Slow through Middle Village here, because there is a small white church down toward the water with a cemetery beside it, and I want to tell you what that ground is.
Start with what was here first. This bluff was Odawa country, and not thinly — L'Arbre Croche was a string of villages running miles along this shore, with cornfields on the high ground and the fishery below, and in the eighteen forties this stretch of coast held the largest concentration of Native people anywhere in the United States. Middle Village was one of the principal settlements. People had been living, farming, fishing and burying their dead here for a very long time before anybody put up a steeple.
Then the mission came, in the eighteen hundreds, and the church went up, and the community that grew around it was Odawa and Catholic at the same time.
Now I am not going to tidy that up for you. The mission era in this country was bound up with real pressure — to take a different name, to stop speaking your own language, to raise your children into somebody else's way of being. That happened here and up and down this coast, and there are families in these townships who can tell you exactly what it cost them.
And at the same time — and both of these are true at once — the people here made this place their own. They built it. They kept it. They are buried in it. Generation after generation, right there in the sand above the beach.
So go down and stand at the edge of that cemetery a minute, if you stop. Look at the stones and read a few of the names, and then notice that many of those same family names are on the mailboxes you have been driving past all afternoon, and on the tribal rolls of the Little Traverse Bay Bands, who are a sovereign nation governing themselves a few miles south of where you are standing.
That is the thing I want you to take out of this stop. Every other historic site on this road is about something that ENDED — the crooked tree that fell, the old man who died in sixty-eight. This one is not. This is an active burial ground for a living community, and there are people who will be laid in that sand this year.
Walk quietly. Take nothing. And then look out past the headstones, because those graves face west over Lake Michigan, and whoever chose that ground chose the best view on this entire coast for their people to keep.