The record's edge: what a fuller record would require

The closing article, as the checklist requires — the missing record classes named, each with the office or archive that holds it

This section has carried the tribal record of the Harris Prairie upland as deep as the published and first-hand record goes, and its honest close is the map of what it could not reach. Six record classes stand between this section and a fuller one. The removal muster rolls — the name-by-name lists of the columns of 1838 to 1843 — would give this ground its count of the removed, the number every pass of this build has had to enter as a gap; they rest in the federal records of the removal itself. The General Land Office patents and tract books would fix where the eighteen floating grants of the 1828 treaty finally fell, and whether Louison's house and cornfield — the one dwelling the instrument rewards — ever stood where a surveyor could find it. The surveyors' field notes of 1829, for the townships of this ground, would say what the survey party saw on the prairie before the first entry was sold — a related field survey of 1829 rests in the Saint Joseph County Records at the University of Notre Dame Archives, whose grave-plot list of 1939 belongs to the same unopened shelf. The annuity rolls of the 1830s, with the standard scholarly lives by Clifton and Edmunds, would date the younger Topenebee's death and close the succession article's open edge. The Pokagon Band's own archives — the Department of Language and Culture that holds Simon Pokagon's birch-bark originals — are the settling authority for the twentieth-century council line after Simon and for any published Bodéwadmi name of the river, the two gaps this section most wants closed by the nation's own hand rather than by another's research. And the closed Indiana site file, SHAARD at the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, holds whatever site-level archaeology Clay and Harris townships possess.

Until those classes are read, the record for this ground stands where this section leaves it: a Potawatomi upland inside a valley the Miami named first; held by the St. Joseph division whose chiefs signed at Carey Mission under a son holding his father's title while the leadership gathered to Pokagon; ceded clean in 1828 with nothing reserved out of it; emptied of its people between 1838 and 1843 by a removal its own valley's kin helped administer; and inside, today, the statutory service area of the nation that was never removed — the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, sovereign at Dowagiac, whose ancestors' marks stand ninth in the list of treaties Congress recited when it affirmed, in 1994, that the band had governed itself from treaty times until today. The upland's tribal record is shorter than the river towns' and longer than its emptiness suggests. This section has printed all of it that the record carries, and named the rest.