The peoples in their own names

Endonyms first, as the checklist of this build requires — the names the peoples give themselves, before any clerk's spelling is allowed to stand for them

The Potawatomi call themselves Neshnabé, a word cognate with Anishinaabe, and in their own language their nation is Bodéwadmi — plural Bodéwadmik — a name the language record glosses "those who tend the hearth-fire," from bodewadm, to keep the fire. The name is itself a political fact: it is the hearth-keeper's name inside the Council of Three Fires, the long alliance of the Potawatomi with the Ojibwe and the Odawa, in which the Potawatomi are the youngest brother and the keeper of the council fire. The citizens of the band that stayed carry the collective name the band publishes for itself, Pokégan Bodwéwadmik dbéndagwzéwad — the Pokagon Potawatomis, they belong to — in the band's own orthography; the scholarly literature supported by the band writes the same self-name Pokegnek Bodewadmik. Both spellings stand in the published record, and this section prints both rather than choosing between a nation's own hand and its scholars'. The Miami call themselves Myaamia — Myaamiaki in the plural — which the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma renders "the Downstream People," for the riverine country their history begins in; their telling of the beginning, carried in Before the City at its full boundary size, sets the emergence at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on Saakiiweesiipiwi, the St. Joseph River. This section uses the peoples' own names where the record is theirs, and the treaty clerks' spellings — Potowatami, Pottawatamie, Po-ca-gan, To-pen-e-bee — only inside the instruments' own words, where the spelling is part of the document. Two forms of the valley's principal chief's name run through the whole record, Topenebee and Topinabee, and a father's name in two forms, Nanaquiba and Aniquiba; the variants print as their sources give them and are never silently standardised, because a reader checking this section against the treaty rolls will meet both in the rolls themselves.

One more name discipline belongs at the head of the file. The band that stayed is the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians — Michigan and Indiana, in the federal register's full style — and it is a band of the Potawatomi nation, not a separate tribe invented by its chief's surname: it took his name because his villages were the ones that held, and Congress, when it came to name the band's ancestry in 1994, named it the descendant and political successor of treaty signatories, not of a man. The Nottawaseppi band of the same river carries a name that is a place before it is a people — Nottawaseppi, written Notta-we-sipa and Na-to-wa-se-pe in the instruments — the reserve tract on the St. Joseph in Michigan from which that band's modern nation, the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, descends; the "Huron" in its name is Michigan geography, the Huron River country its ancestors came from, and not a claim of Wendat nationhood anywhere, on this ground or any other. The removed of this valley descend today chiefly in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation of Kansas, both named in the 1994 act's findings as co-descendants of the same signatories. Those are the peoples of this section, in their own names, and every later article is answerable to this one.

Sources: the language record as carried in the Mishawaka history — the Pokagon Band's published collective name; John N. Low, "Chicago's First Urban Indians — the Potawatomi" (University of Michigan dissertation, 2011) — the self-name written Pokegnek Bodewadmik and the villages united in it; the ethnonym record (Bodéwadmi from Ojibwe Boodewaadamii(g), "those who tend the hearth-fire"; Neshnabé cognate with Anishinaabe; the Council of Three Fires); the Myaamia Center, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — Myaamia/Myaamiaki, "the Downstream People," Saakiiweeyonki and Saakiiweesiipiwi, as carried in Before the City; Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323, §1(1) (25 U.S.C. §1300j(1)) — the successor finding; the Nottawaseppi Huron Band's published timeline — the reserve name and the band's course.