Where we are
Mooningwanekaaning is a place of power and possibility; a location to preserve and grow our culture, intercultural healing and collaborations, and model what is possible when community comes together around land, water, and life.
Mooningwanekaaning, Madeline Island, is the home and spiritual center of the Anishinaabe people whose territory spans the entire transnational Great Lakes region. The Island was the final stopping place on a prophecy-led migration that took generations to complete from the East Coast.
Mooningwanekaaning is rich with the presence of our ancestors, old village sites, ceremony grounds, and cemeteries. The Island was a world trade center hub for thousands of years, a meaningful spiritual, cultural and economic center for not only the Anishinaabek but Indigenous traders from across our region, until colonization and dispossession.
The Island continues to be a place for spiritual pilgrimage, cultural gatherings, celebrations, and has a central role in the storied life of the Anishinaabe people. It is also a precious ecology, featuring some of the last stands of old forest in our region, maple and birch stands, and a thriving rich ecology.
It is important that the Island become accessible for our people to return, hold ceremonies, practice our traditional food relationships, build our waterway-linked economies that depend on strong and resilient ecologies, and support our Island to once more become the heart of our Nation for the benefit of all peoples.
