Senator Daniel Inouye, of Hawaii, has reintroduced a bill to grant the Pottawatomi Nation of Canada 1.8 million dollars in recognition of the “forced removal” of their ancestors in the early 1800s from tribal lands in the United States. Following is an excerpt from an article in the January 18, 2009 edition of the Vancouver Sun. The article contains some very interesting history.
In February 2007, when Inouye last urged the U.S. Senate to back his bill, Pottawatomi Chief Ed Williams described the senator as a “fantastic guy” and a “real champion for aboriginal people.”
Williams and others from the Moose Deer Point First Nation near Parry Sound, Ont., trace their ancestry to the U.S. But their forebears were among those who refused to migrate to reserves in the U.S. southwest when they were forced from their traditional tribal lands in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.
The Pottawatomi were pressured in the 1830s to relocate at gunpoint by the U.S. army under the infamous “Indian Removal” policies of then-president Andrew Jackson.
Many resettled west of the Mississippi River. But some bands escaped eastward, settling in remote woodlands closer to the Canadian border or crossing into what was then Upper Canada.
Some of the Pottawatomi refugees ended up blending with other related First Nations such as the Ojibway and Ottawa, but one group in Canada received land on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay and formed the Moose Deer Point community.
Read the full article by Randy Boswell in the January 18, 2009 Vancouver Sun.