Last week, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation began efforts to relocate the only federal Indian reservation in Illinois, formally confirming the tribe’s governance of its land. The move could have wide-ranging impacts on matters ranging from criminal justice to climate and environmental jurisdiction.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi spent years buying land in northern Illinois where the Shab-eh-nay Discussion once existed, and last week the Nation turned over 130 acres of those lands to the Department of the Interior to hold in trust – a bureaucratic process which legally establishes tribal governance and opens tribes to a range of benefits, including tax credits, federal contract preferences and land use exemptions.
“Now those lands are subject to our laws, our jurisdiction, and the nation determines what — if any — actions will happen on those lands,” said Joseph Rupnick, chairman of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and fourth-generation great-grandson of Chief Shab-eh -no, the original discussion’s namesake.
In the early 18th century, as the United States expanded westward, the federal government took massive tracts of land from Native nations throughout the Midwest, including from the Prairie Band Potawatomi, via armed conflicts and almost a dozen crooked treaties.
The 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien with the Nation reserved land in present-day northern Illinois for Chief Shab-eh-nay and the Prairie Band, where they remained for another two decades. However, in 1849 Shab-eh-nay left the reservation to visit Kansas and on his return found that the state had taken his land and home and auctioned it off illegally. “The state of Illinois said he abandoned his land and sold it,” Rupnick said.
Tribes ceded millions of acres in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin to the federal government by the mid-1800s, and nations in the region were eventually removed from the state to lands west of the Mississippi River. The Prairie Band worked for nearly a century to reclaim those lands, paying to buy back land acre-by-acre. “Congress never took any steps to dissolve that reservation,” Rupnick said. “So in our minds it still exists.”
Last year, federal law was enacted to remedy that seizure of Potawatomi land, and companion bills promised cash settlements to the group to reclaim additional lands in and around the original reservation’s boundaries. The proposed bill would also relinquish the group’s historic claims to the vast majority of its former territory.
“The decision to place portions of the Shab-eh-nay Reservation in Trust is an important step in returning the land that rightfully belongs to them,” said U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood, a co-sponsor of the bill, said. “I am so honored to represent the first federally recognized reservation in Illinois.”
Efforts to make the group whole are also underway at the state level.
“It’s well overdue,” said Illinois State Representative Mark Walker, the sponsor of a account Lawmakers are currently considering transferring Shabbona Lake State Park, just over 1,500 acres within the historic footprint of the reservation, to the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.
This means it is now up to the tribe to take over jurisdiction of the land, everything from law enforcement to natural resource management.
“At this time, we have several options for using the trust lands, and no immediate changes have been decided upon,” according to a spokeswoman for the tribe.
In an emailed statement from DOI, a spokesperson confirmed the transfer and continued, “It is the department’s policy to acquire land in trust for tribes to strengthen self-determination and sovereignty, and to ensure that each tribe has protected homelands where its citizens can sustain their livelihood and way of life.”
“I have pictures of my great grandmother and my grandmother who came here in the sixties and tried to fight for this country,” Rupnick said. He wasn’t sure he would survive this day. “To actually make it happen today is great.”
