Sustained Odawa contact with the French began with the arrival of the first Anishinaabe furs in Montreal in 1654, and Odawa wars against the Haudenosaunee through the 1660s greatly mitigated the threat posed to Canadian commerce by the Iroquois–Anglo-Dutch trade at Albany. This opened the Great Lakes to French voyageurs who were able to travel directly to summer markets at Michilimackinac, where aboriginals traded pelts trapped as far west at Lakes Superior and Nipigon. By 1683 the French established a post at the Straits, which the sieur de Cadillac wrote was the “centre, as it were, for all the rest of the colony,” the place from “whence everything is distributed” (51). Located at the far end of a seasonal round trip from the St. Lawrence Valley, the Odawa at Michilimackinac carried on a provisioning trade that included canoe manufacturing and repair and the sale of fish and locally grown foodstuffs to European and indigenous traders moving across the Lakes. In fact, the indigenous residents of Michilimackinac were such effective merchants that they felt no particular inclination to hunt and instead lived comfortably off the profits of commerce alone.
The Anishinaabeg at Michilimackinac wielded a vast regional influence by positioning themselves at the centre of long-distance kinship networks that incorporated various branches of Algonquian-, Iroquoian-, and Siouan-speaking peoples. And the Anishinaabeg purposely drew the French into these networks, first inviting traders from Canada to overwinter at Michilimackinac in 1665. Once Europeans immersed themselves into the Upper Country they became reliant on indigenous expertise, and many voyageurs to Michilimackinac depended on the labour of Anishinaabe women whose marriage to Frenchmen in turn provided their families with privileged access to trade goods. But in spite of a French presence at the Straits, McDonnell describes a community at the centre of a world still firmly indigenous: the French were only there, he writes, “because the Anishinaabeg wanted them there” (17, 52). It was, for instance, the Michilimackinac Odawa rather than the French who served as the chief mediators of disputes among Upper Country Algonquians, so much so that the late 19th-century Odawa historian Andrew Blackbird recorded that every nation in the vicinity deposited a peace pipe at Michilimackinac for the purpose of conflict resolution. The Odawa proclivity for diplomacy also extended to their dealings with Europeans, as they consistently played rival empires against each other. In order to extract more favourable terms from the French, for example, the Anishinaabeg regularly entertained trade with the English and even threatened an Odawa-Haudenosaunee alliance, which the Jesuit historian Pierre Charlevoix feared “would suffice to oblige all the French to leave Canada” in a single campaign (80).