A map from the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896-1897. The area shaded yellow represents the land ceded to the U.S. government by the Odawa and the Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe/Chippewa: 14 million acres in total. Image via Wikimedia Commons

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By Emily Bingham | ebingham@mlive.com

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HARBOR SPRINGS, MICH. -- In the weak light of a late November afternoon, the beach at Zorn Park is cold and empty and deeply quiet. The marina is deserted. The bay is calm.

The stillness makes it easy to imagine peeling back the years, changing the scene layer by layer: the marina fades away, the distant vacation homes lining Harbor Point vanish, cedar forests creep in closer to the waterfront. Downtown disappears and in its place, clusters of wigwams sprout up. Bend time back until you're standing on this same beach on roughly this same date in 1835, nearly 200 years ago, when Michigan was not yet Michigan and this area was not yet Harbor Springs -- when this place was Waganakising, land of the Odawa.

That late November beach probably was just as cold then as it is today, but in 1835 you wouldn't have been the only one standing there. A group of local men -- Odawa men -- would have been busy along the shoreline, readying themselves for a trip that became a crucial yet little-known turning point in Michigan history. Their wives and children, among others from the community, were there, too, bearing witness, saying their goodbyes and wishing them safe travels for the journey ahead.

The journey would last six weeks, carrying these men straight through the dark heart of winter into a new year. Their destination was the White House in Washington D.C. They went by canoe.

A six-week, 800-mile, mid-1800's canoe trip during winter's worst weather suggests just how high the stakes were for the historic meeting that was about to occur. Faced with the looming threat of being removed -- to a parched Plains state far from the lush Great Lakes they'd always called home -- the Odawa went to Washington to strike a deal with the president: The right to remain, in exchange for 14 million acres of unspoiled land across a mitten-shaped peninsula and its neighbor to the north. In total, the acreage would amount to two-thirds of the Lower Peninsula and half of the eastern U.P.

That meeting, and by extension that canoe trip, is the reason Michigan is now Michigan, and the Odawa are still here.

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Pottawattamie Village, Carp River, sometime between May 19 - July 24, 1838. Item No. HS5594. Sketch by Bela Hubbard, from the Bela Hubbard papers collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

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The original people

They had come from the Northeast, settling first on Lake Huron's Manitoulin Island and then paddling westward across the Straits in long birchbark canoes built to withstand wide-open Great Lakes waters.

Moving down the west coast of Lake Michigan, they built settlements and formed bands along the shoreline from St. Ignace as far south as the Grand River. Waganakising -- stretching between what is now Harbor Springs and the town of Cross Village -- was the heart of their community, an unspoiled sweep of land on a freshwater sea with everything they needed to thrive: fish and game, wild fruits, land fit for farming corn and other crops, trees to tap for maple sugar. Many Odawa wintered farther south in Michigan but returned each summer to Waganakising, the place where they not only buried their dead but celebrated them, holding feasts and ceremonies in their name. Along with the Ojibwa/Chippewa and the Potawatami, their close Great Lakes tribal kin, they called themselves the Aanishnabek: the good people, the real people, the original people.

By the 1700 and 1800's, though, the original people found themselves in a rapidly changing world.

European arrival in North America meant new economic opportunities, of course, with the French and British eager to pay in cash or trade for Odawa furs and provisions -- and in the case of the French voyageurs specifically, those expertly crafted, handhewn canoes.

But for Native Americans everywhere, European contact also brought about new wars that took lives and depleted resources, new diseases that wiped out entire communities, and, perhaps most threateningly, a brash new nation: the United States of America, whose boundaries and ideology were pushing ever outward at a feverish clip. Michigan -- or parts of it, at least -- became a U.S. territory in 1805; 20 years later, the completion of the Erie Canal opened up a deluge of outsiders moving in, and by the early 1830's the territory's population had swelled to more than 80,000, enough to apply for statehood.

For some, impending statehood was cause for celebration. For the Aanishnabek, it was cause for serious alarm.

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Middle Village, the site of L'Arbre Croch, circa 1894-1910. Item BL005792, photographed by Charles Adam Weissert, from the Charles Adam Weissert papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

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"A heart-rending thought"

Treaty by treaty, for four decades before statehood even became feasible for Michigan, the U.S. government had been increasingly staking its claim on the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, negotiating with regional tribes to trade cash, goods, fishing rights and small parcels of property in exchange for millions of acres of land. And, to the young and hungry U.S., there was ever more land to be had -- a mindset bolstered by an 1823 Supreme Court decision that deemed Native Americans' "right of occupancy" second to the United States' "right of discovery." In the burgeoning Michigan Territory, it seemed, there was still plenty of land to be "discovered" -- and soon the government turned its eyes to the northwest, where Waganakising sat on a prime slice of it.

The ominous backdrop to all of this was the 1830 passage of the Indian Removal Act: a piece of legislation championed by President Andrew Jackson that sought to oust Native Americans from their ancestral homelands, freeing up more ground for U.S. expansion. The act empowered Jackson to negotiate with any tribe east of the Mississippi, with the goal being their removal to designated tracts of land out west.

There was western land earmarked for Michigan's tribes, too: Specifically in what is now Kansas, one thousand miles from the sweet-water Great Lakes and Waganakising, that sacred place that had long sustained the Odawa and become the eternal home for their dead.

