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16 JANUARY 2018 — MARCH 2024
The last turning of the Story of South Bend section's story is the oldest one: In 2016 the United States took 166 acres on South Bend's south side, at 3000 Prairie Avenue, into trust for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians — the first restoration of sovereign tribal land in Indiana — and at 4 p.m. on January 16, 2018, the band opened Four Winds Casino South Bend on it: the first casino in Indiana owned and operated by a Native American tribe, some 1,200 jobs, Class II gaming under a local agreement paying the city two percent of the take. Gaming compacts and casino economics belong to the Business section; the Story of South Bend section records the symmetry, because the record itself insists on it. The band that had sent for Badin in 1830, negotiated its right to remain in 1833, watched its neighbors marched to Kansas in 1838 and won its recognition back in 1994 now held sovereign ground inside the city that grew on the cession — and in March 2024 it completed the site with a 23-story, 317-room hotel tower on Prairie Avenue. The portage ground had come, by a road of 240 years, back into the hands of the people who first kept the trail across it.
Sources:
- Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and city references — the 2016 trust decision for the 166 acres at 3000 Prairie Avenue as Indiana's first restoration of tribal trust land; the opening of Four Winds Casino South Bend on January 16, 2018, as the state's first tribally owned and operated casino, with some 1,200 jobs, Class II gaming and the two-percent local agreement.
- Casino and hotel trade references — the 23-story, 317-room Four Winds hotel tower completed in March 2024.
- Public Law 103-323 (1994) — the band's reaffirmed sovereignty, of which the trust land is the exercise.