Resting place is what the Anishinaabe phrase means, and Ah-Nab-Awen Park carries that name on the ground where you now walk. This is the right name for a park that sits on ground where the Odawa and Potawatomi peoples lived, traded, and gathered for generations before European contact. The Grand River valley was one of the most significant Native American landscapes in what is now Michigan — the river and its tributaries connected communities across a vast territory, and the rapids that gave Grand Rapids its name were a particularly productive fishing site where salmon and other species could be taken in great numbers each season.
Louis Campau, the French fur trader who established the first permanent American settlement here in the 1820s, did so by recognizing what the Odawa already knew: this was an excellent place to be. The park today includes interpretive markers about the history of the land and the people who shaped it long before the furniture factories, the churches, or the highways. Stand at the river's edge and think about what this bank looked and sounded like two hundred years ago.