Kekionga, Heart of the Miami Nation
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
You are standing where three rivers meet, in the present-day Lakeside neighborhood of Fort Wayne. People have settled this ground for as long as ten thousand years. By the seventeen hundreds it held a cluster of villages called Kekionga, the political and spiritual center of the Miami nation.
Cornfields stretched in every direction around bark longhouses and dome-shaped homes. Eastern Americans called it Miami Town and feared it as the headquarters of Native resistance on the frontier. In October of seventeen ninety, soldiers under Josiah Harmar burned the towns, and Miami and allied warriors led by Little Turtle struck back hard nearby.
Most of the Miami were forcibly removed from Indiana in eighteen forty-six. The city that rose on top of their capital still bends around these same three rivers.