The situation put lives literally in the balance: Relocation meant suffering and perhaps even death for many. Those who did not die on the long journey to Kansas would be left to reconfigure their existence in an alien landscape that offered nothing like what the Great Lakes' original people had always known.

So a meeting in Washington D.C. was arranged, with not only five Odawa bands but the an Ojibwe/Chippewa band from Sault Ste Marie, too, who also faced the threat of removal. In preparation for the meeting, an Odawa leader and multilingual interpreter named Augustin Hamlin Jr. wrote a frank and heartfelt letter to Lewis Cass, the Michigan territorial governor who'd left his post here to become Secretary of War and assist President Jackson with his Indian removal campaign. So profound was the Odawa connection to their homeland that Hamlin described his people's collective soul "shrink[ing] with horror" at the thought of a permanent relocation.

"We do not wish to sell all the lands claimed by us and consequently not to remove to the west of the Mississippi," Hamlin wrote. "It is a heart-rending thought to our simple feelings to think of leaving our native country forever."

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Two boys and an older gentleman on a covered boat. Photo courtesy the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians.

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"We watched them until they disappeared"

The day one of the Odawa delegations left for Washington from the beach on Little Traverse Bay, a young boy named Andrew Blackbird -- Augustin Hamlin's cousin -- scrambled up into a nearby cluster of towering cedars whose branches leaned out over the water. From there he could take in the entire scene, which he later described in his book "History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan."

"I was clear at the top of those trees, with my little chums, watching our people as they were about going off in a long bark canoe, and, as we understood, they were going to Washington to see the Great Father, the President of the United States, to tell him to have mercy on the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan, not to take all the land away from them," he wrote. "I saw some of our old Indian women weeping as they watched our principal men going off in the canoe. I suppose they were feeling bad on account of not knowing their future destinies respecting their possession of the land. After they all got in the canoe, just as they were going to start, they all took off their hats, 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. We watched them until they disappeared in rounding the point."

There is no written account of the canoe trip itself. Eric Hemenway, a historian and the director of archives and records with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, says the men likely stayed with relatives and tribal allies along the way, finally arriving in Washington D.C. sometime early in 1836. Weeks of negotiations ensued. Sometime in March, the Treaty of Washington was drawn up, in which the five Odawa bands and the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa agreed to cede 14 million acres across both of Michigan's peninsulas in exchange for a permanent home in Michigan on the lands that already sustained them. The tribes were promised other conditions, too -- access to natural resources, cash annuities, dry goods, a dormitory to be built on Mackinac Island.

But for those who'd made the journey all the way from Michigan, the treaty's most important term was not a tangible one. It was simply the right to stay. Waganakising, it seemed, would still belong to the Odawa.

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Odawa girls sit outside the Holy Childhood of Jesus boarding school, founded in Harbor Springs in 1829 to educate Native American children. Originally, lessons were taught in their native language, but by the late 1800's the school was implementing assimilation tactics that sought to erase Native American culture -- including forbidding students to speak their own language while at school. Photo courtesy of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians

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Treaty of 1855

This is where the story starts to wrap up for statehood, at least: The Treaty of Washington in 1836 gave the Michigan Territory almost all of the land it needed to become a state (the western U.P. would come later that year). Michigan joined the Union almost exactly one year later, on January 26, 1837.

But that's not where the story ends for the Odawa, who couldn't rest easy even when their Washington delegations finally had made the long journey home. They were wise to remain wary: After tribal representatives had left Washington, the U.S. Senate altered the treaty without warning, reducing the tribes' right to retain their homelands to a period of just five years -- not forever.

For the next decade, the Odawa continued to strategically navigate a workable way forward. They used annuities to buy back some of their former land, for example, so they could claim rights as taxpayers, even amidst rumors that eviction could happen at any time -- a fate that befell some of the Potawatomi, their southern Michigan kin, who were forced from their homes by the U.S. military between 1838 and 1840.

In 1855, nearly two decades after their first agreement with the United States, the Odawa and the Ojibwe/Chippewa once again sat down with the federal government -- but a six-week canoe trip wasn't necessary this time. Instead, U.S. commissioners came north to southeastern Michigan. The subsequent Treaty of Detroit finally laid to rest the looming threat of a future in unfamiliar land out west. From their lands at Grand River to Grand Traverse to Little Traverse, from Mackinac to Muskegon, there would be no forced removal.

The Odawa would get to remain home.

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And they're still here, too, comprising a portion of the 12 federally recognized tribes in the state of Michigan. Their history is steeped in the cedars and waters and scrubby shorelines of the west and northwest Lower Peninsula, adding rich but often unseen layers of context to the landscape.

With that context, for example, a dormant winter waterfront park in a resort town Up North becomes so much more than what it first appears to be. It's not just a cold and vacant stretch of sand waiting for the return of summer tourism season; it's a scene from a complicated tale of ownership, ancestry, survival, and statehood. There's countless spots like this here. Countless spots like this Harbor Springs beach -- this Waganakising beach -- that have entire stories to tell.

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Waganakising Odawa in the late 19th century. Photo courtesy of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians

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