A New Plan for the Point

On a September morning, the taconite-bearing freighter American Century powers through the St. Louis River Estuary, heading for Lake Superior as it threads the channel separating Duluth’s Minnesota Point from Superior’s Wisconsin Point—twin sand spits that Ojibwe people call Gibiskising-minis, or “land bridge.” I watch the ship from the tip of Wisconsin Point, where a 10.9-acre site will be restored by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve, kicked off by a federal grant of nearly $350,000 to plan the restoration.

While the Lake Superior side of the site features dunes and a beach, the estuary side is marred by trash-speckled ash heaps and vehicle tracks. The plan for the restoration will include interpretive signage, archaeological and plant surveys, and dune and marsh repairs, says Thomas Howes, natural resources manager for the Fond du Lac Band and project coleader. The land, says Howes, “allows us to have a base for our community to remember our history as a people of Lake Superior.”

From the 1600s the band lived at the head of the lake, or Fond du Lac as French trappers dubbed the western end of Lake Superior. Walleye, sturgeon, and whitefish spawned in the estuary. Wild rice covered the Nemadji River delta a half-mile from Wisconsin Point. In 1867, financier Jay Cooke beached his rowboat to talk with the Ojibwe, who, his oarsman recounted, “always camped on the Point and devoted their time to picking blueberries and fishing.”

The band’s presence, however, was fading after the 1854 La Pointe Treaty, in which they ceded their lakeside homeland and settled onto a reservation at what had been a seasonal ricing village 40 miles up the St. Louis River. An Ojibwe village continued at Wisconsin Point into the 20th century.

The road to the end of Wisconsin Point crosses City of Superior parkland, hugging the estuary before tunneling through old-growth pines to the tribal property, which was previously owned by the U.S. Coast Guard but returned to the band in 2017. Weeds colonize an opening where last spring the band demolished a lead- and asbestos-tainted lighthouse keeper’s house.

The plan will be complete by summer 2026 and restoration work may begin in 2027, says Sam Geer, a landscape architect for Urban Ecosystems Inc., the Ojibwe-led company hired to write the plan. Public access will remain.

For the band, Howes says, the project “drives our resolve not to be erased. We’re still here, still living our life.”

“Hopefully this will be a place we can all come back to in 100, 200 years and say, ‘Look at the place we restored and enhanced.’ ”