scattered, like fragments broken loose from the mainland, off the northern tip of Bayfield Peninsula within and beyond Chequamegon Bay. Madeline Island was named after the beloved Ojibwa wife of Michel Cadotte, the chief fur trader there at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and is the largest of the Apostles. Also, because of the moderating influence of the Lake upon the climate, it has a growing season long enough for the cultivation of corn and other native garden crops, and that in turn has made it a place of considerable human importance and activity for many centuries. Consequently, it is a place of many stories.

At the deepest level of those accumulated narratives are those that were told a very long time ago by the Ojibwa people who once lived on the island for many generations before the arrival of the Europeans. They are tales that were passed on down through their oral tradition and which, fortunately for us all, were written down and saved by William Whipple Warren in the middle of the nineteenth century. Warren was a well-educated, young Métis man, born and raised on the island, and was the grandson of Madeline Cadotte.

According to these stories, the original homeland of the Ojibwa people was along the Gulf of St. Lawrence where they lived in a grand town beside “the great salt water toward the rising sun.” They were happy there and there they triumphed over their enemies and had great power. But, in time, they were afflicted with a mysterious sickness, suffering and dying in large numbers until, by the intercession of the Kitche Manitou, they were given a message by a very large, very white Megis sea shell. The great shell arose from out of the sea brilliantly radiating the light and warmth of the sun and directed the Ojibwa to leave their ancient homeland and travel off into the west. Therefore, without ever questioning the message, the Ojibwa people, like the ancient Hebrews upon their exodus out of Egypt, commenced a long and arduous journey into the wilderness.

Eventually they came to the Great Lakes and then traveled on to the Straits of Michilimacinac, where the great Megis shell appeared once again urging them to move onward still farther. At this point there was dissention among the people. Some of them—those who became the Ottawa—remained in the area, and others traveled southward along the shores of Lake Michigan becoming the Potawatomi people, but all the rest departed Michilimacinac and turned northward towards the great thundering white waters at Bow-e-ting (Sault Ste Marie), where they once again stopped their wandering and established a new great town. There they remained throughout a long succession of winters and summers, catching and subsisting upon the whitefish that were always plentiful in those fast-moving water. And from their grand community at Bow-e-ting they dispatched many war parties—some going to the east to fight the Iroquois and others to the west to battle with the Dakotas. However, in time another message came to them from the Megis shell, telling them to leave Bow-e-ting and resume their westward journey. Again there was disagreement. They argued about the route they should take. Some of them decided to travel north of Kitchi-Gami (Lake Superior) while the others where determined to made their way westward along the southern shore of the great lake. That division of the Ojibwa people, according to Warren’s understanding of the old stories, occurred eight generations before his own time.

The people who took the southern route not only had to content with the dense forests and raging rivers, they also suffered from the vicious attacks of Dakota and Fox war bands. But eventually, after traveling almost the entire length of the lake, they came to a long peninsula extending far out into the water from the end of which they sighted large and beautiful island. They crossed over to safety and named the island Moningwunakauning (the place of the golden breasted woodpecker), and found there a refuge from the fury of their enemies.

On this island they created a great new town in which they all lived together. They planted extensive gardens, which were fertile and produced a great abundance of corn and pumpkins, and they feasted upon the fish that swarmed in great multitudes in the cold, clear waters around the island. They were safe and happy there and from time to time some of their bravest men boldly returned to the mainland to hunt moose and deer and bear, and to even venture inland to hunt the buffalo.

Although their enemies persisted in ambushing their hunters on the mainland, and sometimes attempted to invade the island by night with small bands of warriors, the people of the great town remained safe and secure for three generations. In that place there was always enough to eat, and, according to their own ancient stories, even “the widow and orphan never were allowed to live in want and poverty.” People had long and happy lives. Even sickness was rare among them and, according to what Warren learned from an old shaman, many of the people lived with the “weight of over a hundred winters on their backs.”

Unfortunately, after many contented years a dark time descended on the island and “the Evil Spirit. . . found a strong foothold among them.” Perhaps the easy prosperity had opened a way for evil to enter the community through the envy and ambition it encouraged to grow in the hearts of people. But whatever the root cause of the moral corruption may have been, the shamans of the town—the very men the people relied upon to ward off bad spirits and the spells of wicked witches—began to use their knowledge and power for self-serving ends, betraying and abusing the people to fulfill their own dark dreams of power. Once they had begun to travel that path they became progressively more demented and depraved, and “the Ojibways, at this period,” observed Warren, soon “fell entirely under the power of their Satanic medicine men.”

It was during that time their deepest, most disturbing fears were realized. Those were fears associated with cannibalism. Life for the Ojibwa in the bleak, black and white forests of the northern winters was all too often a season of famine and starvation during which they were reduced to the necessity of eating their dogs, their moccasins, and even the strings from their snowshoes. And in such a miserable state they lived in fear of being killed and devoured by their own lodge mates. Indeed, the forests were filled with terrible, blood-chilling tales of men, driven beyond the brink of madness, killing and eating their own wives and children. Not only did they live in fear of being eaten, they were also deeply haunted by the horrifying possibilities of  becoming cannibals themselves—of being transformed into monstrous “windigos” wandering amidst the desolate wilderness, driven by an insatiable hunger for human flesh to relentlessly hunt for people to kill and consume.

Such terror seized the people of Madeline Island once the shamans turned evil, and soon those malevolent figures began to engage in dark, demonic revelries during which they ate the bodies of their own town’s people. They employed their black arts to create and use subtle poisons to kill anyone who opposed them, and after their bodies were buried, the loathsome sorcerers went to the graves in the night to dig up the barely cold corpses and carried them back to their lodges to feast upon.  In time, as their madness deepened, they even compelled the poor and powerless people of the community to join them in those disgusting banquets.

The more they ate the greater grew their appetites, until they required parents to send their own children to them. That evoked a great outpouring of grief in the town. Mothers shrieked and moaned, ripping their cloths from their bodies and pouring ashes upon their heads, while fathers blackened their faces with soot from their fires and plunged knives and thorns into their arms and chests.

For one man the pain was unbearable. With him the wickedness of the shamans could no longer be tolerated. He decided to fight back. According to the ancient oral narrative, he was an elderly man “whose beloved and only child had just fallen a victim to the insatiable longing for human flesh, of one of these poisoners.”

The grieving father and mother buried their dead child, but after dark the father returned to the burial ground with his bow and arrow. He waited among the shadows at the edge of the clearing and at midnight, as a cloud passed before the face of the moon, he saw what appeared to be a huge black bear lumbering among the graves. The giant beast, grunted and made its way to the freshly filled grave of the man’s daughter, and sniffing the night air began to furiously dig. The man then fitted an arrow to his bow, and straining his muscles, pulled back the taught string with all his strength, then releasing it and shooting the shaft through the darkness and deep into body of the bear. Once the arrow had struck its mark, the great slobbering beast roared in agony, and the man fled through the forest back to his lodge. The next morning both parents returned to the burial ground where they discovered the body of the most evil of all the shamans, clad in a bearskin, lying dead upon the grave of their child.

The killing of that shaman freed the people from the belief that the evil ones had the power to transform themselves into the shapes of other creatures, and the conviction that their tormentors were invulnerable even to death itself. Once the truth was known the shamans departed the island. However, their leaving did not end to the fearful times that dominated the life of the once happy community. Soon the ghosts of the victims could be heard moving through the great town in their nightly wanders, weeping and wailing in the darkness.

Madeline Island had become a sorrowfully place of terror and the Ojibwa people soon abandoned their town, fleeing in all directions to escape the sounds and harmful influences of the many, tormented ghosts who haunted the place. This desertion of the island, according to their own narrative, occurred just before the Frenchmen first arrived in Lake Superior—an event that they claimed was itself prophesied in a dream experienced by Masewapega (Whole Ribs), an old Medawe priest, during the period before the shamans commenced their reign of terror. From Madeline Island the Ojibwa dispersed throughout the forests of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the island, said Warren, was “the root from which all the far scattered villages of the tribe have sprung.”