The Fond du Lac Band (Nagaajiwanaang)

At a Glance

Tribe Name: Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa — in Ojibwemowin, Nagaajiwanaang, "Where the Water Stops," named for the place where the St. Louis River's current slows at the head of Lake Superior. In older records the people were the Wayekwaa-gichigamiing Gichigamiwininiwag.

Language: Ojibwemowin (also called Anishinaabemowin) — the language of the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe people.

Language Tree: Algonquian language family (Central Algonquian), the great language family of the Eastern Woodlands and Great Lakes.

Direct Relatives: The other five bands of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe — White Earth, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Bois Forte, and Grand Portage; the Lake Superior Chippewa bands of Wisconsin and Michigan; the wider Ojibwe Nations of the United States and Canada; and, through the Council of Three Fires, the Odawa and Potawatomi Nations.

Enrollment: More than 4,200 enrolled citizens (the Band's own published figure; the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe reported 4,044 in 2007), with about 1,800 Band citizens living on the reservation.

Land Ownership: The Fond du Lac Reservation covers about 101,500 acres in Carlton and St. Louis Counties, Minnesota — of which roughly 42,000 acres remain Indian-owned after the allotment era, a share growing again through tribal reacquisition, the federal Cobell land buy-back (4,248 acres consolidated), and the 2026 return of the 3,400-acre Cloquet Forestry Center. Headquarters: 1720 Big Lake Road, Cloquet.

Sources: Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (tribal government); Minnesota Indian Affairs Council; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Minnesota Historical Society; Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College.

The St. Louis River valley in autumn, at Jay Cooke State Park on the reservation's eastern doorstep — the river corridor that has carried Fond du Lac life for centuries. Photo by Lorie Shaull, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_St._Louis_River_and_surrounding_hills_in_Jay_Cooke_State_Park,_Minnesota.jpg

Gallery

Parching rice — Ojibwe women finishing manoomin beside a birch-bark wigwam, in a historic postcard view preserved by the National Archives. Public domain (U.S. National Archives), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_rice_harvesting_and_processing_-_NARA_-_285182.jpg

Winnowing manoomin the old way — a practiced toss of the birch-bark basket lets the wind carry off the chaff. Photo by Lorie Shaull, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winnowing_the_wild_rice_in_a_birch_bark_basket.jpg

Naw-gaw-nab — "the Foremost Sitter" — a chief of Fond du Lac, photographed at Whitney's Gallery in St. Paul in 1863, in the treaty era's hard decade. Photo by Joel E. Whitney, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fond-du-Lac_Chief_Naw-gaw-nab_of_the_Foremost_sitter.jpg

An Ojibway man at rest at camp, from Roland W. Reed's early-1900s photographs of Ojibwe life in the western Great Lakes country. Photo by Roland W. Reed, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ojibway_Man_Relaxing_by_Roland_W._Reed.jpg

In the iskigamizigan — the sugar bush. An Ojibwe woman taps a maple and gathers the sweet water that boils down into sugar and syrup each spring. Photo by Roland W. Reed, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ojibwe_woman_tapping_for_sugar_maple_syrup.jpg

Name — the lake sturgeon. A U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist holds an adult during survey work; on the St. Louis River, Fond du Lac's own biologists have led this ancient fish's return since 1994. Photo by

USFWS Mountain-Prairie Region, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Sturgeon_(49756830043).jpg

Downtown Cloquet, Minnesota — the lumber town that grew up at the reservation's eastern edge, beside the tribal headquarters district of Bapashkominitigong. Photo by McGhiever, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Cloquet.JPG

Brief History

The Anishinaabeg have lived at the western end of Gichigami (Lake Superior) since time immemorial; archaeologists place their ancestors in the Great Lakes country from at least 800 A.D. The heart of the homeland was the St. Louis River — the great canoe highway running from the lake deep into the interior. Life turned with the seasons: families gathered in spring at the sugar bush, fished through the summer, harvested manoomin in the autumn rice lakes, and scattered to winter hunting camps. French traders arrived in the 1600s; the river mouth became a fur-trade crossroads, and the American Fur Company later built its post where Duluth's oldest neighborhood still carries the name. Two treaties were signed at Fond du Lac itself — in 1826 (7 Stat. 290) and 1847 (9 Stat. 904) — and the cessions of 1837 (7 Stat. 536) and 1842 (7 Stat. 591), which opened pine and copper country to the United States, expressly reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather in the ceded lands.

