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The chiefs named, at valley strength — the line that held the river towns above and below this ground, and the kin-web the tribes' own published histories preserve
The St. Joseph Potawatomi were one division of a decentralised nation — the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph River, in the standard grouping, distinct from the Potawatomi of the Kankakee, of Detroit, of Milwaukee and of the Illinois — and their chiefs held a river, not a town: villages opposite present Niles, at Bertrand, at Moccasin Bluff, at the portage and at the rapids, with the upcountry between them, this ground included, as the division's hunting and travelling ground. The chief line of the division runs in the record from Nanaquiba — Aniquiba in the treaty-era spellings, glossed "Water Moccasin" in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's published family history — to his son Topenebee, Topinabee in the common spelling, "He Who Sits Quietly" in the gloss the tribal record gives, born in 1758 in his father's village on this river. The elder Topenebee is the division's great treaty-era figure before Pokagon: a signer of Greenville in 1795, standing first of the "Putawatames of the River St. Joseph" in Barce's 1918 reading of that roll, and a signer, by the compiled count of his biographies, of a dozen treaties across his leadership. The family record the Citizen Potawatomi Nation publishes adds the kin-web the state papers flatten: Topenebee's brother was Chebass — Zhshibés, "Little Duck" in the chief lists — a chief on this river at Bertrand; his sister Kaukima married the trader William Burnett, and their descendants run through the removal record to Kansas, where Kaukima's line produced Abram B. Burnett, the interpreter of the Trail of Death column, whom the Nation's family history makes Chebass's grandson. The valley's other named heads stand at their own size: Moccasin, whose village at Moccasin Bluff in Berrien County the federal NAGPRA record of 2022 still names, and whose town — Macousin village — is a boundary call inside the 1828 treaty itself; and the chiefs of the Bertrand shore, where Pokagon's village would rise.
This ground's share of all that is stated exactly, because the checklist requires the share and not the whole nation's history. No chief of the line held a town on the Harris Prairie upland; no chief is buried on it in any record reached; the division's government sat at the river towns, and the upland's part in the chiefs' record is the part the geography assigns it: the country their people hunted over, travelled across, and held in the same title as the towns — the title the chiefs' signatures would presently sign away. When the instruments come, in the articles below, they come with these men's names on them: the elder Topenebee's son at the head of the 1828 roll, his brother's people's fate in the removal columns, and Pokagon — who married into the line, taking Topenebee's daughter Elizabeth, called Ketesse, as his wife, so that his son Simon was the elder Topenebee's grandson — holding the valley's future in his own hand. The chiefs are the valley's; the share is the ground's; this section keeps the two in that proportion throughout.
Sources: Barce (1918) — the Greenville signature, as carried in the Mishawaka history; Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Cultural Heritage Center, "Burnett family history" (2025) — Kaukima, Nanaquiba glossed "Water Moccasin," the Burnett line, Abram Burnett interpreter on the Trail of Death and Chebass's grandson in the Nation's telling; the compiled chief lists of the St. Joseph and Elkhart Potawatomi — Chebass (Zhshibés, "Little Duck"), the two Topinbees; the tribal-memory essay on the elder Topinabee (Michigan Historical Review, from a family archive) — born about 1758 in his father's village on the St. Joseph, died probably 29 July 1826 near present Niles; Federal Register NAGPRA notice (October 2022) — Moccasin and Moccasin Bluff, as carried in Before the City; The Birch-Bark Booklets of Simon Pokagon (Michigan History, by the Pokagon Band's archivist) — Simon's mother Elizabeth (Ketesse) Topinabee.