On the shore of Lake Michigan, near the McKinley Marina in Milwaukee, sits a 106-foot-long white, metal and concrete pedestrian bridge. To Eileen McEnroe Hankes, a structural engineer in Milwaukee, it doesn’t really serve a clear purpose.
“Yeah, I called it the bridge to nowhere,” says Hankes, “Because it just kind of seems to go over a little piece of water that you could easily just walk around. So I didn't really know why it was there.”
“Why bother going up and over when you just walk around it?” she asked Bubbler Talk to find out more about the bridge.
A catalyst in Milwaukee’s indigenous history
The short answer? The bridge is the last remnant of a Coast Guard station that was located in McKinley Park from 1916 to the late 1960s, when the federal government abandoned it and moved Coast Guard operations to Bay View near the Port of Milwaukee, where it is now. But that’s where the story gets interesting.
On August 14th, 1971, the local branch of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, led by Herb Powless, who is Oneida, began occupying the abandoned Coast Guard station at McKinley Park.
“We want to highlight the drastic need of our people,” Powless said in an interview with TMJ4 News at the time.”There are funding agencies, government, state, etcetera that have monies to help and are helping other people. But they’ve neglected us, the First Americans,” he continued.
Powless has since passed away. But as he and AIM occupied the Coast Guard building, they used the Treaty of Laramie to negotiate with the Nixon administration.
Like other treaties, it says that federal government lands are held in trust and that if the government abandons a space, it should go back to its original caretakers.
A period of national Indigenous self-determination
The backdrop of all this was the Red Power movement, a time of profound social change led by Native American youth in the 1960s and '70s. In San Francisco, for instance, a group of Native American activists laid claim to Alcatraz Island. Advocates, both locally and nationally, were rising up against inequities and fighting for self-determination. AIM was one of the grassroots organizations that started at that time.
In a 2021 interview with WUWM commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Coast Guard Station occupation, Powless’ wife, Dorothy Ninham, provided the context in which AIM was working.
“You have to remember that a lot of our people were removed from reservations and put into the urban settings and promised housing and employment and education, and a lot of that never happened,” Ninham explained. “You know, some of these people ended up in worse conditions and they were on the reservations, living in poverty and some of them being homeless and with jobs that couldn't support a family. So, it was really a tough time. It was tough for us, but we had to stand our ground.”
Siobhan Marks is communications and marketing director for the Indian Community School in Franklin. She’s Eagle Clan and a lineal descendant of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Marks says, according to Herb Powless, the government considered sending in the Marines to take control of the Coast Guard building during AIM’s occupation. There were even preparations for an armed standoff if necessary, she adds.
“Fortunately, none of that happened,” Marks says. “We were able to negotiate an agreement that would allow AIM to remain on the property and for the Indian Community School to bring their children and teachings here.”
The Indian Community School moves through its third, fourth and fifth homes
The Coast Guard station became the Indian Community School’s, or ICS, third home. It had previously been in a founding mother’s home, then moved to a church basement. The school operated out of the Coast Guard Building until 1980, along with a culturally-based alcohol treatment initiative. Then, after negotiations with the city and county, it moved to the Bartlett Avenue school, then to the Concordia College property, near State Street in Milwaukee.
Marks says that all these locations for the Indian Community School — including the Concordia Campus — were in disrepair.
“It wasn't an easy place to be able to educate children,” she says. “Their lunch was in another building from where they were being educated. So if it was winter, they had to put on their boots, hats, coats, mittens, and be transported over there so they could eat lunch. And then they had to put their boots and hats and mittens and gloves on and go back to where they were being educated.”
Collaboration with the Potawatomi: A new era for the Indian Community School
The Indian Community School struggled financially in the early 1980s. It relied on federally-provided grant funding, which Marks says was sometimes unreliable. It temporarily closed in 1983.
Around that same time, the Forest County Potawatomi, then a small impoverished tribe in northern Wisconsin, started bingo operations.
