The River the Anishinaabe Called Far-Away Water

The Grand River running through the center of Lansing is the longest river entirely within the state of Michigan, stretching roughly two hundred fifty miles from its headwaters to Lake Michigan. The Anishinaabeg people, who include the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations of the Three Fires Confederacy, called it Owashtanong, sometimes translated as the far-away water. French fur traders adopted the name as La Grande Riviere. English speakers simply called it the Grand.

The Three Fires Confederacy had governed the Great Lakes region as a political and cultural alliance since the thirteen or fourteen hundreds. In their arrangement the Ojibwe were the keepers of faith, the Odawa the keepers of trade, and the Potawatomi the keepers of the fire. The Grand River valley was their territory, used for fishing, hunting, growing food, and trade. Trails following the river connected communities from the Lake Michigan shore eastward across the Lower Peninsula. Those trails became what are now Interstate Ninety-Six and Grand River Avenue.

The Treaty of Saginaw in eighteen nineteen transferred more than six million acres of Anishinaabeg territory to the United States government. The Treaty of Chicago in eighteen twenty-one opened the lands south of the Grand River to American settlement. By eighteen forty-seven, when the legislature designated Lansing the capital, the original inhabitants had been largely displaced through treaty pressure and forced removal. The Potawatomi Trail of Death in eighteen thirty-eight had already marched roughly eight hundred fifty-nine people from Indiana to Kansas, with more than forty dying on the way.

The river they knew for generations now runs through a twenty-mile trail system used by walkers, cyclists, and paddlers. The waterway the Anishinaabeg named for its distance is today the organizing spine of the entire metro.