Bob Jones, current owner of the old Sanuskar property, points out the ridge in his land where the human remains were uncovered in 1978.
By KEN WYATT
Contributing Writer
As Jackson approaches its bicentennial in 2029, and the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, there is a history too often ignored — our pre-history. We all know it: The tribal presence on the lands that our predecessors settled in the 1830s.
Not only were tribes living throughout Michigan in the early 19th century, they inhabited what we know as Pulaski Township of Jackson County. That is worth emphasizing, for past research has not always been specific about their presence.
Nearly a century ago, in 1931, Professor Wilbert B. Hinsdale of the University of Michigan produced his Archaeological Atlas of Michigan. It is a valuable work of research that included county-by-county descriptions of Michigan’s pre-history tribal presence.
In the text concerning Jackson County, Hinsdale noted, “Village sites were numerous [23 in total], and every township except Hanover and Pulaski was crossed by a trail.” Such a scholarly effort, based on records compiled by early settlers and hunters had an implication – that not much of note was located in those two southwestern townships of the county.
Not long ago, Bob Jones, former Pulaski Township supervisor, passed on a document published in the Federal Register, dated Sept. 30, 2013. It shed light on the tribal presence in Pulaski, and specifically along the shores of what white settlers in the late 1830s began calling Swains Lake.
Here is the summary paragraph of that document, which provides the gist of its significance:
“The Michigan State University Museum has completed an inventory of human remains, in consultation with the appropriate Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations, and has determined that there is no cultural affiliation between the human remains and any present-day Indian tribes …”
Where were those human remains found? In Pulaski Township, on property that Jones now owns along the northeast end of Swains Lake.
The document invited tribal entities interested in the remains to contact the museum to arrange for a transfer of the remains to their control. While the summary made no mention of Pulaski or Swains Lake, there is specific information later in the document.
According to both the 2013 document and an Oct. 1, 1978, Jackson Citizen Patriot article, human remains were uncovered in September and October of 1978 by Carl Sanuskar along the northeastern shoreline of the lake. At the time, Sanuskar had lived on the property about 30 years. In previous years he had done extensive excavations, mostly to get fill dirt for a swampy area.
Both Bob Jones and brother Jim Jones remember those excavations. Jim helped in some of it, and brother Bob is quite familiar with what happened. During the preparation of this article, he walked the writer over to the area where the excavations took place within sight of the lake, pointing out the exact area where the bones were found and recovered.
At one point in his excavations for fill dirt, Sanuskar uncovered a human skull. He called the Michigan State Police, not knowing what to think. Detectives Lt. Timothy Ryan and Sgt. Robert Piziali responded and determined that the remains were not of any recent vintage.
According to both the 1978 and 2013 articles, the detectives contacted the Michigan State University Department of Anthropology. Dr. Norman Sauer visited the site with two archaeologists, and the team ended up carrying away several boxes of remains for further analysis.
Here’s what the 2013 report by the Michigan State University Museum said about those studies:
“Four individual burials were identified. Individual 1 was a virtually complete, flexed burial and was identified as a mid-adult female. Individual 2 was a virtually complete, except for arms and legs, extended burial and was identified as a late-adult female. Individual 3 was a fragmented burial identified as an adult male. Individual 4 was a fragmented burial identified as a young-adult male.
“The remaining human remains, representing at minimum six additional individuals, included a cranial piece, four ribs, five long bone fragments, four tarsal fragments, and numerous other unidentifiable bone fragments. No known individuals were identified. No associated funerary objects are present. The human remains date to the Late Prehistoric era based on the structure of the mortuary domain being consistent with burial practices.”
So what eventually happened to those Swains Lake tribal remains?
Earlier this year, the writer contacted Jessica Yann, program manager for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act with the MSU Anthropology Department. She did some checking and found that on May 7, 2014, those remains were transferred to the Pokagon Band of the Pottawatomi.
That band is governed tribally from Dowagiac, about 100 miles southwest of Pulaski Township. The band has reservation land in 10 counties in the region.
Though all indigenous tribes then located in southern lower Michigan were relocated to the west in the late 1830s under the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, Chief Leopold Pokagon negotiated with the government. He and his band of 280 people were allowed to remain in southwestern Michigan.
What gave that band exemption to the relocation? According to a 2017 Michigan Public Radio interview with two historians, Leopold Pokagon traveled to Detroit and requested from the Catholic Diocese a priest. That said something to U.S. officials that carried weight – that those Pokagon Pottawatomi “were not a threat and that they were citizens,” according to the WKAR interview. Though a “conversion” with political implications, it was a true spiritual conversion, according to John Low, a University of Michigan-trained PhD graduate and a citizen of the Pokagon band who teaches American Indian Studies at Ohio State University.
While the MSU Museum was unable to connect the Swains Lake burial site directly to the Pottawatomi, that tribe did dominate this region before white settlers arrived. The MSU study dated the remains to the late prehistoric era, which is generally defined as the period between 1,250 to 1,776 AD.
Of the past and the history of those people, the best-known of its chiefs, Simon Pokagon, wrote eloquently about it in an 1897 article entitled “The Future of the Red Man.” Here are his opening words:
“Often in the stillness of the night, when all nature seems asleep about me, there comes a gentle rapping at the door of my heart. I open it; and a voice inquires, ‘Pokagon, what of your people?’ What will their future be? My answer is: Mortal man has not the power to draw aside the veil of unborn time to tell the future of his race. That gift belongs to the Divine alone. But it is given to him to closely judge the future by the present and the past.”
We are in the future of which Pokagon wrote so long ago. Those bones, uncovered at Swains Lake back in 1978 and handed over to the Pokagon band in 2014, can be taken as a reminder of another aspect of our history.
A Jackson County archaeologist, Dan Wymer, adds this bit of information: “The Michigan tribal organizations rebury skeletal material returned to them and any artifacts found with the skeletal material. They keep the reburial locations secret to make sure nobody goes there to dig the burials back up and take the artifacts.”
In our national celebrations of independence from our mother country, it should be remembered that there were indigenous people who lived on these lands we now regard as our own. Their bones are a reminder of our pre-history. We have good reason to celebrate the nation’s independence. But in doing so, let’s not forget that our independence came at the expense of the tribes that once lived, hunted and often fought their own battles to inhabit these lands.
