The Rhinelander Daily News - Online news and information for the Rhinelander, Wisconsin region

Vern Hollister - Correspondent

Near an ax-hewn cabin on the Mole Lake Reservation, Richard Ackley, Jr., Richard Ackley, Sr., and Evelyn McGeshick, protected by an open air tent cover and frame, accepted donations and offered information during the third annual Mole Lake Heritage Festival. The cabin has been placed on the historical register, and the tribe with the younger Ackley spearheading the drive are working on its restoration.

The festival itself, Ackley, Jr. said, is to draw attention to the cabin. "That's why we're doing it," he said, "and we're trying to enhance the history of the Sokaogon people. The cabin itself is unique because of its condition. We want to restore this. It's on the national register; but we have to follow guidelines."

The cabin was built originally by the U.S. government, and it served as a stopover on what was a military road that followed today's highway 55 and kept going to Three Lakes and eventually to Michigan. Before that, the road was an Indian footpath for migration, and one can deduce that animals followed the path on a north-south route.

Now 85 years old, the senior Ackley said that he lived in the cabin at one time, from age twelve to age eighteen. "Back in those days," he said, "I thought I was living in a mansion. My mother and father lived in a tarpaper shack, dirt for a floor," Ackley, Sr. said.

His story of education is one of both travesty and triumph. When the government decided members of Indian nations should go to school and rid themselves of their native tongues, he was whisked off to Lac du Flambeau at the age of five. Ackley was not allowed to speak Ojibwe, his own language and all he knew. He asked a girl where to go to the bathroom. The teacher beat him on the back of his hand with a stick. The scars remain today.

"My hand was bleeding," Ackley said. "The more she hit me – I never cried – I wondered why she was beating me."

He couldn't express himself in any language except his own.

In The Code Talkers, an autobiography of the Navajo and their vast contributions during World War II, the writer also speaks of similar treatment, of the beatings and the attempts to rid them of their language. Yet it was that voice which turned out to be a code no Axis nation could break.

By age twelve, Ackley returned to Mole Lake, and he slept upstairs in the cabin. The male of the household was the County commissioner, and Ackley lived there with the man, his wife, and the daughter, the Mole Lake schoolteacher. His only theory about why he was accorded a place to stay other than the home conditions was because he was quiet and did a lot of artwork. He left school to enter the service for ten years. For service to the country, Ackley, Sr. was awarded the Purple Heart.

In an easy weekend, with the booths set up around the perimeter, visitors came, stayed for awhile, and left. Jim Smith worked the parking lot early. A couple from Elcho brought a llama and a goat and the goods and products provided because of them. In one corner, Anthony Gauthier from Keshena sold his Native American paintings. Velma Landru made squaw bread from flour, salt, sugar, baking powder and water in the traditional style she learned from her mother. She tilted the cast iron fry pans near the end of the cooking process so that a fire browned the top.

Red Star Express, an 8-piece bluegrass group out of Newton, Wisconsin, began playing about two o'clock, almost straight across from where Peter McGeshick and Roger McGeshick showed the process of parching manoomin and ridding it of its chaff. At one point in the process, Peter dumped the wild rice into a container and used his feet, like crushing grapes, to separate the kernel from the shell.

The low-key weekend event exhibited a relaxed atmosphere. Ackley, Jr. realized that donations would not pay the expense cabin guidelines demanded for the cabin's restoration. They'd spent $70,000 on the cedar shakes and to have an architect assess the needs, and they have a grant; but in a way, a small donation allows a person to feel part of the process, part of keeping heritage alive.

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