The Three Fires, Anishinaabe Nations of the Great Lakes

Long before any European name was written on any map, the land Michigan now occupies was home to the Anishinaabe peoples, a great family of nations who called themselves the Three Fires Confederacy. The three member nations were the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, each with a distinct role encoded in tradition. The Ojibwe were the keepers of faith, the Odawa the traders and carriers, the Potawatomi the keepers of the fire.

Together they formed one of the most durable political alliances in the history of the continent, their territory spanning the entire Great Lakes basin from what is now Wisconsin to Ontario. The Ojibwe, also called Chippewa in federal treaty language, were centered along the shores of Lake Superior and the northern reaches of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. Their name is often said to come from an Anishinaabe word for a style of moccasin, though they knew themselves simply as the people, the Anishinaabeg.

Their oral tradition holds that they migrated from the Atlantic coast centuries before European contact, following prophecy westward to the food that grows on the water, wild rice, manoomin, which still grows in the inland lakes and streams of Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas today. The Odawa, whose name means to trade or to buy and sell, occupied the straits of Mackinac and the shores of northern Lake Michigan. They were the commercial network of the Great Lakes, paddling enormous birchbark canoes loaded with furs, copper, dried fish, and maize across hundreds of miles.

When the French arrived in the sixteen hundreds, they found a trading infrastructure already centuries old. The Potawatomi occupied the southern shores of Lake Michigan and the lands of what is now southwestern Michigan. Their role as keepers of the fire was not ceremonial alone, fire, in Anishinaabe cosmology, represented memory, identity, and collective governance.

By the eighteen hundreds, all three nations had signed treaties ceding their Michigan homelands under duress, and were subsequently removed or relocated. The Three Fires nations have never fully left. Tribal governments of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi remain in Michigan today, exercising treaty-reserved rights to fish, hunt, and gather on lands their ancestors have used for ten thousand years.