LA POINTE, Wis. — A decadelong dream has come true for Ojibwe chef Bryce Stevenson, who opened a restaurant on Madeline Island last season.

Located near the ferry dock at 858 Fort Road, Miijim serves traditional Ojibwe fare with a touch of French flair.

With 35 seats, the quaint restaurant fills quickly and gets loud as the energy intensifies each evening.

The atmosphere at Miijim is designed to be a little chaotic, Stevenson explained. The walls are decorated with the work of local Indigenous artists, and quick-tempo tribal music fills the air alongside the aroma of each unique dish being served.

“It’s a constant flow of people asking questions, learning and sharing their stories,” said Stevenson, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. “We have people leaving with smiles on their face and tears sometimes in their eyes because they had an experience that they really couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Since opening May 25, 2023, Miijim has earned Stevenson a James Beard nomination as well as an appearance on the Bravo reality show “Top Chef” as a guest judge on Season 21, Episode 9.

The concept of making Indigenous foods accessible to the general public is gaining momentum with the growing food sovereignty movement of Native American chefs.

Miijim means “food” in the Ojibwe language. Similar to the Sioux Chef Sean Sherman’s restaurant Owamni in Minneapolis, you won’t find any gluten, dairy or refined sugar on the menu.

“Everything we do here seems so limiting to the outside perspective because we don’t use flour,” Stevenson said. “We don’t use soy. We don’t use any of these commercial proteins such as chicken or beef.”

Miijim’s ingredients are primarily sourced from Indigenous tribal organizations, tribal farms and food sovereignty organizations.

The restaurant’s second tier of sourcing is from the Chequamegon Bay area’s farmers, foragers, hunters and gatherers.

The third baseline is that the food is organic.

“It just makes all this food really shine and pop by using the simple ingredients that are already all around us,” Stevenson said. “The food’s here. You just have to find it. You have to educate yourself on it and really just eat where you live.”

No guest is likely to experience the same dish twice as Miijim’s menu rotates with the availability of seasonal ingredients.

The menu features ingredients like mushrooms, ramps, chaga and cedar, paired with game meats like venison, bison, walleye, elk and rabbit.

Strawberries, or ode’imin, which means “heart seed” in terms of the traditional Ojibwe gathering, are a staple on Miijim’s menu. Combined with blueberries, raspberries and blackberries, the strawberries are reduced with cedar and maple sugar to create baashiminasigan, which translates to “exploding berries.”

“I imagine my ancestors 500 years ago just sticking strawberries on the fire, grilling them up,” Stevenson said. “It’s a beautiful, happy treat that is just so important to us as a people.”

Madeline Island, also known as Mooningwanekaaning, is the spiritual homeland of the Anishinaabe (or Ojibwe) people whose territory extended across the entire region, according to Bayfield Historic Walking Tours owner and guide Elizabeth Downey.

Before Bayfield was founded in 1856, a culture and commerce had already been established by its earliest inhabitants. In the 1600s, the French began to populate and influence the area through their commerce with the Native people during the fur trade era, Downey said.

The dining area in Miijim restaurant, featuring Ojibwe-themed decor. (Wyatt Buckner / Duluth Media Group)

Madeline Island was the headquarters for the booming fur trade for 200 years. It was named for Madeline Cadotte, the daughter of Chief White Crane and the wife of fur trader Michel Cadotte.

In the early 1800s, the U.S. government had started to make a concentrated effort to force Native people to move further westward, making lands available to then sell to white immigrants with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and many other treaties, Downey said.

“It was in the 1840s that the Anishinaabe people in this region were being targeted and actively forced out of their homeland here,” Downey said. “It was clear how disastrous this would be for the survival of the people and the culture.”

In 1852, Chief Buffalo, 93, of Madeline Island, and several others embarked on a 10-week journey by a 24-foot birch bark canoe through the Great Lakes, and then by train to Washington, D.C., Downey said.

“They hoped to meet with the federal commissioner of Indian Affairs to convince them to rescind their removal orders. But they were denied a meeting and even told them traveling to D.C. was illegal in and of itself,” Downey said. “By chance, they were able to meet President Millard Fillmore himself in a public dining area, and he was willing to talk with them.”

After smoking a ceremonial pipe with the president, Fillmore agreed that the Anishinaabe should not be forced to leave their homeland and rescinded the Indian Removal orders.

“The Treaty of 1854 established the Red Cliff and Bad River reservations, establishing homeland reservations for the tribe, but of course, reducing the amount of land they had traditionally occupied,” Downey said.

Stevenson explained that the release of the Anishinaabe people’s land to the government “was stipulated on certain outcomes, one being health care, and the other being food sustenance.”

“The food that was given to us in trade, we called the five white gifts: flour, lard, baking soda, granular sugar and dried milk,” he said.

“It was meant to kill us off. It was meant to harm us,” Stevenson said.

This history crossed into generational trauma for Stevenson’s family, he said. His grandmother was one of 13 children who were “raised white” by his great-grandparents in fear of being physically reprimanded for practicing Ojibwe traditions or customs.

“At that time, it is the only way that we’re going to survive in the world,” Stevenson said. “Up until the ’70s, it was illegal for us to practice our songs or dances, our food traditions or our harvesting.”

The biggest motivation driving his success is to change the system and mindset by creating ways to make accessible the heritage his family and people were denied.

“The colonization efforts were to remove us from our traditions, from our food, from our practices, songs or teachings — to sort of isolate us into nothingness,” Stevenson said. “So the fact that we’re here, we’re bringing these foods back or introducing them to other people, other than Indigenous peoples, and getting them educated, excited and motivated to create systemic changes.”

Before opening his own restaurant, Stevenson led the Indigenous Food Lab in Minneapolis and worked as head chef at the Hotel Fauchere, a Relais & Châteaux property in Milford, Pennsylvania.

Before entering the food industry, he worked as a carpenter, graphic designer, letter pressman, landscaping tree and shrub specialist.

“I spent all this time trying to figure out what I loved and what I was passionate about. All of it just came up short,” Stevenson said. “It wasn’t until I just finally took a part-time job down the street from me at a falafel house, just for fun.”

Realizing his passion for food and its influence on those eating it, combined with a responsibility to share the knowledge obtained through a degree in Indigenous studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, were the impetus for Miijim.

Opening Miijim was Stevenson’s way of reclaiming a presence on the island and returning to the foods eaten there originally, reinterpreted in a modern context.

By reviving Ojibwe food traditions and culture to Madeline Island, Stevenson’s biggest hope is that patrons also gain a better sense of what real food is.

“I never saw myself as a teacher because I’ve always spent so much time trying to learn, trying to reconnect,” he said. “That I didn’t realize that everything I was collecting at the time I’d be able to share.”

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