Indian Dormitory

About this property

The Richard and Jane Manoogian Mackinac Art Museum is an art museum located in the historic Indian Dormitory building on Mackinac Island, Michigan. The museum's exhibits feature art inspired by Mackinac Island, including historic painting and maps, photographs from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, Native American art and beaded garments, and contemporary art and photography from area artists. The museum is one of many attractions in Mackinac Island State Park. The Indian Dormitory is a Federal-style structure built at U.S. government expense on Mackinac Island, Michigan, in 1838. It was a pioneering idea in building housing for Native Americans visiting the Indian agency on the island. The local Sons of Temperance chapter, Mackinac Division No. 23 (1847-1851), held weekly meetings there in a rented room in the Indian Dormitory between 1847 and 1848, before moving their meetings to the local Court House. From 1867 until 1960, it was used as a public school, and from 1966 until 2003 as a museum of Native American culture. On July 2, 2010, it opened as the Richard and Jane Manoogian Mackinac Art Museum, operated by Mackinac State Historic Parks. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Indian Dormitory is a surviving fragment of the assimilationist vision of Henry Schoolcraft, the U.S. government official supervising Native American affairs and based at Mackinac Island. Schoolcraft noticed in the early 19th century that the culture of most Native Americans centered on the hunting and gathering of food, activities which were less productive in terms of food production than agriculture. Schoolcraft believed that Native Americans could be persuaded to cede much of their hunting lands to the U.S. federal government, and that the government could reinvest some of the proceeds to be earned from reselling these lands to teach farming techniques to "the Indians." Other income from land sales could be used to support Native American families during the transitional period. As the Indian Agent in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and later on Mackinac Island, Schoolcraft had seen that many of the Native Americans who travelled by foot or canoe to visit his agency were limited by necessity to portable, temporary shelters they could easily build. These did not seem adequate from the European-American point of view. As the Mackinac Island Indian Agent, Schoolcraft was able to persuade many Native Americans of Michigan Territory, especially members of the Ojibwa and Ottawa tribes, to sell most of the northern Lower Peninsula and eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the federal government. The exchange was sealed in the 1836 Treaty of Washington.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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