That right — and the homeland itself — nearly vanished in 1850, when President Zachary Taylor ordered the Lake Superior Ojibwe removed west of the Mississippi and federal agents moved the annual treaty payment to Sandy Lake, Minnesota. Thousands who made the journey found spoiled food, partial payments, and winter closing in; more than 400 people died at Sandy Lake and on the frozen trek home. In 1852, La Pointe chief Bizhiki (Chief Buffalo) led a delegation to Washington; President Fillmore heard them, rescinded the removal order, and restored payments to La Pointe. Two years later, on September 30, 1854, eighty-five Ojibwe leaders signed the Treaty of La Pointe (10 Stat. 1109). The Lake Superior bands ceded the Arrowhead country of Minnesota but kept what they had demanded: permanent reservations near their homes — for Fond du Lac, some 100,000 acres on the St. Louis River — a promise they would not be removed again, and their hunting, fishing, and gathering rights in the ceded territory.

The treaty held the land; allotment broke it apart. Under the Dawes Act of 1887 and Minnesota's Nelson Act of 1889, the reservation was carved into individual allotments — eighty acres to heads of household, forty to children — and a machinery of "competency" rulings, timber sales, tax forfeitures, and outright fraud, greased by the Clapp riders of 1904 and 1906, pried the allotments loose. By 1934, almost three-quarters of the reservation had passed into non-Indian ownership, leaving a checkerboard of tribal, allotted, county, state, and private parcels. The University of Minnesota's Cloquet Forestry Center — some 3,400 acres inside the reservation — was taken under federal and state authority by 1909. The firestorm of October 1918 also burned through reservation communities. Through it all, the people stayed: rice camps, sugar bush, and kin networks carried the nation through its hardest century.

The rebuilding began with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Fond du Lac joined White Earth, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Bois Forte, and Grand Portage in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, adopting a constitution while keeping its own Reservation Business Committee — and began, acre by acre, to buy its homeland back; by 1981 the Band had regained control of just over half the land within the reservation. Under Public Law 280 (1953), which handed Minnesota criminal jurisdiction, the Band still pressed into the self-determination era: a tribally run health system, its own school, gaming enterprises, and, from the 1990s, self-governance agreements with the federal government. When the great flood of June 2012 drowned the rice crop and damaged hundreds of homes, the Band rebuilt. And the long road home still runs: through the Cobell buy-back program the Band consolidated 4,248 acres of fractionated allotments, and in 2026 Minnesota approved the return of the Cloquet Forestry Center itself.

Ancient Echoes

To read this homeland the way its first people read it, begin with its name. Nagaajiwanaang — "Where the Water Stops" — is how the Band renders Fond du Lac in Ojibwemowin: where the St. Louis River's long current eases and stills at the head of the great lake. In the migration teachings, the Anishinaabeg journeyed west from the Atlantic shore through a series of stopping places, guided by a prophecy to seek the place "where food grows on water." In St. Louis Bay, between present-day Duluth and Superior, lies Spirit Island — remembered as the Sixth Stopping Place on that journey. The food of the prophecy was manoomin, the wild rice that still beds the shallow bays and the reservation's southern lakes. The Band's water staff speak of manoomin not as a crop but as a relative — one who "figures very prominently in the Ojibwe migration story," in the words of water projects coordinator Nancy Schuldt — and the treaties were written to guarantee the people could return to gather that relative forever.

The old social order that held this world together was the doodem system — the clans. Crane, loon, eagle, bear, wolf, and marten: each person was born into a clan, carried its identity through their father's line, married outside it, and found relatives in every village on the journey. Kinship did not stop at people. The Band's environmental program grounds its work in a worldview its staff state plainly: water is sacred, and human beings live in relationship with the natural world, deciding with seven generations in mind. Read the reservation through those eyes and the map turns into a family — the river a relative who carries, the rice a relative who feeds, the sturgeon a relative who remembers.

