The Ottawa (also Odawa or Odaawa) are a Native American people. They are related to but distinct from the Ojibwe tribe. They lived near the northern shores of Lake Huron. There are approximately 15,000 Ottawa living in Michigan, Ontario, and Oklahoma. The Ottawa language is part of the Algonquian language family.
Like the Ojibwe, the Ottawa usually referred to themselves as Anishinaabe (plural: Anishinabek), meaning original people.
Odawa, like Ojibwa refers to an Algonkian language (some would say Odawa is a dialect of Ojibwa) and became a common appellation in the 18th century.
The Odawa were forced to leave their homelands, as were many peoples in the Great Lakes basin, under the pressure of Iroquois attacks.
The Odawa seem, however, to have predominated on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan where the large settlements around the Grand and Muskegon Rivers and Traverse Bay were established.
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.
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.
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.
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