The Three Fires: Who Held Michigan Before the Treaties

The Anishinaabe name for this landscape translates roughly to where the water is good. The Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations, the Three Fires Confederacy, have known every bay and river and dune along this shoreline for thousands of years. They called their alliance the Three Fires because each nation carried a distinct responsibility: the Ojibwe as the keepers of the faith, the Odawa as the keepers of the trade, and the Potawatomi as the keepers of the fire. Together they managed an alliance across the entire Great Lakes watershed.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes were part of Odawa territory. The Anishinaabe story of the sleeping bear describes a mother who swam Lake Michigan from the Wisconsin shore with her two cubs, driven from her home by fire. The cubs fell behind and drowned before reaching the Michigan shore. The Great Spirit raised the cubs as the North and South Manitou Islands that you can see from the bluffs. The bear who reached shore and lay down to wait for them became the dune.

That land became the subject of a series of treaties between the United States government and Anishinaabe leaders across the first half of the nineteenth century. The Treaty of Saginaw in eighteen nineteen transferred approximately six million acres of lower Michigan. The Treaty of Detroit in eighteen fifty-five reorganized what remained of Ojibwe and Odawa land holdings in the northern Lower Peninsula. Each treaty was signed under conditions of economic pressure created by decades of American trade policy that had made Native communities dependent on goods the United States controlled.

Twelve federally recognized tribes hold sovereign status in Michigan today. The dispossession of the land they once held is documented in those treaty texts, available in the federal record.