The Burial Place of a French Priest, and the Story of the Straits

In the heart of St. Ignace — one of the oldest settlements in Michigan — sits a quiet park and museum that tells the story of the very beginning of European Michigan, and honors one of its most important figures, who is believed to be buried right there.

This is the Museum of Ojibwa Culture and Marquette Mission Park, built on the site of a 17th-century Huron (Wyandot) village and the mission founded by the French Jesuit priest Father Jacques Marquette in 1671. Marquette is one of the towering figures of early Great Lakes history — the same priest who founded Sault Ste. Marie in 1668, and who in 1673 joined Louis Jolliet on the legendary expedition that mapped the upper Mississippi River for Europeans. He died in 1675 along the Lake Michigan shore, and within a couple of years his remains were carried back to his St. Ignace mission and reburied. In a remarkable modern coda, bones believed to be his — rediscovered in 1877 and long held at Marquette University — were returned and ceremonially reburied at the museum site in 2022, in a Native-led service. A memorial marks the spot today.

But the museum’s real strength is that it tells the story from both sides of that meeting. It centers the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) people — their culture, their longhouses, their way of life at the Straits of Mackinac for thousands of years before any European arrived — alongside the story of the French missionaries and fur traders who came into their world. You can walk through a reconstructed longhouse, see how the Straits peoples lived, and understand the Straits of Mackinac as what it truly was: a great crossroads of nations long before it was anything European.