The peoples of this ground, in their own names

Before 1832, and continuing

The nation the treaty record assigns to this ground names itself Bodéwadmi (singular Bodéwadmim, "Keepers of the Fire") and, in the wider Anishinaabe self-name carried in its own modern accounts, Neshnabé / Néshnabek, "the Original People." The Pokagon Band's own published words: "We are the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi), the Néshnabek (the Original People)." The anglicised form "Potawatomi" is the name the instruments use; this section prints the self-names first. The Band's own descent statement places its ancestors in this valley, not in Potawatomi country generally: "We are the descendants of the allied Potawatomi villages located along the St. Joseph, Paw Paw and Kalamazoo Rivers in what is now southwest Michigan and northern Indiana." Liberty Township is drained by Potato Creek, a tributary in the St. Joseph system south of the river's south bend; the Band's own geography therefore includes this ground's watershed in its ancestral-village country at valley strength — it does not name Potato Creek or Liberty Township, and no stronger claim is made here. The other nation tested against this ground names itself Myaamia (plural Myaamiaki), "the Downstream People"; their first-village place is saakiiweeyonki, at the confluence where the St. Joseph River meets Lake Michigan near present-day South Bend — an emergence geography that touches St. Joseph County at its north, not Liberty Township in its south, printed here only so the Miami test below is run in the nation's own name and geography. And this section's standing gap over everything that follows: no published account by any modern nation reached in any pass names Potato Creek, Liberty Township, or North Liberty specifically (gap G-BC-4; settler: a direct check of the nations' education and cultural publications).