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1830 – present — survival in place, and the return to this city's ground
The strategy: Leopold Pokagon (about 1775 – 1841) succeeded Topenebee on his death in 1826 as head of the St. Joseph valley's Potawatomi, and he read the removal century correctly earlier than most: the band's survival would turn on an alliance and a document. The alliance was the Catholic Church. In August 1830 Father Stephen Badin arrived in the valley to raise the Catholic mission Pokagon's people had asked for; the Catholic Potawatomi of southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana acknowledged Pokagon as their leader, and he himself was baptized in 1833. The document came at Chicago that September. When the United Nation's treaty was written, Pokagon held out: the scholarly account of the council — W. Benjamin Secunda's Notre Dame dissertation, on which this entry follows — records that United States commissioner George B. Porter agreed to add a supplemental article allowing Pokagon's band to remain in Michigan "on account of their religious creed," and that only when the stipulation stood written did Pokagon sign.
The 1994 Senate report on the band's restoration states the result in the government's own words: in the Treaty of Chicago (1833) "the Pokagon Band is the only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan and receive their share of prior treaty payments in Michigan." The exception was then defended on paper: with the treaty money and the sale of family reservations, Pokagon bought land in fee — 874 acres on Silver Creek in present Cass County, Michigan, purchased jointly with his wife, in the summary of James Clifton's history of the band — ground held as private property that no removal order could reach. And when the Army under General Hugh Brady moved against the Catholic Potawatomi anyway, in the removal drive of 1840–41, Pokagon took the treaty to Associate Justice Epaphroditus Ransom of the Michigan Supreme Court, whose written opinion that the band had a right to remain Brady read — and honored. Pokagon died in 1841 with his people still on their ground. His son Simon Pokagon (about 1830 – 1899) carried the band's case into print: The Red Man's Rebuke, the birch-bark pamphlet of 1893, and the novel published the year of his death, are the unremoved band's testimony in its own voice.
The band today: The band Pokagon gathered never left, and it never dissolved; what it lacked for a century and a half was the federal government's acknowledgment of what it was. Congress supplied it in the Pokagon Restoration Act — "An Act to Restore Federal Services to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians," Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994 — which reaffirmed the band as a federally recognized tribe and provided for a trust land base. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians today is a sovereign tribal nation headquartered at Dowagiac, Michigan, with a ten-county service area across southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana and, by its published figures, more than 4,300 citizens. Its Michigan casinos at New Buffalo, Hartford and Dowagiac operate under a Michigan compact. Its presence on this city's ground is the last entry of this section's story, and it is a legal record before it is anything else — the record Indiana itself wrote into its gaming code's findings (Indiana Code § 4-29.5-0.5-2), which this entry follows: in 2015 Indiana enacted the process law for a tribal-state compact; on 17 November 2016 the Assistant Secretary–Indian Affairs made the final determination for the band's South Bend land, and on 28 November 2016 the United States accepted approximately 166 acres in the City of South Bend into trust for the band — the first federally recognized tribal land in Indiana — on the city's south side, between Prairie Avenue, U.S. 31 and Locust Road; on 16 January 2018 the band opened Four Winds South Bend there, conducting Class II gaming, the first tribal casino in Indiana, under a local agreement paying the city two percent of net gaming revenue.
Class III — the Vegas-style games — required the compact the 2015 law contemplated: the band requested negotiations on 13 August 2019, the compact was agreed in January 2021 and signed by Governor Holcomb that May after federal approval. The fight inside that chronology was real and is visible in its shape: a state that had to legislate a process before it could treat, a city that negotiated terms rather than consent outright, and a band that built first with the gaming the federal law allowed it outright and bargained six more years for the rest. The tribe frames the 166 acres as the restoration of its ancestral homeland in Indiana; the gaming code's findings frame them as land "eligible for gaming under IGRA" held by a sovereign the state recognizes. Both framings are in the documents. This section prints both.
Sources: Senate Report 103-266 (1994), on S. 1066, the Pokagon restoration bill — the band's treaty history, the 1833 exception in the government's words, the Brady–Ransom episode, Public Law 103-323 (21 September 1994); W. Benjamin Secunda, "In the Shadow of the Eagle's Wings" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2008), as carried in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era — Porter's supplemental article and the "religious creed" ground; James A. Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683–1983 (1984), as reviewed in the Indiana Magazine of History — the 874-acre Silver Creek purchase; the Pokagon Band's published nation record — the Dowagiac headquarters, the ten-county service area and the citizen count; Indiana Code § 4-29.5-0.5-2 — the compact findings: P.L. 255-2015, the 17 November 2016 determination, the 28 November 2016 trust acceptance of approximately 166 acres, the 16 January 2018 Class II opening, the 13 August 2019 compact request; Global Gaming Business magazine, January 2018 — the opening, the 175,000 square feet, the two-percent city agreement, and the first-tribal-land-in-Indiana statement as the band's chairman framed it.