With a momentous decision to return more than 1,500 acres of land 71 miles west of Chicago to the Pottawatomi, Illinois is righting a wrong committed more than 17 decades ago.
When Gov. JB Pritzker in late March signed legislation that will give Shabbona Lake State Park to the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, this wasn’t just acknowledging Native people once lived on the land.
The move corrects an injustice committed against people who were expressly given land two centuries ago in thanks for their leader’s efforts to make and keep peace between Native people and the country’s expansion — only to see that land sold out from under them 20 years later.
“This was land that was supposed to be carved out for Shabbona’s descendants to use forever and ever,” said Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick, chairman of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, based in Kansas, and a direct descendant of Shabbona. He said the return is the culmination of an effort his great-grandmother led in the 1960s, and that Illinois is “now affirming that our reservation is still there and that the Potawatomi never left Illinois” even though their land was auctioned off in the early 1850s.
There’s not just an emotional tie to the land. Rupnick said an archaeologist confirmed it contains ancestral remains, though the precise locations will not be made public.
Shabbona, the namesake of the state park, was born in the Ottawa nation but later became a leader of the Potawatomi who fought against the Americans in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 and in the War of 1812. But in the years that followed, he pursued peace, including warning white settlers of planned attacks by Natives in 1827 and 1832 so they could get out of the way.
Thanks to the 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien, in which three Native tribes gave up 3.5 million acres east of the Mississippi River, the U.S. government reserved about 1,280 acres in what’s now DeKalb County for Shabbona. The land, the treaty stated, could never be transmitted to another owner without the U.S. president’s permission.
Because most of his nation moved west, where they would eventually have a reservation of more than half a million acres in Kansas, Shabbona traveled between that state and Illinois. After returning from one of those trips in 1852, he found the land had all been sold to white settlers.
According to a 1930 article in the Chicago Tribune, Shabbona was swindled by a nearby farmer who intentionally “courted Shabonna’s acquaintance” in hopes of getting his hands on the land and its valuable timber. He convinced the illiterate Shabbona to sign some papers, encouraged the tribal leader to move west and sold the property to white settlers. When the 77-year-old Shabbona came back, “he saw log houses all around on his land.”
Friends bought Shabbona a farm in Seneca, about 48 miles south of the reservation. Shabbona died in 1859 and was buried in Morris. In the 1980s, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque at his grave describing him as “this gentle man of peace, a staunch friend of white settlers.”
His name, in various spellings, is also on parks in Chicago and Skokie, a school in Northbrook and streets in Morris, Ottawa and Fermilab, among other places.
Flash forward a century, and the state of Illinois began acquiring private land near the town of Shabbona in 1969 for a state park. The state built a dam on Indian Creek to create a fishing lake as the park’s centerpiece.
Around the same time, Rupnick said, his great-grandmother started making regular visits from Kansas to Illinois, trying to reestablish the Potawatomi claim to the land. Later his grandmother led the effort, and in 2006, The Prairie Band bought 128 acres of farmland near the park, the beginning of the most earnest drive to revive their presence here.
Rupnick said this and subsequent land purchases — and the legal expenses — were funded by revenue from the Prairie Band’s casino, which opened in 1998 on their Kansas reservation.
“A lot of people think we want to build another casino” here in Illinois, Rupnick told WBEZ’s Reset, “but we’re not looking at that for land that’s almost the middle of nowhere.”
No major highways are nearby, he noted, and there’s already a casino 32 miles away in Aurora. The Prairie Band is working with a consultant on a long-range plan for the site. For now, it’s maintaining the existing amenities, including a campground, the fishing lake and the park building that houses a restaurant, Pokanoka’s Restaurant, named for Shabbona’s wife.
Not all of the state park lies in the original reservation. The border would be out in the middle of the 318-acre lake. People fishing there would have needed to know where their Illinois fishing license was in effect, and have another from the Prairie Band for when they were in that part of the lake.
This, according to Rupnick, is a key reason that Illinois officials ultimately decided the way to go was to give the entire park to the Potawatomi. For at least the next several years, Rupnick said, no one who goes to the former state park “will see anything different.”
The Shabbona name will likely remain, Rupnick said. Ersatz “Indian” names on the park’s hiking trails such as Tomahawk and Arrowhead may not.
There are still formal steps before the transfer is complete. Congress has to approve putting the land in trust — following the Prairie Band putting 130 acres it already owned in trust last year, to reestablish its presence in Illinois as a federally recognized tribe.
The agreement about management of the park is also still being finalized with the state. Rupnick expects that to be complete by the end of the year, and at that time, “we’ll have some kind of ceremony” to celebrate the return of land that was stolen from them 175 years ago.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.