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A nation-by-nation test, run as the checklist requires — the Myaamia were the valley's first recorded people; what that does and does not give this ground
The first people the written record names in this valley are the Miami — the Myaamia — and the record is not shy about it. The river's first French name was the river of the Miamis. The valley's marker record states it in one sentence, carried in Before the City: "The Miami were the first recorded tribe known to have lived in the valley before 1668. The main village was located east of the St. Joseph River at the present day site of Niles, Michigan. Other villages were recorded in present day South Bend and Waterford Mills, Indiana." Howard's county history says the same of the ground one township west of this section's: "Here, near the spot yet known as Mount Pleasant, was once the great Miami village, where, in 1681 La Salle made his celebrated treaty with the Miami tribe." And the Myaamia people's own account, which this build prints before any French document wherever the two meet, sets the nation's beginning on this very river at Saakiiweeyonki, the Confluence — with its two tribal wordings, near South Bend and at the lake mouth, carried unreconciled in the companion legs where the question was dug. Priority in the record, then, is Miami, at every strength the record offers: the nation's own telling, the French naming, and the marker record all agree on it.
Possession at contact is the separate fact, and on this ground the Miami test returns the careful answer. Across the French century the Miami centre of gravity moved southeast, to Kekionga and the Wabash, and the people in possession of the St. Joseph valley at the treaty era — the people whose towns the instruments name, whose chiefs signed them, whose removal emptied them — are the Potawatomi. No source reached places a Miami town, a Miami chief, or a Miami reserve on the Harris Prairie upland at any date; the Miami villages of the record are the river towns at Niles, at the portage, and at Waterford Mills, and the upland between them and the line was, by the time paper begins, inside the valley the Potawatomi held. The test therefore prints in two parts, because the record prints in two parts: the Miami are this valley's first recorded people, and their own account of the river stands first in this section's telling — and this ground's tribal record, the record of possession, cession and removal, is a Potawatomi record. Both halves are the finding; neither half cancels the other.
The modern tail of the test belongs here, because the nation's own course has bent back toward Indiana in this decade. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — the federally recognised successor of the Myaamia nation, governed from Miami, Oklahoma, with its Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio — purchased forty-five acres at Fort Wayne in 2021, saw the land approved for trust status in June 2024, and keeps its Cultural Resources Extension Office there, as the State of Indiana's own emergency plan records in March 2025. Fort Wayne is Kekionga's ground, the Wabash-side centre the valley's Miami moved toward three centuries ago — the return is on their own historic ground, printed here at boundary size because it is the valley nation's present fact and not this ground's. On this ground the Tribe holds nothing and claims nothing in any record reached, and the test closes where the record closes: first in the record, absent from the possession, present again in Indiana on the Wabash side.
Sources: the Elkhart river marker record and Howard (1907), Chapter V, as carried in Before the City — the Miami first in the record, the villages named, the great village at Mount Pleasant and La Salle's 1681 treaty; the Myaamia Center — the emergence account in its two wordings, as dug in the South Bend leg; the treaty record of 1821–1833 — possession at the treaty era, Potawatomi throughout; State of Indiana Emergency Operations Plan (March 2025) — the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's forty-five acres at Fort Wayne, purchased 2021, trust approved June 2024, and the Cultural Resources Extension Office seated there.