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The Bad River Band (Mashkiiziibii)
Algonquian language family (Central Algonquian), the great language family of the Eastern Woodlands and Great Lakes.
Red Cliff (Gaa-Miskwaabikaang) — Bad River's closest relative, born of the same La Pointe Band — and the other Lake Superior Chippewa bands of Wisconsin: Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac du Flambeau, St. Croix, and Sokaogon (Mole Lake); the wider Ojibwe Nations of Minnesota, Michigan, and Canada; and, through the Council of Three Fires, the Odawa and Potawatomi Nations.
7,923 enrolled citizens (tribal figure, U.S. Department of Energy tribal profile), with about 2,614 residents living on the reservation.
The Bad River Reservation covers 124,655 acres in Ashland and Iron Counties — the largest Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin — with 57,884 acres held in trust, 17 miles of Lake Superior shoreline, more than 100 miles of rivers and streams, and roughly 2,000 acres on the eastern end of Madeline Island. Tribal headquarters are at Odanah, Wisconsin.
Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (tribal government); U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Indian Energy; Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Tribal Affairs; Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Gallery
By the Numbers
West: Down the shore toward the Fish Creek sloughs and the Bayfield Peninsula, where the sister community of Red Cliff — Gaa-Miskwaabikaang — guards the northern tip. Beyond them, the shore road runs toward Fond du Lac and Duluth, through the heart of the 1837 and 1842 ceded territories, where Bad River citizens still hunt, fish, and gather under the rights their ancestors reserved and the Voigt decision affirmed.
West
North: The great water — Gichigami, Lake Superior. The reservation holds seventeen miles of Superior shoreline in Chequamegon Bay, facing the Apostle Islands, Wenabozho ominisan, and Mooningwanekaaning, Madeline Island, whose eastern end — some 2,000 acres — lies within the reservation's treaty boundaries. At the shore, the river slows into the Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs: wild rice beds, cranberry marshes, and the spawning grounds of sturgeon and walleye, watched over by eagles and migrating cranes. North is where the food grows on water.
South: The uplands. South of Odanah the land rises toward the Penokee-Gogebic Range, where the Bad River is born in cold springs and maple-beech forest. This is sugarbush country in spring, hunting country in fall, and the watershed that decides the fate of everything downstream — the reason the Band has fought mines and pipelines proposed in these hills. To protect the rice, you protect the headwaters.
Ancient Echoes
At the center of Bad River's story stands the migration teaching. As Anishinaabe knowledge keepers recount it — recorded for a wide audience in Edward Benton-Banai's The Mishomis Book — seven prophets came to the people by the Atlantic Ocean with seven fires, seven prophecies. The people were told to move west or face destruction, and to follow the miigis — the sacred cowrie shell that rose from the water to guide them. At each stopping place the shell appeared: in the St. Lawrence country, at Niagara, at Detroit, at Manitoulin Island, at Baawiting (Sault Ste. Marie), at Spirit Island in Lake Superior, and finally at Mooningwanekaaning — Madeline Island — where the miigis settled and the food grew on the water. That food was manoomin, wild rice, given by the Creator specifically to the Anishinaabe. It is why, centuries later, the Bad River people describe rice not as a crop but as a relative and a gift: when the ancestors found the rice standing in the sloughs of Chequamegon Bay, they knew the long journey was over. The August manoomin celebration still draws people from all over Ojibwe Country to Bad River when the rice ripens.
Bad River life still moves to the seasonal round the ancestors followed. In spring, families go to the sugarbush for iskigamizige — making maple sugar as the sap rises. Summer belongs to the lake and the gardens: fishing the cold water off the shore, gathering berries in the clearings. In late summer and fall comes the rice harvest, when harvesters pole canoes through the Kakagon Sloughs and knock the ripe grain in with cedar sticks, as their grandparents did — the tribe's own natural resources department sets the season's opening by the ripeness of the beds, so the rice, not the calendar, decides. Winter is for storytelling, when the snow lies deep and the old teachings can be told, and for the spearfisher's dark house on the ice. Social life is ordered by the doodem — the clan system inherited through the father. In the original Anishinaabe teaching there were seven clans: Ajijaak (Crane) and Maang (Loon), the chieftainship clans who balanced each other as outside and inside voices of leadership; Giigoonh (Fish), the scholars and mediators; Makwa (Bear), the police and guardians who also gathered medicines; Waabizheshi (Marten), the warriors and hunters; Waawaashkeshi (Deer, the Hoof clan), the poets and peacemakers; and Bineshiinh (Bird), the spiritual leaders. "What is your clan?" — Aaniin dodem — remains one of the first questions of Anishinaabe introduction. The arts carry the same continuity: wiigwaas (birchbark) worked into containers and canoes, floral beadwork in the woodland style, and the drum at the center of the powwow ground — each one a way the old world keeps speaking in the present tense.
