d r a f t
Kevin Kilbane, Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend
Their presence drew the first Europeans to what is now northern Indiana. They played roles in the founding and growth of parishes and institutions such as what became the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. They held strong in their faith while facing a lack of priests, prejudice and numerous other obstacles.
In many ways, the strong Catholic community that exists today in Northern Indiana can be traced to the area’s original inhabitants, the people of the Miami and Potawatomi nations of Native Americans. Members of the two nations remain active in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend today.
[…]
Likewise, many Potawatomis related easily to Catholicism because the Book of Genesis and other books of the Bible told stories similar to their own native beliefs, said Art Morsaw of Hartford, Mich., 75, a Pokagon Band elder and a Catholic deacon.
The Potawatomis long before had sensed an order to nature, and they believed God had set that order, Morsaw said. The Potawatomis also saw themselves only as stewards of the land they lived on, not its owner.
French traders and trappers also began settling near and marrying into Potawatomi families, bringing with them the Catholic faith, James A. Clifton said in the book, “The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley.”
[…]
After a Baptist missionary failed in his efforts to convert the Potawatomis, village leader Leopold Pokagon, who had been raised with a limited knowledge of the Catholic faith, traveled to Detroit in July 1830 to ask priest Father Gabriel Richard to send a priest to the Potawatomis, Clifton wrote. A month later, Father Stephen T. Badin, the first priest ordained in America, arrived to minister to them. […] By late 1832 Badin had baptized more than 170 people, Joseph M. White said in the book, “Worthy of the Gospel of Christ: A History of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend.”
He reportedly also had begun buying land that eventually totaled 524 acres and would become home to what became the University of Notre Dame, White said. Badin planned to use the land to open an orphanage and school serving all children but which would be partially financed by federal money allocated for the education of Native-American children.
[…]
Leopold Pokagon used his band’s Catholic identity to add language to the Treaty of Chicago of 1833 that allowed them to stay in Michigan if they moved to land farther north. Unable to find land there, Pokagon used treaty payments he received and proceeds from the sale of land allocated to him by the treaty to buy 874 acres for his people to live on near present-day Dowagiac.
Pokagon Band members settled on the land, known as Silver Creek, while the U.S. government forced nearly 860 other Potawatomis to walk from northern Indiana to a new home in Kansas in 1838. More than 40 tribe members died on the journey, which became known as the Trail of Death.
The trek also took the life of Father Benjamin Marie Petit, who came to serve the Potawatomis after Deseille’s death in 1837, according to White. Devoted to his new flock, Petit agreed when the Potawatomis asked him to accompany them on their removal to Kansas. The priest became ill along the way and died in St. Louis while on his way back to Indiana.
[…]
An active relationship no longer exists between the diocese and either the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma or the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.
[…]
Notre Dame also maintains a strong relationship with the Pokagon Band, said Dennis K. Brown, university spokesman.
University officials have regular meetings and other interaction with current and past Pokagon Band leaders, Brown said. A member of the Pokagon Band sat on a university committee that made the recommendation last year on coverings to hide murals of Christopher Columbus painted in the second-floor hallway of the campus’ Main Building.
[…]
Kilbane is a freelance writer and columnist for Today’s Catholic in Fort Wayne. He has a very nice quote from a contemporary Miami Indian about how the French assimilated to Indian culture and the Americans demanded the Indians assimilate to Anglo culture. FIND IT.
***
Isaac Akande, “Missionary Education,” Notre Dame
PC: Tell us about the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Potawatomi Nation.
IA: The Potawatomi had been in contact with Catholic missionaries since the 17th century and saw the first Catholic mission, known as Saint Francis Xavier, established among them in 1669 by Father Claude Allouez close to present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin. As the tribe migrated, another mission was noted by 1721—having been established possibly as early as 1693—on the St. Joseph River near the Indiana-Michigan border (approximately 10 miles from present-day Notre Dame). The mission work would be interrupted, but such prolonged contact nonetheless resulted in several of the surrounding Potawatomi communities converting to the Catholic faith, as evidenced by the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs which noted that the Potawatomi and other tribes were “attached to the Catholic religion.”
PC: What role did Catholics play in the relocation of the Potawatomi from the Great Lakes region to west of the Mississippi River? Could you tell us about Father Benjamin Marie Petit and why he chose to travel with the tribe?