The river as a living relative — the St. Louis sliding over ancient slate in the mist at Jay Cooke State Park, downstream of Nagaajiwanaang, "where the water stops." Photo by Lorie Shaull, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_St_Louis_River_at_Jay_Cooke_State_Park_in_Carlton,_Minnesota.jpg

Modern Horizons

The Fond du Lac Band governs itself through a five-member Reservation Business Committee — a chair and secretary-treasurer elected at large, and representatives of the three districts: Bapashkominitigong (Cloquet), Gwaaba'iganing (Sawyer), and Ashkibwaakaaning (Brookston). From its headquarters in Cloquet, the Band runs the machinery of a modern nation: tribal courts and police, housing, a Head Start program, and the Fond du Lac Ojibwe School, a tribal K-12. Its health system centers on the Min-No-Aya-Win ("Good Health") Clinic, with satellite care at the Center for American Indian Resources in Duluth and the Mashkiki Waakaaigan pharmacy in Minneapolis; Mash-ka-wisen, the nation's first Indian-owned residential chemical-dependency treatment center, stands in Sawyer. The Band operates as a self-governance tribe, running federal programs on its own authority.

Education's flagship is Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. Created by the Minnesota Legislature and chartered by the Band in the same year, 1987, FDLTCC holds a status no other college in the nation shares: at once a federally recognized tribal college and a full member of the Minnesota State system; Congress made it a land-grant institution in 1994. Its Cloquet campus — laid out, by design, in the pattern of a giant bear's paw, with a drum-shaped library at its heart — serves around 2,000 students a year: nursing, law enforcement (uniquely including tribal and treaty law), Anishinaabe studies, Ojibwe language. The Band's enterprises anchor the regional economy alongside it: the Fond-du-Luth Casino in downtown Duluth, built with the city on a deserted block the Band bought and placed into trust — the only Minnesota casino on land not originally reservation — and the Black Bear Casino Resort at Interstate 35 and Highway 210, making the Band a major regional employer.

It is in the water, though, that Fond du Lac's modern sovereignty runs deepest. The Band's Resource Management Division is among the most accomplished tribal environmental programs in the nation. Granted "treatment as a state" authority under the Clean Water Act in 1996, the Band adopted its own water-quality standards in 1998 — approved by the EPA in 2001 and written, uniquely, to protect wild rice by name — and built a decades-long monitoring record on its 108 lakes and streams. With Bois Forte and Grand Portage it co-manages treaty hunting, fishing, and gathering through the 1854 Treaty Authority. Its fisheries crews began returning lake sturgeon to the upper St. Louis River in 1994, a generation after dams and pollution had wiped the ancient fish out; in 2011, young sturgeon found below the Fond du Lac Dam proved the river was spawning them again. When Minnesota moved to weaken its water rules, Fond du Lac and Grand Portage sued the EPA — the first suit of its kind by tribal nations — and in 2024 the EPA rewrote its national rule to require states to consider tribal treaty rights in water standards.

The Fond du Lac Band by the numbers. Original infographic created for 7th Fire Warriors from the sources cited on this page.

Tribal Land & Homelands

Fond du Lac is a water homeland. The reservation holds 108 mapped water bodies — twenty-four named lakes totaling some 2,850 acres — nineteen streams running more than sixty-seven miles, roughly twenty miles of the St. Louis River, and 6,310 wetlands covering 42,581 acres. By the EPA's accounting, nearly half the reservation — forty-seven percent — is aquatic country: a homeland measured as much in rice beds, marshes, and slow black rivers as in dry land.

East: Downstream and east, the homeland tilts toward Gichigami. The St. Louis River leaves the reservation and drops through its last wild gorge — the slate Dalles of Jay Cooke State Park — then spreads into St. Louis Bay between Duluth and Superior. In that bay sits Spirit Island, the Sixth Stopping Place of the migration. On the bay's north shore stands Duluth's Fond du Lac neighborhood, where the Band today runs the Center for American Indian Resources and the Fond-du-Luth Casino. Across the water lies Wisconsin Point, site of an ancestral burial ground disturbed and removed in the early twentieth century.

