Bodewadomik

The Bodewadomik, known to Europeans as the Potawatomi, are an Algonquian people of the western Great Lakes. Their own name, Bodéwadmik, means keepers of the hearth fire of the Council of Three Fires, their alliance with the Ojibwe and Odawa, where they were the youngest brother. Early French records place them in southwestern Michigan until the mid-seventeenth-century Beaver Wars drove them west to Green Bay.

They returned east with the French fur trade, settled near Detroit, and fought France's Fox Wars. After Britain seized the region in 1763 they joined Pontiac's Rebellion, capturing every British garrison except Detroit.

After the American Revolution their warriors joined Tecumseh's confederacy. Treaties after the War of 1812, culminating in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, ceded their Michigan and Indiana lands and opened removal west of the Mississippi.