2 rustic family campgrounds plus, on Highway 6 less than 10 minutes north of the ferry.1) climax-forested and close to showers, playground, mini-putt, store, and a small WiFi access area,2) open-field in Canada’s first RASC-designated commercial Dark Sky Preserve for astronomy enthusiasts,plus 3) a scatter of hike-in tent sites for serious birders and trackers.Established in 1990, this 260+ acre site hosts miles of hiking trails through 4 distinct ecozones, several rental Teepees and Bunkies for the tent-averse, 3 forest sites with 20 amp service (no water or sewage hookups) plus a plethora of trailer or RV sites for the self-sufficient, and an increasing roster of family-friendly and accessible stellar and nature events.
The Codmothers’ Family Dining • Takeaway Wheelchair Accessible Licenced Wheelchair Accessible Licenced About The Codmothers’ This fully licenced family restaurant in
Wass Tours specializing in spring rainbow trout and summer salmon offering half and full day charters on Georgian Bay.
Captain Wassegijig operates a transport compliant vessel certified in SVOP and MED A3 and is knowledgeable of the waters surrounding Manitoulin Island.
Wass Tours also offers Scenic/Historic Cruises throughout the North Channel, Killarney and Collins Inlet.
Captain Moe Gauthier is a full time Fishing Guide on Manitoulin Island.
He is the Owner/Operator of Screamin’ Reels Fishing Charters based out of South Baymouth, Manitoulin Island.
With over 20 years fishing the waters of Lake Huron. Captain Moe grew up fishing and hunting Manitoulin Island. He is extremely knowledgable of the island and the water’s surrounding it.
Capt. Moe operates a 30ft Sea Sport Fishing boat and has the latest technology onboard. This aides him in giving his clients “a trip to remember for a lifetime”. His passion for fishing is evident the moment you step on the Screamin’ Reels.
Captain Moe won 1st place and has multiple top 10 finishes in the Manitoulin Salmon Classic Fishing Derby.
This event, begun in 1961, is the forerunner of all modern powwow festivals in central Canada and thus it has special status. Colonization had ended the tradition in the 1800s but the idea of traditional gatherings with dancing, drumming and singing never went away. Determining it was time to bring back the tradition to her community and make it public, Rosemary Fisher-Odjig made it part of her life’s work to rekindle the powwow spirit in her community and brought dancers and drummers from Saskatchewan the first year to help her cause. The rest is history and this important festival, held the Civic Holiday Weekend each August is part of a North American powwow circuit that brings competitive dancers from all parts of Canada and the United States where they compete, within their chosen categories, for prizes and cash. It is a very large cultural spectacle with crafts vendors from all over North America on hand.
Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory is Manitoulin’s and Northern Ontario’s largest First Nation community so it’s not surprising that it hosts two powwow events each year.
Each is different, though. The traditional powwow is held each year the third weekend in June at Thunderbird Park in the heart of the village of Wiikwemkoong. What makes this event unique is that, each year, it is planned and hosted by one of Wiikwemkoong’s satellite communities and each of these (Buzwah, Kaboni, Rabbit Island, South Bay, Murray Hill) will put their own mark on the powwow when it is their turn to host.
Sheguiandah First Nation’s annual traditional powwow is held each year the first weekend in July at the community’s waterfront powwow grounds. The beautifully treed setting ensures that there’s shade enough for all and this event is one of the most popular of Manitoulin Island’s Powwow season. The food and crafts vendors are also nestled among the trees and the ambience of this event is one of calm tranquility. Sheguiandah First Nation is located on Highway 6, 10 km south of Little Current.
Manitoulin Island is able to boast three theatre groups, each of them unique
Burns Wharf Players
Named after the Manitowaning waterfront warehouse (Burns Wharf) where this talented group treated patrons to 15 years of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the Burns Wharf Players are now bringing musical theatre to the revamped Knox United Church (in Manitowaning, at 25 Napier Street) while their beloved playhouse is being restored. The congregation at Knox United invited the players in and, during the spring rehearsal and late spring performances, have literally transformed the church’s sanctuary into a theatre setting. For details on Burns Wharf Players’ offerings, contact the box office at 1-866-967-8167 or book online at www.burnswharf.net
Gore Bay Summer Theatre
Gore Bay Summer Theatre presents two offerings through the month of July each year. This talented and well-directed group of volunteer actors, set designers and carpenters, lighting and sound technicians are also busy in the winter months when they pick a challenging dramatic work, polish it and go on to compete in the Northern Ontario regional drama festival, Quonta. Since they often win this event, they are also often off to Theatre Ontario’s showcase to compete against Ontario’s other regional winners in amateur theatre. The Gore Bay troupe is often successful at the provincial level too.
When you take in a summer production at the Gore Bay Summer Theatre, you’re being entertained by local thespians who hone their craft year-round. To see what’s on, call the box office at 705-2420 extension 3 or visit the town’s website www.gorebay.ca.
When you attend a production at Gore Bay Summer Theatre, you’ll find yourself in the town’s classic community hall at 25 Meredith Street in the downtown core.
