Cultural attractions Local attractions include a variety of arts opportunities. Museums include the Duluth Art Institute at the Duluth Depot, the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and smaller local art galleries scattered around the city. Duluth is also home to a professional ballet company, the Minnesota Ballet. Duluth shares a symphony orchestra with Superior, Wisconsin, the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. In summer there are often free concerts held in Chester Park where local musicians play for crowds, and the Bayfront Blues Festival is held in early August. Beginning in 2004, Duluth has celebrated Gay Pride with a Labor Day parade. The city celebrates the Homegrown Music Festival the first week in May each year. Started in 1998, the festival features over 130 local musical acts performing across the city. Native American tribes had occupied the Duluth area for thousands of years. The original inhabitants are believed to have been members of Paleo-Indian cultures, followed by the "Old Copper" people, who hunted with spear points and knives and fished with metal hooks. Around two thousand years ago, the Woodlands people, known for their burial mounds and pottery, occupied the area.

They also cultivated wild rice, a crop that continues to be harvested today by Ojibwa tribes in the region and is often seen being sold in the area, especially in Wisconsin. Even today, the Duluth's name in the Ojibwe language is Onigamiinsing ("at the little portage") due to the small and easy portage across Minnesota Point between Lake superior and western Superior Bay forming Duluth's harbor. According to Ojibwa Oral history, Spirit Island located near the Spirit Valley neighborhood was the "Sixth Stopping Place" where the northern and southern branches of the Ojibwa Nation came together and then proceeded to their "Seventh Stopping Place" near the present city of La Pointe, Wisconsin.

In 1679, the first white man known to visit the location of present-day Duluth and the city's namesake, Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, arrived to settle rivalries between two Indian nations, the Dakota and the Ojibwa, to advance fur trading missions in the area. His work allowed for this to occur, with the Ojibwa becoming middlemen between the French and the Dakota. As a result, the area prospered, and as early as 1692, the Hudson Bay Company set up a small post at Fond du Lac.

It was not until 1792 that the next trading post, on the Wisconsin side of the St. Louis River, was opened by Jean Baptiste Cadotte of the North West Company. A fire destroyed the post in 1800, but a German emigre, John Jacob Astor, constructed a post on the river's Minnesota side. The store initially floundered as a result of the Indians' insistence in trading with established English and French partners. However, Astor managed to convince the United States Congress to ban foreigners from trading in American territory. His American Fur Company was re-formed in 1816-17. Hard times hit the post once again by 1839 due to fashionable Europeans choosing silk hats over those made from beaver pelts.

Two Treaties of Fond du Lac were signed in the present neighborhood of Fond du Lac in 1826 and 1847. As part of the Treaty of Washington (1854) with the Lake Superior Band of Chippewa, the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation was established upstream from Duluth near Cloquet, Minnesota, and the Ojibwa population was relocated there.