Introduction
 
 
The Ottawa, meaning traders, are a Native American and First Nations people. They are related to but distinct from the Ojibwe nation. They lived near the northern shores of Lake Huron. There are approximately 15,000 Ottawa living in Michigan, Ontario, and Oklahoma. The Ottawa language is considered a divergent dialect of the Ojibwe, characterized by frequent syncope. The Ottawa language, like the Ojibwe language, is part of the Algonquian language family.

The Ottawa and Ojibwe were part of a long term alliance with the Potawatomi tribe, called the Council of Three Fires and which fought the Iroquois Confederacy and the Sioux. The Ottawa allied with the French against the British and the Ottawa Chief Pontiac led a rebellion against the British in 1763.
 
 
Chief Pontiac grew up in a time of particularly rapid cultural and technological change. In early adulthood he did not seem an especially noteworthy figure among the Ottawas, a tribe that had lived for several generations in the Great Lakes region. Like many other tribes, the Ottawas had gained materially from their association with the French, but the arrival of British traders in the 1730s ushered in a period of conflict. In the early 1760s the British victory over the French in North America in the French and Indian War signaled altered circumstances for all the Indians of the Midwest.A decade later, chief Egushawa led the Ottawa in the American Revolutionary War as an ally of the British.
 
     
Chief Pontiac grew up in a time of particularly rapid cultural and technological change. In early adulthood he did not seem an especially noteworthy figure among the Ottawas, a tribe that had lived for several generations in the Great Lakes region. Like many other tribes, the Ottawas had gained materially from their association with the French, but the arrival of British traders in the 1730s ushered in a period of conflict. In the early 1760s the British victory over the French in North America in the French and Indian War signaled altered circumstances for all the Indians of the Midwest.A decade later, chief Egushawa led the Ottawa in the American Revolutionary War as an ally of the British. In the 1790s, Egushawa again fought the United States in a series of battles and campaigns known as the Northwest Indian War.
 
The name in its English transcription is the source of the place names of Ottawa, Ontario and the Ottawa River, even though the Ottawa's home territory i.e, at the time of early European contact, but not their trading zone, was well to the west of the city and river named after them. For several other places named for the Ottawa.
 
 
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