Just off the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where Lake Huron turns cold and clear, there’s an island that remembers. Beneath the postcard charm of Mackinac-- the fudge shops, the bicycles, the horse-drawn carriages-- lies a history far older and far deeper.

Before it was a tourist destination, it was a center of trade. A crossroads between worlds. And at the heart of it all was Magdelaine La Framboise, a Métis fur trader, Odawa woman, and entrepreneur who built one of the most successful trading empires in the Great Lakes.

Her story is one of power, loss, and legacy, a woman navigating between languages, faiths, and nations at a time when few women held any authority at all. She retired to Mackinac Island decades before it became the place we know today, leaving behind a church, a school, and a memory that the island still carries.

This is the story of the woman who kept the island alive long before it became a souvenir.

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