De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Storytellers
Debajehmujig Storytellers is one of only a handful of professional Indigenous theatre groups in Canada.
Debajehmujig is headquartered in Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory but has its offices, rehersal space and theatre space in the village of Manitowaning at the Debajehmujig Creation Centre at 43 Queen Street.
The troupe has been presenting original work for over 35 years and has toured all across Canada and the United States, Europe and Great Britain.
The players present their own work at the Creation Centre theatre space which also often hosts touring performances.
Having their own theatre space gives Debajehmujig Storytellers flexibility and the versatile year-round theatre space is a real asset to Manitoulin Island’s cultural community.
The Creation Centre is also home to an art gallery with continually changing exhibits and installations.
The Debajehmujig Storytellers pride themselves on also being a land-based operation so crew and cast members get, literally, grounded in the growing season by spending some of their time helping to grow food and, each winter, hosting Manitoulin Island’s first ‘seed swap’ of the season. At Thanksgiving, the storytellers host a ‘Six Foot Festival’ of installations that fit in that space and there is an annual Christmas Cabaret show.
In the summer Debajehmujig Storytellers also often produce plays at Wiikwemikoong within the scenic stone ruins of a two-storey dormitory that once housed the community’s parish priests.
It is located on Wikwemikong Way, on top of one of the village’s highest point beside historic Holy Cross Catholic Church.
To find out what is going on at Debajehmujig Storytellers, visit www.storytellers@debaj.ca or call the theatre office at 705-859-1820.
When you take in a summer production at the Gore Bay Summer Theatre, you’re being entertained by local thespians who hone their craft year-round. To see what’s on, call the box office at 705-2420 extension 3 or visit the town’s website www.gorebay.ca.
When you attend a production at Gore Bay Summer Theatre, you’ll find yourself in the town’s classic community hall at 25 Meredith Street in the downtown core.
If you’re a golfer, by all means pack your clubs and come to Manitoulin Island.
Manitoulin is a large island (the biggest one in fresh water in the world) with a relatively small population (13,000-plus) but there are three golf courses here and each one of them is distinct in its features.
“Manitoulin’s Old Course” is the nine-hole Brookwood Brae Golf Course located not only within 2 km of the busy village of Mindemoya but also on the shoreline of Mindemoya Lake, one of Manitoulin’s larger inland lakes.
The nine hole course comes with its own array of bungalow cottages and is neighbour to three more housekeeping cottage businesses and a motel, all within walking distance of the course.
The course has challenging features and is also a fine course for golfers of every skill, especially those who, following their swing, can look forward to a glimpse of the beautiful lake, the large island called Treasure Island whose profile (an old woman on her hands and knees, according to local Ojibwe legend) will come in and out of your view as you play through, giving you the time to make up your own mind about the legend.
Just outside of the North Channel port town of Gore Bay, Manitoulin Golf offers golfers nine holes of bucolic beauty. The course, set in the fertile farmland that marks the Gore Bay area, is both gentle and subtly challenging. Manitoulin Golf is located in the rural township of Gordon/Barrie Island, although primarily agricultural, besides the golf course, is also the proud host of the Gore Bay-Western Manitoulin Airport and, along its share of the North Channel shoreline, one of Manitoulin’s distinctive and historic lighthouses: Janet Head Light.
We’ve covered the golf courses in Manitoulin’s central region and in its West End.
On Manitoulin’s eastern side, and just outside the historic village of Manitowaning, the Rainbow Ridge Golf Course is Manitoulin Island’s championship 18-hole golf course. It is also unique as it is owned and operated by the neighbouring Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve. This challenging course has numerous water features and a clubhouse that enables golfers to play their favourite game year-round, in any weather, at the state-of-the-art virtual golf course that has been installed there. Players can choose to play this way at most of the world’s most famous and challenging courses: suddenly, you’re there, at, for example, St. Andrew’s, and you have to match your play to the giant computer-generated vista before you and you must accommodate its perks and foibles as you play through as the virtual program gives you an extremely realistic experience, course by course.
Golf carts and clubs are available to rent at the pro shops at each course. Each club has dining facilities at its clubhouse and you’ll meet Manitoulin Island golfers as you play through or relax in the clubhouses.
Two museums within easy access to each other, in Little Current and Sheguiandah, each distinctive, tell of prehistoric peoples, of the settlers of large homesteads, the builders of towns and villages, the entrepreneurs and their struggles to establish a foothold on largely forested Manitoulin Island beginning in the 1860s when the land was first opened to settlement.
Up the wide, old staircase to the second floor in Turners store on Water Street in Little Current, tucked into a far corner, is the tiny one-room museum dedicated to the Turner family and mercantile history of the last 140 years. A bit like stumbling upon a cache of treasures in great- (or great- great-) grandfather’s attic, the museum’s collection is stacked here and there throughout the little space in and on old glass store cases and counters; an ancient typewriter collects dust beneath the stern gaze of Turner ancestors whose framed photos cover the walls; yellowed newspapers proclaim achievements, wins in boat races and milestones in the business and political life of the town.
