Waganakising: The Odawa Who Would Not Leave

Long before the resorts and railroads, this shoreline was Waganakising, the land of the crooked tree, home to the Odawa, or Ottawa, people for centuries. They were part of the wider Anishinaabe world, fishing, farming, and trading across the northern Great Lakes. Their story here is not one of removal, but of resistance to it.

In eighteen thirty the United States passed the Indian Removal Act, and over the following decades tens of thousands of Native people were forced west to Kansas and present day Oklahoma. The Odawa of Little Traverse Bay faced that same threat. Through determined negotiation, and by pointing to earlier promises, they secured two treaties, the Treaty of Washington in eighteen thirty-six and the Treaty of Detroit in eighteen fifty-five, that allowed many to remain on their homeland rather than be driven off.

Those treaties came at a heavy price. They dissolved the formal union of the Ottawa and Chippewa, broke communal land into individual allotments of forty and eighty acre parcels, and opened much of the region to white settlement. Fraud and lost paperwork later stripped many families of the very land they had been promised.

Yet the community endured. Their descendants are today the federally recognized Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, still here, on the ground their ancestors refused to leave.