The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1679 — present
The ground was a community before it was a town: the Miami town at the portage and the Potawatomi villages of the bend — including the village of Chief Torum that gives Rum Village its name, told in that neighborhood's entry below — are the first South Bend, and their full telling stands in the before-the-city file of this history. What belongs here is the community's survival into the city's own time. Leopold Pokagon's band negotiated, in the supplemental article to the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, a right to remain when the other bands were removed; 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 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 tribe opened Four Winds South Bend there, under a revenue agreement paying the city 2 percent — the oldest community at the bend is also one of its newest neighbors, and it is a sovereign one.
Sources:
- Before the City, the Land & the Tribes, this history (treaty record, Pokagon Band, Four Winds) — banked fragment, /srv/brain/history/indiana/south-bend-full/
- Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, tribal history and Four Winds South Bend — pokagonband-nsn.gov; fourwindscasino.com