The nations today, in their own accounts

Status as of November 2026

Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians — headquarters at Dowagiac, Michigan, with a South Bend, Indiana satellite: the Bureau of Indian Affairs approved the Band's application on 18 November 2016 to take into trust 166 acres of the Band's ancestral homeland in the city of South Bend. The Liberty Township connection states at exactly county strength: the township lies inside the Band's statutory service area, because 25 U.S.C. §1300j-6 lists St. Joseph County, Indiana among the Band's service-area counties — and a service area is a county-level statutory fact, distinct from trust land, of which there is none in Liberty Township. The two facts print together, or neither. Citizen Potawatomi Nation — headquartered at Shawnee, Oklahoma, with more than 30,000 citizens; its own education-guide account names the Trail of Death as the forced removal of the Potawatomi from Indiana — the nation's own framing of the 1838 column tested above, from the nation descended in part from the people marched on it; its Cultural Heritage Center's teaching materials state the column at the same strength: in 1838 over 850 Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their homeland in Indiana on the 660-mile journey to Kansas. Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation — headquartered at Mayetta, Kansas; in April 2024 the Department of the Interior placed about 130 acres of the Shab-eh-nay Reservation in DeKalb County, Illinois, into federal trust, making Prairie Band the first federally recognised tribal nation in Illinois; in March 2025 Illinois enacted the transfer of the roughly 1,500-acre Shabbona Lake State Park to the nation, with a state land-management agreement to keep the park open. Prairie Band's modern land story is an Illinois return story, run from Kansas — printed for completeness of the removal-era nations, with no claim on the St. Joseph valley implied. Forest County Potawatomi Community — at Crandon, Wisconsin, holding about 12,000 acres, reservation status granted in 1988; its descent is a returned / refused-removal descent, from people who refused the forced exodus and settled near Blackwell and Wabeno around 1880. That descent does not claim this valley — no Forest County account reached in any pass places its ancestors in the St. Joseph valley or Liberty Township, and none is printed here. Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi — at Pine Creek, Michigan, re-recognised 19 December 1995; the 1840 removal, escape, and return stand in the Band's own timeline as its founding modern story — the same 1840 operation tested against this township, negatively, above. Completeness pointers, no entry at depth by design: the Hannahville Indian Community and the Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Band — the remaining Michigan Potawatomi nations in the reached record; no account by either was read at depth, and neither is placed against this ground.