Perham museum opens exhibit on Otter Tail Pillager history
Perham’s East Otter Tail County Museum opened a free exhibit on the Otter Tail Pillager, pairing local Indigenous history with a $15 book sale that supports the museum.
The East Otter Tail County Museum in Perham opened its new Otter Tail Pillager exhibit Thursday at 6 p.m., using a free public program to turn a local history display into an evening built for neighbors, summer visitors and anyone tracing East Otter Tail County’s roots.
The opening included a guest speaker and an author, and it added a fundraising piece as well. Andrea Young’s book, The Otter Tail Pillager, was being sold at the museum for $15, with all proceeds going back to the museum. That gave the launch a practical payoff beyond the exhibit itself, helping channel interest in the story into support for the institution that is preserving it.
Museum materials place the Otter Tail Pillager Ojibwe, also identified as Anishinaabe, at the center of a much older story than county lines or township maps. The exhibit describes them as an ancient people whose history in the lake area predates modern county boundaries. It also notes that after White Earth Reservation was created in 1867, Otter Tail Lake area Pillagers moved there so they would no longer be landless.
That history gives the exhibit local weight in a county where lake culture and regional heritage are part of the tourism draw. Visitors to the museum will find the story inside the History Museum of East Otter Tail County, a Perham institution established in 1998 and housed in a historic stone building built in 1887. The museum’s public description says its displays tell the stories of the people, places and events of East Otter Tail County through interpretive exhibits, photographs and original motion picture footage.
The museum is staffed by volunteers and operated by the History, Arts and Cultural Association of East Otter Tail County, known as HACA. HACA says its mission is to unite humanities, art, community and culture. The Otter Tail Pillager exhibit fits that mission directly, bringing Indigenous history into a setting where local families, researchers and visitors can encounter it as part of the county’s broader story.
For Perham, the exhibit does more than fill a gallery wall. It gives the museum a fresh reason for traffic, a new source of donations through Young’s book sales, and another stop for people moving through the west-central lakes area who want a better sense of what shaped Otter Tail County before the county existed.
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