The Native Nations of Granger: The Peoples of the Upland

Tribes · The Peoples of the Upland

Granger's tribal record begins with a refusal, and this section keeps it. The ground of the census-designated place — the Harris Prairie upland in Clay and Harris townships, between the St. Joseph River's north bend and the Michigan line — carries no named village, no named chief, and no named band in any record this build could reach, and the companion leg, Before the City, has printed that negative whole. What this ground does carry is a share — an upcountry share — in one of the best-documented tribal records in the Great Lakes: the record of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, whose towns stood on the river below and across the state line above, whose chiefs signed the instrument that took this ground in 1828, whose removal emptied the valley between 1838 and 1843, and one of whose bands — the Catholic band of Leopold Pokagon — negotiated the right to stay, stayed, and sits today as a sovereign nation whose statutory service area takes in this ground by name of its county. This section is that record at the depth the tribal sources themselves support: the peoples in their own names first; the chiefs as the treaties and the tribes' own published histories give them, including a succession the treaty clerks wrote down more exactly than the county histories retold it; the band that stayed, carried past its chief's death in 1841 through its long unrecognised century to the act of Congress that affirmed its recognition in 1994 and the council that governs it as of November 2026; and the other nations of this valley's record — the Miami who were here first in the written telling, the Nottawaseppi band of the same river, and the nations in Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin that descend from the valley's removed. Where a claim cannot be carried — a village on this prairie, a tribal acre on it today — the test is printed with its search, at the size the search deserves.