Modern Horizons
Today the Bad River Band governs itself from Odanah under its 1936 constitution, through an elected seven-member Tribal Council chosen in staggered annual elections. The Band runs its own courts, police, natural resources department, fish hatchery, Head Start, and health and social services for a citizenry of 7,923 enrolled members, about 2,614 of whom live on the reservation. Its stewardship work is nationally known. The Mashkiiziibii Natural Resources Department manages the forests, the water, and the wildlife of 124,655 acres; the tribal fish hatchery — the Raymond "Snooty" Couture Fish Hatchery — raises walleye by the millions of fry for the lakes of the ceded territory, and the Band partners in restoring the lake sturgeon that spawn in the Bad River each spring. The sloughs at the river's mouth are protected as Tier 3 Outstanding Tribal Resource Waters under tribal law, and in 2012 they became Ramsar Site no. 2001 — 4,355 hectares (about 10,760 acres) recognized by the world, inside a wetland complex of roughly 16,000 acres that elders call the Everglades of the North. And Odanah is also the headquarters of the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, the intertribal agency formed in 1984 that serves eleven Ojibwe tribes across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota — a daily sign that Bad River sits at the center of treaty-rights country.
The defining fight of the modern era is over a pipeline. Enbridge's Line 5, built in 1953, carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil a day across about twelve miles of the reservation — straight through the watershed of the sloughs. The easements under part of that route expired in 2013; in 2017 the Tribal Council formally declined to renew them, and in 2019 the Band sued in federal court to remove the pipeline as a trespasser on tribal land. A federal judge agreed: in September 2022 the court found Enbridge in trespass, and in June 2023 it found the pipeline a public nuisance, awarded the Band $5.15 million, and ordered the line shut down and removed from the reservation by June 16, 2026. On July 30, 2026, the Seventh Circuit affirmed the trespass ruling but sent the remedies back for refashioning, holding the three-year timetable too aggressive and the damages in need of recalculation — while pointedly urging Enbridge to complete a reroute around the reservation "as soon as possible" and calling the delay "not our approval." The case continues, and the Band's position has never moved: the rice beds and the lake are not negotiable.
The same self-determination shows in quieter work — after a catastrophic "500-year" flood tore through the reservation in July 2016, the Band rebuilt with emergency and pre-disaster plans and invested, with U.S. Department of Energy support, in the Ishkonige Nawadide solar project for energy sovereignty. And in the classrooms, the language is coming home: Bad River's Language Trainee Program and Ojibwemowin program train new speakers, Head Start children learn in Ojibwe immersion, tribal trainees have written children's books in the language, and bilingual highway signs now greet drivers at the reservation line — Gibiindige Mashkiziibiing: "You are entering Bad River." As the Band's language program puts it, "Our dream is that all of our children will grow up hearing and speaking our language, Ojibwemowin."
Reservation Land
The present land base was created by the Treaty of La Pointe on September 30, 1854, when the United States — having failed at removal — agreed that the Lake Superior Ojibwe would keep permanent homelands in their own country. The Bad River Reservation was set aside for the La Pointe Band "and such other Indians as may see fit to settle with them," and it remains the largest Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin. The treaty's promise of 80-acre family allotments began a long fragmentation: through allotment, sale, and tax loss, thousands of acres passed out of tribal hands, leaving the checkerboard that exists today, in which 57,884 of the 124,655 acres within the boundaries are held in trust. Bad River was never terminated, and the Band works steadily to restore its land base, parcel by parcel. The reservation today is centered on the community of Odanah; it takes in the marshes and rice beds of the Kakagon Sloughs; seventeen miles of Lake Superior shoreline; more than a hundred miles of rivers and streams; and some 2,000 acres on Madeline Island — treaty ground on the island where the whole story began.
Learn and More Resources
Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa — Official Tribal Government: https://www.badriver-nsn.gov/
Bad River Ojibwemowin — the Band's language program page: https://www.badriver-nsn.gov/ojibwemowin/
Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) — intertribal natural resources agency headquartered in Odanah: https://glifwc.org/
Ramsar Sites Information Service — Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs, Site no. 2001: https://rsis.ramsar.org/ris/2001
National Park Service, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore — Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) history: https://www.nps.gov/apis/learn/historyculture/ojibwe.htm
Wisconsin Historical Society — the Anishinaabe migration historical marker on Madeline Island: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS17320
U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Indian Energy — Bad River Band project profile: https://www.energy.gov/indianenergy/projects/bad-river-band-lake-superior-tribe-chippewa-indians-2019-2021
References and Sources
1. Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, official tribal government website, badriver-nsn.gov — including the Ojibwemowin (language) program page and the tribal press release "Kakagon Slough Becomes First Reservation Wetlands of International Importance in U.S." (February 8, 2012).
2. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Indian Energy, "Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians — 2019–2021" project profile (enrollment 7,923; reservation population 2,614; constitution ratification and approval dates; Ishkonige Nawadide solar project).
3. Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Tribal Transportation Assurance Program, "Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa" (124,655 acres within reservation boundaries; 57,884 acres in trust; largest Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin; Gibiindige Mashkiziibiing dual-language signs).
4. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, American Indian Studies Program, "Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians" (seven-member Tribal Council; Odanah meaning "town/village"; Odanah ten miles east of Ashland on U.S. Highway 2).
5. Constitution and By-Laws of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin (ratified May 23, 1936; approved June 20, 1936).
6. Treaty with the Chippewa, 1837, 7 Stat. 536 (Treaty of St. Peters).
7. Treaty with the Chippewa, 1842, 7 Stat. 591 (Treaty of La Pointe).
8. Treaty with the Chippewa, 1854, 10 Stat. 1109 (Treaty of La Pointe, September 30, 1854).
9. Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Voigt, 700 F.2d 341 (7th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 805 (1983).
10. Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians v. Enbridge Inc., No. 3:19-cv-00602 (W.D. Wis.) — trespass ruling September 2022; public nuisance judgment and $5,151,668 restitution, June 2023; affirmed in part and remanded in part, No. 23-2415 (7th Cir. July 30, 2026).
11. Ramsar Sites Information Service, "Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs," Site no. 2001 — 4,355 hectares, designated February 2, 2012.
12. Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, glifwc.org (formed 1984; headquartered at Odanah; eleven member Ojibwe tribes).
13. Wisconsin Historical Society, "Apostle Islands: Historic Ojibwe Village and Madeline Island (Mooningwanekaaning)" historical marker, erected 2023; National Park Service, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Ojibwe history pages.
14. Edward Benton-Banai, The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (1988) — the migration teaching and the seven clans.
15. William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People (1885).
16. Benjamin G. Armstrong, Early Life Among the Indians (1892) — the Sandy Lake payment and the 1852 delegation to Washington.
17. Patty Loew, Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2001).
18. Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, clan (doodem) teachings pages — the seven original clans and their roles.
19. Reuters, "US appeals court upholds trespass ruling against Enbridge's Line 5" (July 30, 2026).
Image Credits (all images via Wikimedia Commons unless noted):
- Hero — "Apostle Islands Maritime Cliffs" by Joshua Mayer, CC BY-SA 2.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apostle_Islands_Maritime_Cliffs.jpg
- Wild rice harvest — "Wild rice harvest on Mud Lake, Cass County, Minnesota, September 2015" by George Stringham, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_rice_harvest_on_Mud_Lake,_Cass_County,_Minnesota,_September_2015.jpg
- Wild rice plant — "Zizania aquatica – wild rice" by R. A. Nonenmacher, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zizania_aquatica_-_wild_rice_0200.jpg
- Madeline Island aerial — "Aerial view of Madeline Island from off La Pointe, 2020-08-28" by August Schwerdfeger, CC BY 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_view_of_Madeline_Island_from_off_La_Pointe_2020-08-28.jpg
- Kechewaishke portrait — photographer unknown, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kechewaishke.jpg
- Maple sugarbush — "Ojibwe woman tapping for sugar maple syrup" (detail) by Roland Reed, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail,_Ojibwe_woman_tapping_for_sugar_maple_syrup_(cropped).jpg
- Lake sturgeon — "Acipenser fulvescens" by moxostoma, CC BY 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acipenser_fulvescens_29399697.jpg
- Odanah — "Odanah Wisconsin Looking North" by Royalbroil, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odanah_Wisconsin_Looking_North.jpg
- Ancient Echoes sunrise — "Madeline Island sunrise over Superior" by Yinan Chen, public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gfp-wisconsin-madeline-island-sunrise-over-superior.jpg
- Infographic — original graphic by 7th Fire Warriors; data from the Bad River Band tribal government, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Indian Energy, and the Ramsar Sites Information Service.
A sovereign tribal nation of the Lake Superior Chippewa — Mashkiiziibii, the Bad River, in northern Wisconsin.
Language Name
Language Tree
Enrollment
Land Ownership
Ojibwemowin (also called Anishinaabemowin) — the language of the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe people.
At a Glance
“The food that grows on water.”
