The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (Ottawa) Indians are located in the northern portion of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, with headquarters centered in Petoskey (First Light In The Morning), MI. The current tribal enrollment is 3, 167, with an unemployment rate of 73% according to the 1999 BIA National Labor Force Report. Of those employed, 5% are listed as living below the poverty guidelines.

Odawa oral tradition, as so outlined in Gah-Baeh-Jhagwah-Buk (The Way It Happened: A Visual Culture History of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa), indicates that long ago before Europeans came to North America, the Odawa and their close kin, the Ojibwa and Potawatomi, migrated from the Northern Atlantic coast of southern Canada. Together the three tribes formed the alliance known as Council of The Three Fires and refer to themselves collectively as Anishnabek, The Good People or the Read People.

Following European contact in 1615, they moved their principal settlements from Manitoulin Island, ON to St. Ignace, MI then on to Chequamegon, WI, then back to Manitoulin, where a number of Odawa stayed permanently. The remaining moved back to the Mackinac Straits area and south along the northeastern shores of Lake Michigan, where they remain today.

The Little Traverse Band Bands of Odawa are clearly and distinctly listed as participants to the Treaties of 1836 and 1855. Under these two treaties, they ceded most of their ancestral homelands in Michigan, where they had resided for over 200 years. Between 1812 and 1855, they experienced a loss of political autonomy, nearly complete dispossession of their lands and intense pressures to restructure the very foundations of Odawa cultural life. Despite the pressures, they found the means and wherewithal to not be either politically or culturally dominated by mainstream America and found creative compromises that allowed them to preserve their autonomy to present times.

Their history was carefully written and preserved in 1887 by an Odawa man named Macketebenessy, or Andrew J. Blackbird, as he drafted a history of his people entitled: History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan.

The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa were not accorded the opportunity to participate in the Indian Reorganization Act activities of the mid 1930s and in federal practice, lost their status as a federally recognized United States tribe. Their long struggle to rectify this deliberate omission was finally corrected in September, 1994 when they received “affirmation of their federal tribal status”, pursuant to federal congressional legislation, P.L. 103-324.

The Little Traverse Odawa have purchased a forty acre wooded parcel of ancestral lands located seven miles north of Harbor Springs to serve as their tribal land base. Most of their current tribal offices and enterprises are scattered in various Petoskey locations. They have a huge tribal membership service area which encompasses 27 Michigan counties, 06 in the Eastern Upper Peninsula and 21 in the Northern Lower Peninsula, which was their original home range.

They have remained a tightly knit tribal community for many, many years and have been able to keep most of their traditional ways intact. They further have a core of traditional families who model a healthy, cultural and spiritual lifestyle. Efforts are underway to develop a holistic system of tribal service deliveries, modeling their traditional Odawa Anishnabek society.

They have toiled long and hard to establish their tribal infrastructure and to establish and expand community membership services, which prior to federal status reaffirmation, were nearly non-existent. They offer programs in higher education, adult education, vocational education, JOM student program services, as well as programs for the elderly and youth. Odawa language classes are held on a regular basis and they offer law enforcement and conservation protection services. They have a tribal court system, child welfare program, social services and quite a myriad of health and human services, including: CARF accredited substance abuse programs, a health clinic, juvenile court system and Headstart & Early Start Programs, as well as their casino operations in Petoskey.

The majority of the tribal population lives in the towns of Petoskey, Harbor Springs and Charlevoix, MI. These three communities are all very well-to-do, with many year-around recreational activities. Most employment centers around the tourism business. Part of Petoskey (Bay View Association) is listed in the Historic Federal Register, for their turn-of-the-century summer home, for the elite of Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids.

Like their Odawa brethren to the south (Grand Traverse Ottawa and Little River Ottawa), they have endured living in rich communities with such glaring differences of financial “have” and “have not”, and their determination and the will to persevere has been immensely tested, but actually strengthened, in such a social-structure climate.

In just a few short seven years, these Odawa of indomitable spirit, have made great strides with a cadre of well-trained and experienced tribal members who have led them into the new century on their own terms. As they continue to plan with fortified vision for the future, they always keep their tradition and culture in mind and the welfare of the next seven generations. They will soon become a tribal influence to be reckoned with through-out historic Anishnabek country, as they reestablish their influence among The Three Fires Council people specifically and with all Algonquian-speaking peoples in general.