The Chief's Son Who Printed the Legends: Simon Pokagon's Books

1893–1900 · the band's own published tellings

The fact the tales stand on: the Potawatomi tales of this valley did not have to wait for an outside collector to reach print. They were printed, in his lifetime and under his own hand, by a chief's son. Simon Pokagon (c. 1830 – 28 January 1899), third son of Leopold Pokagon — the chief whose band, the Catholic Potawatomi of the St. Joseph River valley, negotiated the right to remain when the other bands were removed — was born in an Indian village on Pokagon Creek about a mile from the St. Joseph River, spoke only his native language until he was fourteen, and became one of the recognized Native American authors of the nineteenth century. The publisher of his novel, C. H. Engle of Hartford, Michigan, relates in his publisher's notes how the boy Simon spent many happy hours listening to his father recite the history of the Potawatomi, passed down through oral tradition — the collector's chain for everything Simon later printed begins at that fireside, in his own publisher's account of it.

The books, at their record size: Pokagon's printed tellings came out as pamphlets, articles and birch-bark booklets over seven years: The Red Man's Greeting (1893), the booklet — also issued as The Red Man's Rebuke — that he carried to the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, where he was the invited guest of Mayor Carter Harrison for Chicago Day in October 1893; Indian Superstitions and Legends (1898), its contents announced in its title; The Pottawattomie Book of Genesis: Legend of the Creation of Man, one of the birch-bark booklets in which he printed the people's own account of their beginnings, in his own presentation of it; Algonquin Legends of South Haven and Algonquin Legends of Paw Paw (1900), the legend collections issued the year after his death; and the novel O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-i-gwa-ki (Queen of the Woods), published by Engle at Hartford in 1899, shortly after Pokagon died, and reprinted by Michigan State University Press in 2011 in a scholarly edition. In his writings Pokagon interjects Potawatomi words and phrases into the English text — the technique scholars call glossing — and the writings, as the scholarship on him summarizes them, seek not only to preserve the oral traditions of the tribe but the language as well. Simon Pokagon's last verses, in English and Potawatomi both, appeared in the Chicago Inter-Ocean of 23 January 1899, days before his death.

The rule this section keeps: the contents of those books are the Pokagon Band's own published telling of its own inheritance, and they govern themselves: they are catalogued here as the valley's documented Native tale-stock — the finder record by which any reader can go to them — and are not paraphrased into this history's voice. What a folklore record owes them is exactly this: their titles, their dates, their teller, and the fact that the teller was the son of the chief of the bend's own band, printing in the 1890s, in Hartford and Chicago, the stories his father had recited to him as a boy on Pokagon Creek. The band's history, and the treaty that let it remain, stand in this history's account of the tribes; its storyteller stands here.

Sources:

1. John N. Low, “Hegemony and Resistance at the World's Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man's Rebuke” — Simon's birth on Pokagon Creek about a mile from the St. Joseph River; Engle's publisher's notes on the boyhood hours listening to Leopold recite the tribal history; the glossing technique; the catalogue of writings including Indian Superstitions and Legends, the birch-bark Pottawattomie Book of Genesis and Algonquin Legends of South Haven; the 1893 Chicago Day invitation.
2. Simon Pokagon, O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-i-gwa-ki, Queen of the Woods (Hartford, Mich.: C. H. Engle, 1899); Ogimawkwe Mitigwaki (Michigan State University Press, 2011) — the novel as testimony to Potawatomi traditions, stability and continuity, in the press's description; the 1899 first publication shortly after his death.
3. St. Joseph County Public Library, “Simon Pokagon: Weaving Words Between Worlds” (sjcpl.org) — the library's account of his life and works, its references including the 2011 edition and Buechner's The Pokagons (Indiana Historical Society, 1933).
4. James A. Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683–1983: Catholic Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley (University Press of America, 1984) — the band's history, named here as the standing scholarly account; Simon's tribal management and the 1866 partial payment of $39,000, as the scholarship carries it.