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Throughout the nineteenth century Anishinaabeg leaders from the Great Lakes, wearing eagle feather headdresses and elegantly beaded bandolier bags, met in treaty councils with U.S. commissioners. Trained for years as astute listeners and eloquent speakers, these diplomats put their skills to the test as they negotiated with their non-Indian counterparts, whose primary responsibility was to serve the interests of the federal government. The stakes were high, for Native territories and lifeways were often at risk.1 T he Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians is one of several Indian tribes who are signatories to the 1836 Treaty of Washington . These treaties brought together as a formal legal and political body the loose confederation of Indian communities or bands living in the Grand Traverse Bay region.2 In both treaties, the Grand Traverse Band people, represented by its leaders or ogemuk, sought to preserve a permanent tribal land base; reserve lake and inland hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; establish C H A P T E R O N E The Story of the 1836 Treaty of Washington 2 | | 3 a government-to-government relationshipwith theUnited States; and acquire needed funds, materials, and services from the federal government. The Three Fires Anishinaabek Anishinaabek had lived in the Great Lakes area for hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans. The old stories say that the Anishinaabek came from the eastern seaboard, migrating upriver until they reached the massive inland seas.3 Vine Deloria Jr. recounted scholarship about four major groups of ancient people from the north and east—the Anishinaabek, the Dakota, the Salish, and pale-skinned people—and how they fought over many, many years until the pale-skinned people left the continent, perhaps as a result of an ice age.4 Andrew Blackbirdwrote that spirits (Manitouwog) stole an Ottawa woman’s baby and terrorized the Ottawas on the eastern seaboard, so that they moved away from the rising sun, toward the setting sun, and settled on Manitoulin Island.5 The Three Fires—the Odawa (or Ottawa), the Ojibwe (or Chippewa or Ojibway), and the Bodewadmi (or Potawatomi)—had been linked together for 4 | chapter 1 centuries in Michigan and the western Great Lakes. Later, as they settled the Great Lakes area between 600 and 900 years ago, the Anishinaabek split into three major groups—the Odawa, the Ojibwe, and the Bodewadmi.6 Consistent with the importance of family to the Anishinaabek, the Ojibwe are often referred to as the “Elder Brother” in the confederacy, with the Odawa known as the “Next Elder Brother,” and the Bodewadmi as the “Younger Brother.”7 The Ottawa name likely derives from the word for “trader,” and the Chippewa name from the kind of moccasins that Chippewa hunters wore; Potawatomi means “Keepers of the Fire.”8 A nineteenth-century ogema (Anishinaabe leader or headman), Chamblee, explained their relationship in Michigan: “We Three nations—Chippewas, Pottawatomis, and Odawas—have but one council fire.”9 These three nations are commonly referred to as the Three Fires.10 The community now known collectively as the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians has occupied the Grand Traverse Bay region since as early as 1675,11 but Anishinaabe people and others have been living and hunting in Michigan for perhaps as long as 11,000 years. Back then, these Indian people appear to have hunted giant mammals, and fished the lakes and river using nets. Rock paintings recently discovered in the GrandTraverse Bay area demonstrate that Indian hunters armedwith spears hunted the Michigan mastodon.12 These people may have been known by later Michigan indigenous peoples as the “Mammoth People.”13 Other peoples included the Adena and Hopewell cultures.14 Before the Treaties: Politics and Economics Indian people in the Great Lakes region in the decades before the 1836 Treaty of Washington had already undergone centuries of change and conflict as a result of the European arrival in North America. Likely the first people that the Europeans encountered in the western Great Lakes region were the Ottawa, then living on and near Manitoulin Island and the Georgian Bay archipelago.15 Samuel de Champlain wrote the first European journal entry about his encounters with the Manitoulin Island Ottawas, who claimed to be picking blueberries, in 1615 or 1616.16 By this time, the Ottawas living on and around Manitoulin Island had been hunting seasonally in northern lower Michigan for hundreds of years.17 Intheseventeenthcentury,whenthecenterofOttawaculturewasManitoulin Island between Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay, the...

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