Homelands

During the time the United States was born, our historical families were located in the Great Lakes area, Michigan-Indiana-Illinois from about today’s Detroit south around Lake Michigan.  (If you are interested in much older history, the Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa people were at one point one Indian nation,  originally East Coast, into what is now Canada, and bands spread from there. You might also hear the group referred to as Algonquin-speaking, or Ojibwe, but I’m not going into that detail.)

 Like so many Native Tribes, our people had a Trail of Tears (or Trail of Death), a forced walk in 1838  across Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and finally Kansas, forced by soldiers with rifles riding horseback. We lost 41 people, mostly the very young and the elderly.

 Beginning in about 1861 with yet another treaty, when Kansas became a state, our band was both pressured to move again (railroads wanted the land) and looked to take control of their destiny after so many government-failed promises.  Starting in 1867 and over the next 20 years, our families moved to the area of Shawnee Oklahoma and established Citizen Potawatomi band; we were Tribal members and U.S. citizens, although in those days no one really knew what that meant, and we were still considered wards of the U.S. government.

 Kansas: note our great-grandfather Bert Pitcher was born in Kansas 1893. 

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