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The band that stayed — its mechanism stated exactly: a supplemental article, a faith, and land bought in fee
The succession: Leopold Pokagon (about 1775–1841) succeeded Topenebee as the valley's principal chief on Topenebee's death in 1826. The band he led made its stand on a religious alliance, and the valley's Catholic record opens in a dispute this build prints whole, here as in the South Bend leg where it was dug: Buechner (1933) has Fr. John Frederic Reze arrive in July 1830 and baptise Pokagon with twelve others; the Pokagon scholarship has Fr. Stephen Badin arrive in August 1830 to raise the mission Pokagon had requested, and Pokagon baptised in 1833. Both accounts agree on the substance: the Catholic Potawatomi acknowledged Pokagon as their leader in 1830, and the Catholic affiliation became the band's defining identity — the identity on which the exception was negotiated.
The mechanism: At Chicago in 1833, Pokagon held out. Commissioner George B. Porter added the supplemental article allowing the band to remain in Michigan — in the words of Secunda's Notre Dame dissertation, the ground of the permission was stated in the negotiation itself: they might stay "on account of their religious creed." The 1994 Senate Report on the band's restoration states the result in one sentence: "the Pokagon Band is the only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan and receive their share of prior treaty payments in Michigan." The right was then made ground: Pokagon bought 874 acres on Silver Creek in Cass County, Michigan, in fee simple — Clifton's figure, in The Pokagons, 1683–1983 — with treaty money and the proceeds of family-reservation sales. A band that held its land as citizens hold land, under a treaty article that let it stay, had a defense no removal order easily moved. In the removal drive of 1840–41 it was tested: General Hugh Brady, superintendent of the emigration, honored the written opinion of Associate Justice Epaphroditus Ransom that the band had a right to remain. Pokagon died on 8 July 1841 with his people on their ground. His son Simon Pokagon (about 1830–1899) carried the band's case into print a half-century later in The Red Man's Rebuke (1893).
The band today, and this ground: The band's federal standing was restored by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994, whose findings name the band the descendant and political successor of the signatories of eleven treaties — from Greenville in 1795 through Chicago in 1833, including the St. Joseph treaties of 1827 and the 1828 treaty that took this ground — and name its citizens as residing "close to their ancestral homeland in the St. Joseph River Valley in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana." The band is a sovereign nation today, headquartered at Dowagiac, Michigan, with more than 4,300 citizens on its published figures, and a ten-county service area that includes St. Joseph County, Indiana — therefore this ground: the upland whose title passed in 1828 lies inside the present service area of the band whose chiefs signed the instrument. The band's Indiana ground of record — the satellite office in South Bend, the trust land accepted on 28 November 2016 after the final determination of 17 November 2016, and Four Winds South Bend, opened 16 January 2018 as a Class II facility under the compact chronology of Indiana Code § 4-29.5-0.5-2 — is South Bend ground, printed here at that boundary. Its first villages stood across this ground's north line: Pokagon's village in southeastern Bertrand Township, Berrien County, "about six miles north and west of the present city of South Bend" in Buechner's placement, within the villages tract of the 1833 supplementary articles; and Buechner places the band's cemetery "on a high knoll in section 22… not far from the west bank of the St. Joseph" near that village — Michigan ground, printed at boundary size, soberly, and without elaboration.
Sources: Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683–1983 — the Silver Creek purchase and the band's ground; Buechner (1933) and the Pokagon scholarship (Secunda, University of Notre Dame dissertation), as dug in the South Bend leg of this project — the Catholic record in its two accounts, the Porter article and its stated ground, Pokagon's village and the cemetery knoll at boundary size; Senate Report on the Restoration Act (1994) — the only-band sentence; Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323 (21 September 1994) — the eleven treaties and the ancestral-homeland finding; Indiana Code § 4-29.5-0.5-2 and the 2016 trust determination and acceptance dates, as carried in the South Bend leg — the Indiana ground at its boundary; the band's published figures — citizens and the ten-county service area.