The Bodewadmi, the Potawatomi, are the Keepers of the Fire. In the Nation's telling, the Neshnabek migrated from the Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes, and at Niagara Falls separated into the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi, who settled along Lake Michigan. They signed more than 40 treaties with the United States, more than any other tribe, and were removed west in the 1830s; the forced march of 1838 is remembered as the Trail of Death.
The Nation's name comes from Kansas. On November 15, 1861, eight chiefs and more than 70 others signed a treaty that started almost two-thirds of the Potawatomi toward land allotments and U.S. citizenship, among the first tribes to take both. A treaty of February 27, 1867 provided for a move to Indian Territory; a party chose the reservation in 1869, and the first families, who paid their own way, arrived in 1872. Allotment came again in 1890, and the 1891 land run opened the rest of the reservation to settlers. The Nation adopted a constitution in 1938 and, in 2007, a new one that ended Bureau of Indian Affairs oversight of its amendments.
The center opened in January 2006. Its galleries move from Mamogosnan's gifts and the origin stories through treaties to Indian Territory, where one case holds the footlocker David P. Johnson took to the Carlisle boarding school in 1895. The Veterans Wall of Honor and the Nation's archive are here, and the Nation also keeps an eagle aviary for injured eagles that cannot be returned to the wild.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour