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23 2 The Crisis In the fall of  on the shores of Little Traverse Bay, near the present city of Harbor Springs, Michigan, a large group of Ottawa gathered on the warm sands of the beach. The old women, draped in bright red blankets, had their hands in front of their faces, vainly hiding tears. The men tried to busy themselves with the matter-of-fact tasks of preparing a canoe for a long journey, speaking little, thinking much. Andrew Blackbird looked down on the somber scene. He was at the awkward adolescent stage of life, more than a child and less than a man. He did not feel it was his place to be with the adults on the beach. Instead, he had joined “my little chums” at a favorite playing spot. High up on the sandy terrace overlooking the beach two cedar trees had grown together and leaned precipitously toward the lake. They had become, in Blackbird’s words, “almost like a staircase projecting far out into the bay.” Andrew was “clear at the top of those trees.” He was a witness but apart from the scene on the beach. He watched “our people as they were about going off in a long bark canoe, and as we understood, they were going to Washington to see Great Father, the President of the United States, to tell him to have mercy on the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan, not to take all the land away from them.” The men, who included his cousin Augustin Hamlin and perhaps his father, Mackadepenessy, entered the canoe and secured their paddles in front of them. They then took off their broad dark hats and “crossed themselves and repeated the Lord’s prayer; at the end of the prayer, they crossed themselves again, and then away they went towards the Harbor Point.” Andrew stayed on his high perch watching the canoe as it smoothly rose and fell on the swells of the big lake, slowly getting smaller, until at last “they disappeared in rounding the point.”1 Andrew shimmied down the tree as the gathering on the beach dispersed . The people walked back to the village deep in thought concerning 24| Chapter Two “their future destinies respecting their possession of the land.” It had taken sixteen years, but the full price of military defeat was about to be paid. By the fall of 1835 the Ottawa were in the midst of a crisis that affected every aspect of their lives, economic, political, social, and environmental. It was a challenge less violent than the Iroquois attacks of the mid-1600s, but one that threatened their very existence as a people just as surely.2 Much had changed in the condition of the Ottawa since the depressing days following the end of the War of 1812. The Ottawa of Michigan had a new “Great Father.” He lived in a white house and his white children had an enormous appetite for land—a sad fact that necessitated the delegation to the capital. New also were the prayers to the Christian God. Where sixteen years before there might have been an offering of tobacco or even a dog to the spirits of the lake, that autumn day the men said the Lord’s Prayer. Together with that fundamental change was the alteration in their lifestyle. Not just a single canoe should have been departing L’Arbre Croche that fall. In the past, most families would have already taken to their canoes in order to safely reach their winter hunting grounds before the snow flew. But by 1835 many residents of the village had abandoned their winter hunts for a more sedentary lifestyle. Over too was the way of the warrior. Unlike his fathers before him, Andrew was poised on the cusp of adult life with no clear cultural guidance as to how he should live his life. The two principle standards by which young men had been measured, their prowess as hunters and their bravery as warriors, no longer seemed relevant. The decades of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s were a period of crisis for the Ottawa. It was a time when a venerable and successful culture was challenged to pioneer a new way. To find a path of peace and yet still protect their identity and homeland would prove more difficult than any military battle Ottawa warriors of old had ever fought. It was a time that demanded the cool-blooded reason of elders and the...

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