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1 1 A Forest Youth A SON IS BORN TO MACKADEPENESSY Before he was born, before he was even conceived, the soul of Andrew Blackbird had been placed by the Great Manitou in his mother’s womb. In a dome-shaped wigwam the body and the soul became one when his mother, kneeling on a mat of woven reeds, her arms clutching the smooth wooden pole of the delivery rack, pushed the infant boy out into the world. The women attending the birth took the baby and washed him in a murky bath of hot water, herbs, and ash. With relief the weary mother looked at the well-formed baby boy bawling over his unceremonious entrance into the world. For months both she and her husband had tried to avoid the sight of any deformed people or animals for fear of transmitting an abnormality to their child. She smiled with pride on the healthy child that would join his six brothers and four sisters as the newest member of the family. He was given the name Penesswiquaam, which can be roughly translated to mean Big Bird.1 Like most Indians of his time and place Andrew Blackbird never knew the exact year of his birth. In 1884 he told the compilers of a commercial biographical and local history volume that he was “born south of the Traverse Region about 1820.” Sixteen years later in one of his own writings Blackbird wrote, “The first remembrance I have of seeing a white man is more than 80 years ago, or soon after the war of 1812.” How soon after 1815 this encounter was Blackbird could not be certain. He confessed in 1900, “I don’t know just how old I am, as my parents did not remember.” 2| Chapter One The best approximation of when he was born that can be obtained is his own estimate of “about 1820.”2 Andrew Blackbird was born and spent the first months of his life in the thick forests of the upper Muskegon River valley. Every day his father and brothers took their guns and set out in pursuit of game. Beaver and raccoon were hunted for their furs; deer, elk, and bear for their meat. Andrew’s mother and sisters were kept perpetually busy by the laborious process of scrapping and drying the hide of furs destined for trade. At night in the wigwam Mackadepenessy and his older sons, while puffing on pipes, recounted their success and failures in the day’s hunt. Their accounts of tracking deer through the winter forest or of treeing raccoons, told amid the blue haze of wood smoke and the glow of campfire, were the boy’s first lessons on what was expected of him as a man.3 Hunting camp stories also taught the boy to be proud of his lineage. The men of the Blackbird family were unique among the Ottawa in that they were said to descend from a people known as the “Undergrounds.” Generations before they had come to the tribe as prisoners captured by far-ranging war parties. Their name came from “their habitations in the ground” and they likely were Panis, Indian slaves found among most Great Lakes Indian peoples . The name derived from the French term for the plains-dwelling Pawnee Indians, who did live in earth lodges. By Andrew’s time the “Undergrounds,” through merit and intermarriage with their captors, were in his words “the best counselors, best chieftains, and best warriors among the Ottawa.”4 Late in life when Andrew Blackbird wrote his history he took pains to present his family as “closely connected with the royal families” of the Ottawa. His mother’s brother was the famed warrior Shaubena, an Ottawa who had married into the Illinois Potawatomi, and rose to a position of eminence. During the War of 1812, Shaubena was a strong supporter of Tecumseh’s Indian alliance and he fought alongside the Shawnee leader until the latter’s death at the Battle of the Thames. Thereafter, Shaubena became an advocate of peaceful coexistence with the United States, and in 1832 he won praise from white settlers for keeping the Potawatomi from joining Black Hawk’s tragic “war.” On his father’s side was Ningegon, known to the Americans as Wing, the leading chief of the Mackinac Straits Ottawa. Wing earned the trust and friendship of the Americans for his anti-British position during the War of 1812. Pungowish , Andrew’s great-grandfather, first brought the...

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