The Pokagons: the band that remained

c. 1775 – 1899

Leopold Pokagon (c. 1775–1841): the Potawatomi leader whose diplomacy is the reason a Pokagon band exists in this region at all. Pokagon succeeded Topenebee as leader of the St. Joseph Potawatomi in 1826, was baptized a Catholic in 1833, and at the Treaty of Chicago that year secured, in a supplemental article, the provision the Pokagon Band still cites: it was, in the band's own account, the only Potawatomi band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan. He bought land in fee — 874 acres at Silver Creek — with the band's own money, putting his people's tenure in American property law as well as in treaty. When removal came anyway in the Brady removal attempt, it was stopped on a Michigan justice's opinion — Justice Ransom's — that the treaty right held. Pokagon died in 1841, on the ground he had kept. The treaty and removal record stands in the Before the City section; the man stands here: a leader who read the conqueror's law closely enough to beat removal with it.

Simon Pokagon (c. 1830–1899): the son, and the band's voice in print. Simon Pokagon succeeded to his father's leadership and became the most widely read Potawatomi author of his century: his 1893 address The Red Man's Rebuke, printed for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, indicted the celebration from the side of the dispossessed and was distributed at the fair itself. He spent his leadership in the long, unglamorous work the record shows — pressing the band's claims, holding its Catholic, land-owning community together through the decades when federal policy denied it existed as a tribe at all. The denial outlasted him by nearly a century: the Pokagon Band's federal recognition was restored by statute, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994, with tribal headquarters at Dowagiac, in the Michigan ground Leopold had kept. The band's Indiana chapter — the Four Winds casino's land taken into trust on 28 November 2016 and opened as a Class II facility on 16 January 2018 — stands in the Before the City and Government records. Father and son together are the longest continuous leadership in this valley's documented history.

Sources:

1. Before the City section of this history (banked) — the 1826 succession, the 1833 baptism and Chicago supplemental article, the 874-acre Silver Creek purchase, the Brady removal attempt and Justice Ransom's opinion, the Restoration Act (P.L. 103-323, 21 September 1994), and the Four Winds trust acceptance (28 November 2016) and opening (16 January 2018).
2. Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, tribal history publications — the "only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan" account and the Dowagiac headquarters.
3. Simon Pokagon, The Red Man's Rebuke (1893), printed for the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago.