The author of O Pioneers!, Willa Cather, once said: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

This certainly can be said of one of SOAR’s new faculty members and Marquette resident, Tyler Tichelaar, who wrote his first book in 1987 at age 16 titled The Only Thing That Lasts…. Since then he has written 15 books, and at age 51, is still going strong.

Tichelaar’s latest book and the subject of his Fall 2022 SOAR class is Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man (2020), and is about an Ojibwa chief who lived in Marquette for part of his life. The class will be held on Zoom, on October 13 at 1 p.m.

The Only Thing that Lasts is a fictional novel about a boy named Robert living in Marquette during World War I. Tichelaar said he wrote it over a period of two years, starting on it one summer and continuing it during the school year.

“I wanted to write a novel about Marquette set in the past and being a teenager I wrote it from a teenager’s perspective,” said Tichelaar. “Robert is 13 to 14 in most of the novel. I had just read David Copperfield by Dickens. Since The Only Thing That Lasts is a novel told by a boy who grows up to be an author, I suspect I was heavily influenced by it…though maybe I didn’t fully realize it at the time.”

Although completed in 1987, The Only Thing That Lasts was not published until 2009. Tichelaar’s first published book was The Iron Pioneers (2006). Set in Marquette, in the 1840s and 50s, the novel is based partially on letters written by a Tichelaar ancestor, Basil Bishop, who first owned an iron forge in New York and later came to Marquette in 1850 because of the discovery of iron ore. The character of Lucius Brookfield is based on Basil Bishop.

In writing his latest novel, Tichelaar believes one of his ancestors might have known Chief Charles Kawbawgam, but he hasn’t uncovered any proof of this. Tichelaar said he wrote Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man because he wanted to learn more about this man who “witnessed a period of intense industrial growth and unheralded change for Native Americans.”

“In what I’ve read he has been mentioned briefly,” said Tichelaar. “I thought there must be more, that there is something more interesting about him.” Kawbawgam’s date of birth and death are even uncertain; the dates are listed as 1816 and 1902 on a sign near his grave in Presque Isle Park, Marquette.

“I thought it would be a small book – maybe 100 pages — and then it became 400 pages. A lot if it is about the Ojibwa themselves, a broader perspective about things going on at the time. And there are parts where I had to fill in blanks, like about Kawbawgam’s life as a child.”

Tichelaar hopes his book will inform readers about Native Americans and their part in American history.

“It’s important to understand our history and our past,” he said. Historically, “we romanticized and dismissed Native Americans.” Some examples Tichelaar gave of romanticizing Native Americans are the poem The Song of Hiawatha and their depiction in movies.

“We glorify our history and don’t acknowledge their contribution,” he said. “It is the myth of the vanishing Indian. We have to take responsibility for our past.”