Peshawbestown & the Grand Traverse Band

We're running down the Grand Traverse Bay shore now, and we're passing through Peshawbestown, the community of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.

The mission here was founded in eighteen forty-nine by Father Ignatius Mrak, who called the place Eagletown. But the community is far older than that name and is very much a present-day nation, not a historical footnote.

The history in between is worth knowing and is not comfortable. In eighteen seventy-two the federal government simply severed its recognition of the Band — a stroke of a pen, and a nation that had signed treaties with the United States officially ceased to exist in the government's eyes. It took over a century to undo. Members petitioned in nineteen thirty-four, again in nineteen forty-three, again in nineteen seventy-eight. And in March of nineteen eighty, the Grand Traverse Band became the first tribe in the country to be restored to federal recognition through the formal acknowledgment process. The first.

Alongside that ran a fight over treaty fishing rights, decided in the Band's favor in nineteen seventy-nine, and the current agreement governing Great Lakes fishing in the eighteen thirty-six treaty waters was signed in two thousand twenty-three and runs to twenty forty-seven.

So as you drive this shore: the water on your left is treaty water, and the boats fishing it are exercising a right that took a hundred years to get back.