Ottawa

A people

Brandywine Falls dropping 60 feet over a sandstone ledge into the gorge at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
Erik Drost, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Background

The Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma's cultural center gives its people two names, Adawe in the tribe's own language and Ottawa in English, and files them under the Anishinaabe. It places the Ottawa inside that larger people, whose roots run deep in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley. The same account says the Ottawa have lived, governed and sustained a community in Kansas and Oklahoma since the mid-nineteenth century, and that they have signed numerous treaties with the United States, most recently in 1862 and 1867. Cuyahoga Valley records French missionaries noting an Ottawa village at the mouth of Tinkers Creek and another at Boston under Chief Stigwanish, and an early settler record of an Ottawa village north of Boston in 1806. Representatives of the Ottawa signed the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785, which set the lower Cuyahoga River, the Portage Path and the Tuscarawas River as the western boundary of the United States. They were party to the Treaty of Fort Meigs in 1817, ceding claims to 4.6 million acres in northwestern Ohio, northeastern Indiana and southern Michigan. In the 1830s the United States removed 349 Ottawa from Ohio to Kansas in three trips. The last was led by Au-to-kee, a grandson of Pontiac, from July 25 to August 30, 1839, its 107 people travelling by boat through the Cuyahoga Valley on the Ohio and Erie Canal. Within a few years about half of roughly 500 Ottawa from Ohio had died in Kansas.

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Visit and learn

Adawe Cultural Center and Museum

26 N Main Street, Miami, Oklahoma·cultural center

The Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma's cultural center and museum, with history, library, museum, language, lifeways, a calendar and class registration sections. Its history section carries Ottawa history classes open to sign up, and the center posts its own current class and event calendar.

https://www.heritage.ottawatribe.gov/ottawa-history

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Brandywine Falls dropping 60 feet over a sandstone ledge into the gorge at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.Cuyahoga Valley National Park

In 1839 the US removed 349 Ottawa from Ohio to Kansas in three trips. The last was led by Au-to-kee, a grandson of Pontiac, and went by boat through the Cuyahoga Valley on the Ohio and Erie Canal. Source

Programs

  • Anishinaabemowin language program

    The Adawe Cultural Center calls Anishinaabemowin the ancestral language of the Adawe people and says the language cannot be separated from the culture. The program runs language classes, points learners at a Rosetta Stone Ojibwe project, the Ojibwe People's Dictionary at the University of Minnesota, Anishinaabemdaa lessons and the Anishinaabemoda Waking Up Ojibwe site, and links to the Anishinaabemowin work of the Little Traverse Bay Band.

    https://www.heritage.ottawatribe.gov/language·language

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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