As the Lake Superior Chippewa in the nineteenth century, leaders of the bands negotiated together with the United States government under a variety of treaties to protect their historic territories against land theft by European-American settlers.
Under the treaty, bands with reservations have been federally recognized as independent tribes; several retain Lake Superior Chippewa in their formal names to indicate their shared culture.
Ojibwe who followed the south shore of Lake Superior found the final prophesied stopping place and "the food that grows on water" (wild rice) at Madeline Island.
Beginning about 1737, they competed for nearly 100 years with the Eastern Dakota and the Meskwaki tribes in the interior of Wisconsin, west and south of Lake Superior.
The Biitan-akiing-enabijig were divided into three principal Bands: In a series of treaties with the US Government in the mid-nineteenth century, the Lake Superior Chippewa were formally grouped as a unit, which included the In the winter of 1851, President Zachary Taylor ordered the removal of the Lake Superior Chippewa to west of the Mississippi River, as had already been forced on most other tribes in the east.
During the course of these removals, the US Army attacked in what has become known as the Sandy Lake tragedy, in which several hundred Chippewa died, including women and children.
In 1988 the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa succeeded in gaining federal recognition as a separate tribe.
The St. Croix and Sokaogon bands, left out of the 1854 treaty, did not obtain tribal lands or federal recognition until the 1930s after the Indian Reorganization Act.