Anishinaabe Land: Before Ann Arbor

Before this was Ann Arbor, before the surveyors came and the speculators platted their town, this land had a name.

Local Ojibwe called it something like Kaw-goosh-kaw-nick, a name recorded in early accounts and linked to the sound of the river and the sawmill. For centuries before European contact, this valley was home to Anishinaabe villages, part of the homeland of the Three Fires Council, an alliance of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples whose political structures were sophisticated and enduring.

The Anishinaabeg were not simply passing through. They tended the land deliberately. They burned the oak savannas to keep them open, which is part of why John Allen and Elisha Rumsey found such beautiful oak clearings when they arrived. They sugared maple stands each spring, cultivated crops, and maintained council networks that stretched across the Great Lakes.

The land changed hands through the Treaty of Detroit in eighteen-oh-seven, when the United States negotiated cessions from the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot nations covering a vast stretch of what is now southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio. The payment was small next to the value of the land.

The University of Michigan itself sits on land transferred in those same negotiations. The forty acres the Ann Arbor Land Company offered the state in eighteen thirty-seven, first as a possible capitol site and then for the university, were ultimately rooted in those coercive purchases decades earlier.

The Anishinaabe nations were not extinguished. Their descendants are still present in Michigan today, still connected to these places. The Potawatomi name for this valley was here before the road you are driving. It will likely outlast the road as well.