Kekionga

Kekionga. . This area of the Three Rivers was a site of settlement of Native Americans for as much as 10,000 years. The collection of villages known as Kekionga, located in the present-day Lakeside neighborhood, was a center of the Miami nation in historic times. At the time of the Miami confederacy in the 1790s, Kekionga also was the gathering place for the Huron, the Ottawa, and the Shawnee., Tradition holds that Kekionga means "the blackberry patch." To the Miami people this also had the meaning of an ancient, sacred place. In the spring, the scattered families of the several clans came to Kekionga from their winter hunting grounds to conduct their business, prepare for war, and cultivate the fields., Kekionga was described in the 1790s as being a very large settlement called "Miami Town" by eastern Americans who feared the place as the center of Indian resistance to the expanding United States frontier., Kekionga occupied the ground above the flood plain of the Maumee and the St. Joseph rivers and was surrounded by wide expanses of corn fields, as far as the eye can see," according to one observer. Anthony Wayne commented on the broad corn fields that extended all along the Maumee River. Others noted the herds of cattle and the many gardens growing pumpkins, melons, and squash. Dome-shaped houses, called "wiccias," log homes, and bark-covered long houses, for business or religious purposes, covered the many acres of Kekionga., Kekionga remained a place of native settlement until the Miami were forcibly removed from Indiana in 1846.