Gun Lake Tribe Constructs Nine New Homes

With the completion of a block of nine homes, the Gun Lake tribe has begun bringing its tribal elders home.

An open house March 31 unveiled the homes of “The Settlement,” built in Bradley on a cul-de-sac off 128th Avenue west of 6th Street with nearly $2.5 million in grants.

Tribal housing director Melissa Brown said the homes will first be offered to tribal elders—members older than age 50—who now live throughout west Michigan but may lack the means to live where the tribe has called home for more than a century.

The 400-member tribe has approximately 80 elders.

The tribe, also known as the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band, settled in Bradley in 1838 near Gun Lake. According to the tribe, the tribal settlement was then called the Griswold Mission, overseen by an Episcopal church. The tribe was formally recognized by the federal government Aug. 23, 1999.

“This is exciting,” Brown said of the project’s completion. “We worked hard to get here.”

The bulk of the funding came from 2009 federal stimulus money, through the Native American Housing Block Grant. The Gun Lake Band of Pottawatomie Indians were one of 104 tribes and Alaskan native villages that won grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development nationwide; 327 applied.

The Settlement is the tribe’s first housing project. The two- and three-bedroom homes on 33 acres include some “green” features, such as geothermal heating systems, efficient windows and on-demand water heaters.

To accommodate some needs of the elderly, the homes contain no stairs and have wheelchair-friendly door frame widths.

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