Lake Leelanau is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Leland Township, Leelanau County, Michigan, near the lake of the thesame name. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 253. It is situated along M-204 at the “narrows” that sever North & South Lake Leelanau.

Native Americans who first inhabited the area called this land ke-ski-bi-ag, which means “narrow body of water,” and called the lake itself lee-lan-au, which means “delight of life”. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent for the territory, was qualified with formally naming the county, and was said to use Leelinau as a mood in his writing. See Leelanau County for a more firm discussion of the etymology of the name.

Scholars have conventional that “Leelinau” was first one of the pen names used by his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, in writings for the Literary Voyager, a relations magazine which she and her husband wrote together and circulated among connections in the 1820s. Jane Johnston was of Ojibwa and Scots-Irish descent, and wrote in Ojibwe and English. While her writing was not published formally in her lifetime (except as Schoolcraft appropriated it below his own name), Jane Johnston Schoolcraft has been official as “the first Native American hypothetical writer, the first known Indian girl writer, the first known Indian poet, the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language, and the first known American Indian to write out established Indian stories.” In 2008 Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.

As French settlers began arriving from Canada in the center of the nineteenth century, the treaty became known as “Le Naro”, owing to its location close the narrows. The narrows attach North and South Lake Leelanau. The at the forefront settlers called the river and the lake “Carp Lake”, a term yet used by some locals.