Miami Indians

Miami (also called Maumee) is the name of an important Native American nation. Today, the Miami people live primarily in Ottawa County,Oklahoma, and in St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, Indiana. There are also Miami living in Peru, Wabash, Marion, Huntington, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis, Indiana. Tribal rolls in the Peru archives list approximately 6,000 persons of Miami descent. In the Oklahoma tribal rolls, the Miami number approximately 2,000.

French traders and explorers were the first Europeans to arrive in the Great Lakes region and in the Ohio Valley (1550–1600). Sent by the king of France, their primary goal was to chart the river systems as highways facilitating access into the interior of North America. Covered in dense impenetrable forest, the area was interconnected by canoe only. Even during the winter, when many river tributaries froze over, the smooth and unobstructed surfaces were more convenient for travel by dogsled. These French explorers, habitants (settlers), fur traders, and Jesuit missionaries discovered that the Miami were a traditional trading nation that controlled most of the Great Lakes region's waterways, possibly having forts at all of the major lake portages.

Linguistic anthropologists offer additional insights into the extent of Miami trading preeminence with the discovery that place names of geographical locations are not arbitrary meaningless designations applied for purely utilitarian purposes. Rather, place names carry symbolic import that also encodes historical data. Significantly, all of the Algonquin-speaking Native American nations of the Great Lakes region (e.g., Ojibwa, Ottawa, Menominee, Potawatomi) referred [Page 1592]to a great number of rivers as “the Maumee” and were unanimous in designating the Ohio Valley (criss-crossed by rivers bearing the Maumee appellation) “Valley of the Maumee.”

Little Turtle (1751–1812), the most famous Miami warrior chief, made an historic speech in 1795, when he delineated the relation of Miami to rivers during Treaty of Greenville negotiations. It is also remarkable that not one Native American nation attending the Treaty of Greenville negotiations registered a protest to Little Turtle's sweeping claims.

As late as the 1800s, Tacumwah, the sister of Pacanne (chief of the Fort Kekionga Miami) and possibly a woman chief in her own right, exemplified the regulation of river trade by Miami in that she and her son, Jean Baptiste Richardville, “controlled the portage to the Wabash and enjoyed its revenues,” according to Stewart Rafert's 1996 book, The Miami Indians: A Persistent People1654–1994. Tacumwah “transported goods over the portage employing a number of Indians and their horses for that purpose and making a large profit” in the process.

The French documented Miami occupation of the current states of Illinois,Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. However, one must be cautious in using the English legal term occupation, with its attendant implication of property ownership, when speaking of Native American land use given that Native Americans did not recognize property ownership. This European (and especially British) concept developed most fully during the Industrial Revolution, when landowners succeeded in expropriating the peasantry's “right of the commons” (ownerless land to be used by all) for the gathering of wood, herbs, and berries as well as for the grazing and watering of cattle and the like.

...