KALAMAZOO (WKZO AM/FM) –Kalamazoo was breifly an Indian reservation. Now the first of a number of new street signs identifying the original boundary of the Reservation are in place.
The reservation roughly included everything south of Patterson, west of the Edison and Milwood neighborhoods, east of Parkview and north of Cork and White’s road.
Members of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band were on hand for the event at the corner of Riverview and Patterson where the first of the new signs have been installed.
They will also be put up at 24 other intersections along the edge of the old reservation.
The 9-square miles was set aside for the tribe in 1821, but reclaimed by the U.S. Government just 6-years later, under less than favorable terms for the Tribe, which had its village on the Kalamazoo River and had been living in the area for an unknown number of years prior to the arrival of white settlers. .
The band, better known as the Gun Lake Tribe moved to a settlement near Bradley to avoid the forced marches that other Pottowatomi tribes would endure, that moved them west of the Mississippi.
Now they own and operate the Gun Lake Casino in Allegan County.
