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140 The Michigan Historical Review What separates this book from the other Vintage Views titles is that this volume extends beyond a single region and deals with larger Michigan history topics, the first of these being how Michigan came to have the road system it has today. Initially, rural road construction was focused more on bicycles than automobiles but the urban success and popularity of cars meant people began traveling outside of cities only to find roads whose construction was locally controlled and whose quality standards varied wildly. There was no cooperation or coordination at the county and state levels. But with the Good Roads Movement, including groups such as the West Michigan Lake Shore Highway Association and leaders such as Horatio Earl and Dr. William DeKliene, Michigan developed a master plan that would improve road construction and change travel patterns forever. The authors also discuss how this particular road—an extension of the larger national Dixie Highway—changed lives and communities throughout the state as tourism grew as an economic force in areas that previously were excluded because they were not on railroad or steamship routes. As the title suggests, starting as nothing more than a path, US 31 became a thoroughfare rivaling the famous Route 66 in its cultural and economic importance to generations of travelers. This really is a “Michigan” book that is filled with carefully chosen images and examples of ephemera and text that both explain and illustrate this delightful bit of transportation, cultural, and economic history. Michael Federspiel, Executive Director Little Traverse Historical Society, Petoskey, Michigan Matthew L. M. Fletcher. The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 257. Bibliography Index. Notes. Cloth, $29.95. Fletcher’s work adds to a growing library of indigenous legal histories. The Grand Traverse Band consists of communities from the Anishinaabek “Three Fires” group of Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe (Chippewa or Ojibway), and Bodewadmi (Potawatomi) peoples, who all reside in the Grand Traverse Bay area of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Fletcher focuses primarily on the band’s efforts to restore its land base, Book Reviews 141 political autonomy, and usufructuary rights, all of which the United States acknowledged in the Treaty of 1836. In that treaty, Grand Traverse and other Anishinaabek leaders ceded about one-third of present-day Michigan to the United States. In exchange, Henry Schoolcraft, the federal negotiator, promised that the United States would establish a permanent reservation for the band. The U.S. Senate, however, limited the commitment to five years. For the next several years, the band continued to push the United States to fulfill the promise made in 1836. In the Treaty of Detroit (1855), federal treaty commissioners offered the band a reservation on the condition that its members abandon communal land-ownership and accept individual allotments of land, an insidious idea that presaged the Dawes (1877) and Curtis (1898) acts mandating the allotment of all indigenous lands. In subsequent decades, most band members sold (or were swindled out of) their allotments; by the end of the nineteenth century the Grand Traverse Band had lost almost its entire land base. To make matters worse, in the 1870s the United States, which had abandoned its policy of dealing with the tribes through treaties, refused to recognize the band or deal with it on a nation-to-nation basis. For the next century, the band tried through various means to reverse what Fletcher calls this “administrative termination” (p. 53). Only in 1980 did the federal government restore the Grand Traverse Band as a recognized nation—it was the first Indian nation to negotiate its way through the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ new tribal-acknowledgment process. From that point forward, the band worked to reestablish its land base and devise new political and legal institutions that integrated and respected traditional mores. In 1984, the band began high-stakes bingo operations and since that time it has opened and expanded a successful casino. The band was often required to litigate in order to protect its interests, and it played a significant role in defining the rights of tribes to operate off-reservation...

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