Kewadin: Northwest Wind Country
Near Traverse City, Michigan
The small community of Kewadin, on the north shore of Elk Lake in Antrim County, carries an Ojibwe name. Kewadin comes from an Ojibwe word for the north wind, and the community took it when its post office opened in eighteen eighty-three. The entire region around Elk Rapids was known among the early native people as Kewadin, and the Odawa and Ojibwe who made their home here called it the Land of the Crooked Tree, Waganakising, which today we call Emmet County to the north.
European settlers arrived slowly in the eighteen fifties and sixties, but the name Kewadin survived because the land itself seemed to insist on it. The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, whose ancestral homeland this is, had their federal recognition reaffirmed in nineteen ninety-four and continue to hold their cultural center in the area.