Then, the school came up with an idea, says Jeff Crawford, a member of the Forest County Potawatomi and the tribe’s attorney general. “In the mid 1980s, the Indian Community School was looking for a tribal partner to take land into trust. And it is my understanding that they approached every tribe in the State of Wisconsin and the only tribe that said that they would be interested was the Forest County Potawatomi.”
The Potawatomi’s historic treaty and occupation area is from Chicago all the way up to Door County.
“And so, in other words, all of Milwaukee, Kenosha and Racine, this entire southeastern Wisconsin was Potawatomi treaty territory,” he says. “For that reason, we were most interested in getting lands back in the Milwaukee area and so that was a successful application, in part because we had those historical connections to this very campus.”
The school purchased a seven and a half acre property on Canal Street in the Menomonee Valley, where, after years of negotiations with the city and county, the Forest County Potawatomi began operating a bingo hall in 1991.
It eventually became Potawatomi Casino Hotel, the first off-reservation casino in the country.
That has led to financial stability for both the Potawatomi and the Indian Community School.
As a result, ICS was able to purchase the 178 acres on which the school is currently located, in Franklin. The school opened its doors in 2007. “And we are [in] what we consider our forever home out in Franklin,” describes Marks.
She says the school owes gratitude to everyone who took on every challenge before it. “And made the tough decisions,” she says. “And some of them were truly tough. ... All of the leaders who looked at the opportunities before us and made sure that we had a spending discipline and were well invested, which has given us the ability to say this school can go on forever. Truly this school can go on in perpetuity, which means seven generations and seven more, and so on.”
Connecting students to Native languages, culture and ways
On a rainy spring day, as water and mist coats the gardens and trails around them, students sit in the ICS cafeteria, eating lunch at the school in Franklin.
It’s a magnificent building that connects the outside natural world with the inside. The building is made of natural materials like copper, wood, marble and ancient stone. Everything has been built intentionally, in line with Indigenous traditions.
The approximately 360 kids who go here learn traditional K4 through 8th grade subjects. But the school is also pushing forward Native languages, culture and ways so that the children learn about who they are and where they came from.
Honoring Indigenous history
The school can thank its three Oneida founding mothers: Marge Funmaker, Darlene Funmaker Neconish and Marj Stevens, who originally began teaching students in Stevens' apartment in 1969. But it turns out that the Coast Guard bridge on Milwaukee’s lakefront, and AIM’s time occupying the station, are a piece of the history that led to the school’s success today.
Looking at the bridge and the park around it, you wouldn’t know it. There is no monument to this piece of Indigenous history in the Milwaukee area or at McKinley Park itself.
Historian John Gurda says that the Coast Guard building suffered a serious fire in 1988, but “was still admired by preservationists as a rare example of a Prairie Style public building.” He says plans for a Great Lakes museum, a restaurant, an Indian heritage center and a few other ideas all fell through. “The decrepit building was finally demolished in 2008, but the bridge remained,” Gurda explains.
When asked about the absence of any monument commemorating the Indigenous history of the site, Marks says this: “I think it's important to note that the largest concentration of Native Americans in the entire state of Wisconsin actually reside right here in Milwaukee, and we have a rich, vibrant Native community, and have had for many years. That said, we are less than 2% of the overall population. So it is difficult to be seen, difficult to be remembered, unless someone actually takes that time to document the original caretakers’ role in this part of history.”
She says Milwaukee didn't start with its city charter and the electing of its first city council. Milwaukee began 40,000 or 50,000 years before that, with the original caretakers of this land. The bridge is a connector to that past — and the future generations that honor it.
According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Coast Guard building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 and removed in 2009 due to demolition. There is not currently an official state historical marker for this property.
"I really had no idea of the history. I really thought — I had no idea. And clearly this whole land has been Native, but I didn't know the direct tie to all of that. It's incredible. I want to learn a lot more," says Bubbler Talk question asker McEnroe Hankes.
McEnroe Hankes says she'll never walk by and call it the "bridge to nowhere" again, "because there's a whole history behind it. So, I'll tell everybody the story when I walk past."
Note: The music featured in this story is the "Alligator Dance," sung by students and staff from the Indian Community School.
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