The Native Great Lakes and the Conquest of Michigan: A View from the Huron River, Part One

The Huron River watershed is an area rich in evidence of a variety of Native American cultures. Trails, mounds, cemeteries, village sites and fields dot the local landscape and are testimony to the different ways the landscape was seen and used over thousands of years.

In more recent times, saw the establishment of many autonomous, multi-tribal, villages with their own unique histories and politics. Ypsilanti's place on the Huron River was the site of one of those villages, an eighteenth and early nineteenth century Potawatomi village.

From from around 1640 through Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763, through the American Revolution to Tecumseh and the "War of 1812" through the policy of removal in the 1830s and 40s, Michigan's Native peoples played a central role in the region and nation's history.

They established alliances, tenaciously pursuing their own independence and interests, as well as engaging in fierce, sometimes successful, wars of resistance.

Internal differences and fierce debates within villages also led to deep divisions among villages over how to respond to American settlers ever expanding encroachment.

Descendants of those villagers, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, continue to live in Michigan today, just 100 miles from Ypsilanti.
Join historian Matt Siegfried for a two part examination of this history from the view of the Huron River with part one focusing on 1640 until 1763, while part two focus from then until the removal policies of the 1830s and 1840s.