Odawa Erotic

The Odawa are the traders of the upper Great Lakes. Their name comes from an Anishinaabe word for trading, and for centuries that was their role: the people who moved corn, furs, copper, tobacco and medicines between the nations of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, and later between those nations and the French at Montreal. The Ottawa River and Canada's capital carry their name because the river was their trade route east, not because they lived there. They are one of the three Anishinaabe peoples of the Council of Three Fires, alongside the Ojibwe and Potawatomi, with whom they share language, clan system and much of their oral history. Their heartland is Manitoulin Island and the north shore of Georgian Bay in Ontario, and across the water the Straits of Mackinac and the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan, especially the coast around Little Traverse Bay that they call Waganakising, the land of the crooked tree. A smaller branch, pushed out of Ohio in the 1830s, now lives in northeastern Oklahoma.

The language is the Ottawa dialect of Ojibwe, an Algonquian tongue. It is set apart from other Ojibwe speech by heavy vowel syncope: unstressed short vowels drop out, which compresses words and makes Odawa sound clipped even to Ojibwe listeners from farther west. It is still spoken at Wiikwemkoong on Manitoulin, and the Michigan bands run immersion programs to bring it back. Catholicism runs deep, particularly in Michigan, where a Jesuit mission took root at L'Arbre Croche near present-day Cross Village in the 1740s. Today many Odawa families move between Mass, the Midewiwin lodge and the pow wow circle without seeing a contradiction. The best known Odawa in the history books is Pontiac, who in 1763 organized the multi-nation uprising against British posts after the French defeat. Less known is that Wiikwemkoong is one of the very few unceded reserves in Canada, its people having refused the 1862 Manitoulin treaty, or that Michigan's Odawa spent most of the twentieth century fighting for federal recognition, which came for the Grand Traverse Band in 1980 and for the Little Traverse Bay Bands and Little River Band only in 1994. Andrew Blackbird, an Odawa from Harbor Springs, published his own history of the people in 1887, one of the earliest books about a Great Lakes nation written by a member of it. Black ash basketry, porcupine quillwork on birch bark and commercial whitefish fishing remain living trades, not revivals.