North: The reservation's northern reach is the Sawyer district, Gwaaba'iganing, in the pine highlands of St. Louis County. Here the Cloquet River slides down out of the north woods to join the St. Louis — the tributary into which Fond du Lac biologists first stocked sturgeon eggs in 1998 — and the country grows wilder: moose, wolves, and bear in second-growth forest that has been healing since the cutover. North of the boundary stretches the 1854 ceded territory, the Arrowhead, where the Band's members still hunt, fish, and gather under treaty right, and where the Band's biologists track a moose herd that thinned so sharply in the 2010s that the traditional hunt was suspended.

West: At the reservation's northwestern corner sits Brookston — Ashkibwaakaaning — where the St. Louis River makes its great bend. Upstream, the river unwinds toward its headwaters in the high lakes of the St. Louis County highlands. West of the reservation ran one of the continent's great hinges: the Savanna Portage, the short carry over the Laurentian Divide between the St. Louis watershed and the Savanna River, which drains to the Mississippi. For centuries, a traveler could paddle from Lake Superior to the Gulf-bound river system with a single portage — and the people of Nagaajiwanaang sat at the crossroads of the two worlds.

South: The southern reservation is rice country. When the first surveyors drew the reservation's lines, they tried to cut off the southern lakes; the old people protested that the tribe could not survive without its rice and fish, and the line was redrawn to take the lakes back in. Jim Northrup's grandfather remembered their names: Perch, Dead Fish, Mud, Jaskari, and Rice Portage. Eight of the reservation's waters are managed wild-rice lakes — some 828 acres of manoomin — alongside Big Lake, by the headquarters in the Cloquet district, and the community of Mahnomen. Beyond the southern boundary lie the pine lands of the 1837 cession, where Fond du Lac citizens also hold reserved rights: south, like north, the homeland extends past the surveyed line.

Reservation Land

The reservation the United States confirmed in 1854 held about 100,000 acres; today the Fond du Lac Reservation encompasses some 101,500 acres across Carlton and St. Louis Counties, about twenty miles west of Duluth. Allotment shattered its ownership: by 1934 almost three-quarters had passed to non-Indians, and the reservation became the checkerboard it remains today — tribal trust parcels woven among allotted, county, state, and private land. The EPA's accounting counts roughly 42,000 acres still Indian-owned. But the current runs the other way now. The Band has reacquired land steadily since the 1930s, consolidated 4,248 acres of fractionated allotments through the Cobell buy-back program, and in 2026 won approval for the return of the 3,400-acre Cloquet Forestry Center from the University of Minnesota. Some 4,200 people live within the reservation — about 1,800 of them Band citizens — in the three districts of Cloquet, Sawyer, and Brookston and in communities like Mahnomen, centered near the tribal headquarters on Big Lake Road in Cloquet.

Learn More & Resources

Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (official tribal government site): https://www.fdlrez.com

Fond du Lac Resource Management Division — environmental, fisheries, and wild rice programs (via the tribal site): https://www.fdlrez.com

Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College: https://www.fdltcc.edu/

Minnesota Indian Affairs Council — Fond du Lac Band profile: https://mn.gov/indian-affairs/tribal-nations-in-minnesota/nah-gah-chi-wa-nong-fond-du-lac-band-of-lake-superior-chippewa.jsp

Minnesota Historical Society, MNopedia — "Treaty of La Pointe, 1854": https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/event/treaty-la-pointe-1854

U.S. EPA — Fond du Lac Band water quality standards: https://www.epa.gov/wqs-tech/water-quality-standards-regulations-fond-du-lac-band-minnesota-chippewa

U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit — Fond du Lac Band case study: http://toolkit.climate.gov/case-study/fond-du-lac-band-lake-superior-chippewa-combine-mitigation-capacity-building

References & Sources

1. Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Official website, fdlrez.com — including the Band's published self-description and enrollment figure, as quoted in the U.S. Forest Service MOU announcement with the Grand Portage and Bois Forte Bands.

2. Fond du Lac Band, Resource Management Division. 2024 Lake Sturgeon Monitoring: Upper St. Louis River (Weske, 2024).

3. Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. "History," fdltcc.edu (created by the Minnesota Legislature and chartered by the Band in 1987; land-grant status in 1994).

4. Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. "Nah-gah-chi-wa-nong / Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa." Minnesota State Tribal Relations, mn.gov.

Minnesota Historical Society. "Treaty of La Pointe, 1854." MNopedia.

6. Kappler, Charles J., ed. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. II — Treaty of Fond du Lac, 1826 (7 Stat. 290); Treaty of St. Peters, 1837 (7 Stat. 536); Treaty of La Pointe, 1842 (7 Stat. 591); Treaty of Fond du Lac, 1847 (9 Stat. 904); Treaty of La Pointe, 1854 (10 Stat. 1109).

7. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Fond du Lac Band: Clean Water Act Section 404 Assumption Analysis (reservation data: 101,500 acres, ~42,000 Indian-owned; 108 water bodies; 8 wild rice waters, 828 acres; 6,310 wetlands, 42,581 acres).

8. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Water Quality Standards Regulations: Fond du Lac Band of the Minnesota Chippewa" (treatment-as-state granted May 16, 1996; initial standards approved December 21, 2001).

9. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sustainable Construction in Indian Country: Fond du Lac Case Study (4,121 enrolled members, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency data).

10. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General. Audit of the Bureau of Justice Assistance Grant Awarded to Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (G-5010-001, 2009).

11. U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. "The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Combine Mitigation with Capacity Building" (Seven Generations; 2012 flood and rice loss; moose hunt suspension).

12. Northern Wilds Magazine. "Lake sturgeon studied in St. Louis River" (1983–2000 stocking; natural reproduction documented 2011).

13. Tribal Business News. "Fond du Lac Band set to reclaim 3,400 acres after Minnesota lawmakers approve land transfer" (2026).

14. Sierra Magazine. "The Land Back Movement Unravels Manifest Destiny" (Cobell Land Buy-Back Program: 4,248 acres consolidated at Fond du Lac).

15. Giese, Paula. "Fond du Lac, Minnesota, Ojibwe Indian Reservation" (historical page; rice-lake boundary account).

16. "Fond du Lac Indian Reservation" and "Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa," Wikipedia (secondary summaries: allotment losses by 1934, reacquisition by 1981, Spirit Island, Wisconsin Point).

Image Credits

Hero — "The St. Louis River and surrounding hills in Jay Cooke State Park, Minnesota." Photo by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_St._Louis_River_and_surrounding_hills_in_Jay_Cooke_State_Park,_Minnesota.jpg

Gallery 1 — "Wild rice harvesting and processing" (parching rice postcard). U.S. National Archives. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_rice_harvesting_and_processing_-_NARA_-_285182.jpg

Gallery 2 — "Winnowing the wild rice in a birch bark basket." Photo by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winnowing_the_wild_rice_in_a_birch_bark_basket.jpg

Gallery 3 — "Fond-du-Lac Chief Naw-gaw-nab of the Foremost sitter" (1863). Photo by Joel E. Whitney, Whitney's Gallery, St. Paul. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fond-du-Lac_Chief_Naw-gaw-nab_of_the_Foremost_sitter.jpg

Gallery 4 — "Ojibway Man Relaxing by Roland W. Reed." Photo by Roland W. Reed. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ojibway_Man_Relaxing_by_Roland_W._Reed.jpg

Gallery 5 — "Ojibwe woman tapping for sugar maple syrup." Photo by Roland W. Reed. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ojibwe_woman_tapping_for_sugar_maple_syrup.jpg

Gallery 6 — "Lake Sturgeon (49756830043)." Photo by USFWS Mountain-Prairie Region. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Sturgeon_(49756830043).jpg

Gallery 7 — "Downtown Cloquet." Photo by McGhiever. CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Cloquet.JPG

Ancient Echoes — "The St Louis River at Jay Cooke State Park in Carlton, Minnesota." Photo by Lorie Shaull. CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_St_Louis_River_at_Jay_Cooke_State_Park_in_Carlton,_Minnesota.jpg

Infographic — original graphic created for 7th Fire Warriors (Pillow), from the sources cited above.