The first community: the village at the rapids, and the band that remained

BEFORE 1833 – PRESENT

The ground was a community before it was a town: the Potawatomi village at the Mishawaka rapids is the first Mishawaka, and its full record — what the written sources do and do not establish about the village, and the name's three readings — stands in the tribes file of this record. What belongs here is the community's course through the taking and after it. The townsite itself was the school section, bought out of the cessions: the ground passed by the second cession, the Treaty of St. Joseph of 20 September 1828, and by the time the plats were filed in 1833 the village's people had no paper left under the town that replaced them. The removal course that followed is the valley's: the emigrations directed from 1837, and the forced march of September 1838 that carried Menominee's band from Twin Lakes in Marshall County to Kansas — the Potawatomi Trail of Death. No column of that removal is recorded as gathered on Mishawaka's own ground, and this section does not move one here.

The exception that held was seated upriver: Leopold Pokagon's band of Catholic Potawatomi negotiated, in a supplemental article to the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the right to remain when the other bands were removed, and the band held its ground in the valley north of the state line, at Bertrand and Pokagon in Michigan. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians was restored to federal recognition by statute in 1994 (Public Law 103-323), is headquartered at Dowagiac, Michigan, and serves a ten-county area that includes northwestern Indiana. On Mishawaka's own ground, no remaining band, reserve or village community is named in any record reached for this build: the removal, at this city's resolution, was complete, and the individuals who stayed in the county stayed as individuals on private land, their descendants merging into the majority culture, as the state's removal record puts it. That absence is printed as the record gives it.

The first community's return to the county is a boundary entry, and it is dated. On 28 November 2016 about 166 acres on South Bend's south side became the first federally recognized tribal land in Indiana, and on 16 January 2018 the Pokagon Band opened Four Winds South Bend there — the oldest community of the valley standing, in the present century, as a sovereign neighbor four miles from the rapids where its village record begins. The ground is South Bend's; the community is the valley's; Mishawaka's share is the share this article has stated, no more.

Sources

1. Tribes and Before the City files of this record — the village record, the name's readings, and the 1828 cession of the townsite ground.
2. South Bend file of this record — the Pokagon Band's survival, the 1994 restoration (Public Law 103-323), the Dowagiac headquarters and ten-county service area, the 2016 trust land and the 16 January 2018 opening of Four Winds South Bend; boundary-carried.
3. Historical marker, "Avoiding Removal — The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi" (Pokagon Band; hmdb.org) — the 1833 treaty amendment and the band's remaining in the St. Joseph River Valley.
4. "Indian removals in Indiana" — the removal course of 1837–1838, the Trail of Death, and the statement that Native people remaining in Indiana settled on privately owned land and merged into the majority culture.