By Steve Friess | The New York Times
ATHENS, Mich. — For now, the field isn’t much. All that stands along a quiet country road is a small storage building, beyond which rolls 28 acres of prairie a mile south of this blink-and-miss-it hamlet. To Mon-ee Zapata, though, this land is both the past and the future.
As denoted on a historical marker across the street, this is the vicinity where, 175 years ago, the United States government rounded up her ancestors, the Potawatomi Indians, and forced them on a deadly walk to inhospitable Kansas. But it is also a place where her tribal elders plan to build a manufacturing operation of some sort as a way to ensure their long-term economic stability beyond the revenue from the six-year-old FireKeepers Casino.
