Citizen Potawatomi Nation — RoamSchoolFamily

Background

In 1846 the scattered Potawatomi settlements out west were consolidated onto a single reservation on the Kansas River, according to the Nation's Cultural Heritage Center. On November 15, 1861, a few dozen tribal members signed a treaty beginning the process of acquiring land allotments and United States citizenship. That treaty is where the Citizen Potawatomi name comes from. A further treaty signed on February 27, 1867, set out the move to Indian Territory, and a delegation traveled there to select the tract that would become the reservation. In 1890 the Citizen Potawatomi took part in the allotment process carried out under the Dawes Act of 1887, and in the Land Run of 1891 the remainder of the Oklahoma reservation was opened to non-Indian settlement. The Nation's own account puts the twentieth century as a period when a working government was established and, from 1985, rapid growth in jobs, services and culture. It names the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 as the federal legislation behind that reform. The Cultural Heritage Center at 1899 S. Gordon Cooper Drive in Shawnee, Oklahoma, calls itself a living center of edification for tribal citizens and the public, and the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums names it a Top Ten Model Museum or Cultural Center. Its Wedaséjek memorial commemorates more than a thousand Potawatomi veterans and warriors and, the Nation says, keeps growing.

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Visit and learn

Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center

1899 S. Gordon Cooper Drive, Shawnee, Oklahoma·museum

The Nation's museum and cultural center, with galleries, a library, archives, a language program, a Potawatomi games collection, a classroom, workshops and a virtual tour. Open Monday to Friday 8am to 5pm and Saturday 10am to 3pm. The galleries cover early European contact, the fur trade and colonial competition, treaty making, removal, and the move west.

https://www.potawatomiheritage.com/museum/galleries/

Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own site

Tribal lands have their own laws. Check the nation's site before you visit.

Parks on its homelands

Bare sand face of Mount Baldy, a moving dune rising above the Lake Michigan shoreline at Indiana Dunes.

Indiana Dunes National Park

The Nation's Cultural Heritage Center records that on the morning of September 4, 1838, 859 Potawatomi set out from northern Indiana for a reserve in present-day Kansas, their leaders shackled in the back of a wagon, and that more than 40 died on the march the Nation calls the Trail of Death. The same gallery records that the Potawatomi signed more than 40 treaties, more than any other tribe. Source

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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