When Isaac and Elizabeth Turner arrived in Little Current in 1877, they had only stopped to rest for a few days before continuing on their journey west in pursuit of advantageous land prices, but the aspect of the flourishing Manitoulin town pleased Elizabeth and she refused to move on. Two years later, Turners was established as a dry goods store, selling everything from flour to rubber boots, pots and pans and cloth by the yard.
Little Current was booming in 1879, having been surveyed in 1864-65, after the Treaty of 1862 removed the Indigenous residents, who had been living on their lands and operating businesses there since the 1850s, to the small nearby reserve of Sucker Creek (now Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation).
On the steamer route, Little Current became a market town, boosted by the huge trade in lumber. In about 1874, the first small sawmill was built, then the larger Red Mill in 1886 and two other large mills shortly after, hiring hundreds of men and sheltering them in boarding houses along the waterfront.
Later, Turners became widely known for its fine British china and wool; it was the place to shop for mohair sweaters, coats of camelhair, cashmere shawls, linens for table and bed and clothing for the whole family, all imported from England. “Canada’s oldest nautical chart dealer” still sells charts, reflecting the family’s passion for boating of Grant Turner who founded the Great Lakes Cruising Club, and of Jib Turner, a sailor of some repute. The iconic Turners map of Manitoulin was developed by Barney Turner in 1949 after he took a course in cartography; that map, with some improvements in the 1960s and in 2006, has been a big seller for seventy years, its vintage look a favorite of souvenir hunters.
Debby and Jib Turner are the owners of Turners today, in the same building the store has occupied since 1913 when it was built by George Strain, after Turners had occupied two other town locations. “We’re the fifth generation of Turners to carry on the family business,” says Debby Turner, “and we’re waiting on the 6th and 7th generations of customers who have shopped here since the doors opened in 1879.”
“Since the high import tariffs of British Trade Act were imposed in the 1970s, Turners has moved toward becoming wholly Canadian, specializing in more Canadiana and local art in the upstairs gallery,” adds Ms Turner. “Turners of Little Current is still in small part a department store but is mostly focused on quality Canadian products while our new store in Elliott Lake is truly a department store. In a way, Turners has come back to its roots.”
Turners of Little Current, 17 Water St, Little Current. Tel: 705-368-2150 Open Monday to Saturday from 9 am to 5:30 pm; Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. www.turners.ca
Just 10 kilometres south of Little Current on Hwy 6, the Centennial Museum of Sheguiandah offers a sweeping survey of this area’s origins, beginning with the earliest human activity. Artifacts on display, excavated from a quartzite outcrop nearby known as Sheguiandah Hill and carbon-dated by archeologists to 10,000 years ago, are evidence of quarrying by the first humans on Manitoulin Island after the last Ice Age. In 1954, the Sheguiandah archeological site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, along with the habitation area that encompasses today’s village of Sheguiandah.
Large descriptive panels outline the anthropological periods here and the two excavations of the 1950s and the 1990s that definitively confirmed the age of the findings; glass cases hold the ancient spear points, hide scrapers and other prehistoric tools that define this museum as unique on the Island.
Like its neighbour Little Current, Sheguiandah was a lumber boomtown at the turn of the twentieth century, with three water-powered mills in operation by 1902: a grist mill (for grinding grains into flour), a sawmill and a woolen mill. A map available free at the museum takes visitors on a historical walking tour through the village of Sheguiandah, highlighting the mills, cheese factory, milliner’s shop, blacksmith, school, post office and hotel of olden days.
The luxuriant grounds of the Centennial Museum are filled with several log cabins furnished in period detail and turn of the century farm machinery; picnic tables and lawn chairs invite visitors to relax and soak up the history of this ancient place.
The modern building housing the Museum itself opens onto a hallway lined with photographs of the area’s first settlers, introducing visitors to the Heis, Nicholson, Skippen, Batman and Lewis families that arrived here over 150 years ago. A family feeling pervades the museum, with an authentic recreation of a cozy bedroom with beautifully hung starched cotton nightdress; other vintage clothing in rich-coloured, well-preserved fabrics dot the room among a selection of antique musical instruments: an elaborately-carved Newcombe piano, a violin and a concertina that enlivened homesteaders’ long winter evenings.
The Museum hosts a wide range of events each year: the annual Heritage Alive Art Exhibition runs from July 18 until August 15, and the Manitoulin Fine Arts Association Members’ Art Show from August 20 until September 8. The full line-up of summer and fall events is listed on the website.
Centennial Museum of Sheguiandah, 10862 Highway 6, Sheguiandah. Tel: 705-368-2367. Open 9 am to 4:30 pm every day from May to October. www.townofnemi.on.ca/places/museum
Isobel Harry is a photographer and writer who has also worked extensively in the field of human rights advocacy. Her photos have been widely exhibited and she has published articles in many magazines; as programmes director and executive director for PEN Canada for twenty years, she worked on behalf of the right to freedom of expression internationally.
Now living on Manitoulin Island, Isobel works as a freelance writer and photographer and is a frequent contributor to the weekly Manitoulin Expositor newspaper and the annual This is Manitoulin magazine.
Her interests lie at the intersection of arts, culture and human rights.