The Four Directions
The Bad River Reservation lies in northern Wisconsin, in eastern Ashland County and western Iron County, where the Bad River and its sister streams run north out of the Penokee Range, through cedar swamp and forest, and spread into the great marsh at the edge of Lake Superior. U.S. Highway 2 crosses the reservation's heart at Odanah. Walk it in the four directions:
North
East
East: Toward the Montreal River and the Michigan line. The reservation's Iron County lands reach toward the border country, where the wetlands feed streams that run to Superior's southern shore. East of the reservation, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the other Michigan Ojibwe nations carry the same language and the same treaty history — relatives in the direction of the sunrise, where the migration teaching says the people first heard the prophecies.
More
Long before there was a Bad River Reservation, there was a journey. The Anishinaabe — the Original People — once lived along the Atlantic coast, until prophets brought word from Gichi Manidoo, the Creator: travel west, follow the sacred miigis shell, and stop where you find "the food that grows on water." Over generations the people moved through the Great Lakes in a migration remembered at seven stopping places, until they reached the island the teaching had pointed to all along — Mooningwanekaaning, Madeline Island, "home of the golden-breasted flicker," in the great lake they call Gichigami. In the shallow bays and sloughs of Chequamegon Bay, the rice grew thick on the water, exactly as promised. Madeline Island became the spiritual center and capital of the Ojibwe Nation, and the villages around the bay — La Pointe on the island, and the settlements along the rivers of the mainland shore, including the mouth of the marshy river the people called Mashkiiziibii — became some of the oldest Ojibwe communities on Lake Superior. French traders arrived in the 1600s, and for two centuries Chequamegon Bay was a crossroads of the fur trade, but the land, the rice, and the lake remained Anishinaabe.
The treaty era tested everything. In the Treaties of 1837 (7 Stat. 536) and 1842 (7 Stat. 591), the Lake Superior Ojibwe ceded vast territories in what became Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota — but they expressly kept their rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the ceded lands, "during the pleasure of the President." In 1850, President Zachary Taylor's administration tried to end that arrangement by force: a removal order moved the annual annuity payment from La Pointe to Sandy Lake, Minnesota, drawing thousands of Ojibwe west in late autumn. The payment arrived late and short; disease, cold, and starvation followed. Some 400 Ojibwe died — at Sandy Lake and on the desperate winter journey home. The Lake Superior bands refused removal. In 1852 the aging La Pointe leader Kechewaishke — Chief Buffalo — traveled to Washington and carried his people's case directly to President Millard Fillmore. The removal order was rescinded. Two years later, on September 30, 1854, the Treaty of La Pointe (10 Stat. 1109) was signed on Madeline Island: in exchange for the last great cession, the United States set aside permanent reservations that could not be taken away. The La Pointe Band divided along the lines of that era — many of Buffalo's Catholic followers settled at Red Cliff, while the Midewiwin traditionalists made their home on the mainland at Bad River. The two communities remain close relatives to this day.
The century that followed was hard. The 1854 treaty promised 80-acre allotments to heads of families, and allotment-era policies across the following decades broke the reservation into a checkerboard of trust land, tribal land, and land lost to non-Indian ownership — of the original 124,655 acres, 57,884 remain in trust today. Timber companies cut the great pine forests under leases the Band could not control. At Odanah — the name simply means "village" — Franciscan sisters ran St. Mary's boarding school, part of the federal system that punished children for speaking Ojibwemowin. Yet the Band endured and reorganized: under the Indian Reorganization Act, Bad River ratified its constitution on May 23, 1936, and the people kept governing themselves, kept fishing, kept ricing. When Wisconsin spent decades arresting tribal members for exercising the rights reserved in 1837 and 1842, the Lake Superior bands went to court — the legal fight that began in 1974 became the case of Lac Courte Oreilles Band v. Voigt.
In 1983, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Voigt (700 F.2d 341) that the Ojibwe had never given up their usufructuary rights: the rights to hunt, fish, and gather — including the right to rice — on the ceded territories survived the removal order and the 1854 treaty. The decision reopened an era. In 1984 the eleven Ojibwe tribes of the ceded territories formed the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) to manage the harvest together, and they headquartered it at Odanah, on the Bad River Reservation. The affirmation of treaty rights survived the angry "Walleye War" protests of the late 1980s, and Bad River's own people wrote their chapter of direct action in 1996, when the Anishinaabe Ogitchida blocked a train carrying sulfuric acid across the reservation until the shipment was turned back. In 2012 the Kakagon and Bad River Sloughs — the largest natural wild rice bed on the Great Lakes — were designated a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, the first Ramsar site owned by a Native American tribe. The old teaching had come full circle: the Band was once again recognized, in international law, as the caretaker of the food that grows on water.
Brief History