IA: In the 1830s, Jacksonian era government policies and pressure from a growing population of white settlers would force the removal of a majority of Potawatomi to lands west of the Mississippi River. Although some of the tribe’s village leaders, most notably Chief Menominee, had refused to sign the treaties agreeing to be relocated, he and his band, like everyone else, were given two years to move. Some Potawatomi left voluntarily, while others were forcibly relocated. The latter was the case for Menominee’s band, which was forced at gunpoint by state militias in August of 1838 to trek 660 miles from Indiana to eastern Kansas on a two-month journey that became known as the “Trail of Death.”
While a Baptist missionary serving the Potawatomi named Isaac McCoy had surveyed lands west of the Mississippi River for the government and advocated for the removal of the tribe from the negative influences of white settlers who brought alcohol and other sins, the Catholic missionaries viewed the situation differently. Although they attempted to remain neutral so as not to run afoul of government policy, Father Benjamin Marie Petit was bothered by the injustices committed against the tribe. As a trained lawyer, he wished to intervene on their behalf, even offering to take a trip to Washington with the Potawatomi at his own expense. He is recorded as saying that “the Americans, with their hearts dry as cork and their whole thought ‘land and money,’ fail to appreciate [these Indians] and treat [them] with so much disdain and injustice.” Father Petit’s sympathetic concern for the Potawatomi and its Catholics prompted him to request permission from his superiors to accompany the tribe during their forced migration, a decision that would prove fatal as he fell sick and died during his attempted return to Indiana in early 1839.
Issac Akande is a Ph.D. candidate studying the history of education and education policy in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With support from a Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant, Akande visited the Notre Dame Archives in June 2018 for research related to his dissertation project, “Catholic Missionary Education Among the Potawatomi of Kansas, 1840–1870.” Cushwa Center postdoctoral fellow Pete Cajka caught up with Akande after his visit to discuss his research.
Cite: Isaac Akande, “Catholic missionary education among the Potawatomi: Five questions with Issac Akande,” interview by Peter Cajka, Kushwa Center, Notre Dame, Nov. 27, 2018 https://cushwa.nd.edu/news/akande-interview/.
***
Jesuit Archives, Part IV, [PDF]
The Potawatomi Mission of Sugar Creek, maintained by the middlewestern Jesuits during the decade 1838-1848 near the present Centerville, Linn County, Kansas, was a revival after the lapse of many years
of the eighteenth-century Jesuit Miami-Potawatomi Mission on the St
Joseph River near the site of Niles in Michigan
1 Children and grandchildren of the Indians who had received the gospel-message from the
latter center were to be found in numbers at Sugar Creek, where the
devoted zeal of Allouez, Mermel, Chardon and their Jesuit associates
lived again in worthy successors For the historical background of
Sugar Creek one must therefore go back to the mission on the St
Joseph “Here, ” says Parkman, “among the forests, swamps and oceanlike waters, at an unmeasured distance from any abode of civilized man,
the indefatigable Jesuits had labored more than half a century for the
spiritual good of the Potawatomi, who lived in great numbers along
the margin of the lake [Michigan] As early as the year 1712, as
Father Marest informs us, the mission was in a thriving state and
around it had gathered a little colony of the forest-loving Canadians ” –
Here, then, in the valley of the St Joseph was going forward on behalf of the Potawatomi an evangelical enterprise of promise when the
suppression of the Society of Jesus supervened and the mission went
down in the general luin of the Jesuit establishments in the West Yet
it was not to perish altogether The early thirties of the nineteenth
century saw its restoration at the hands of diocesan priests.
With the passing of the Jesuit missionaries the Christian Potawatomi
of the St. Joseph became demoralized though they preserved the
memory of the black-robes as a precious heirloom far into the nineteenth
century. […] (Jesuit Archive 175)
[…]
“The Potawatomi of Sugar Creek,” Chapter 23, The Jesuits of the Middle United States, Part IV, Jesuit Archives, St. Louis https://jesuitarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/chap23.pdf.
***
Kansapedia, “Potawatomi Trail of Death”
Good brief summary of teaty, events in Indiana, squatters, etc
[…] On November 4, 1838, the Potawatomi Trail of Death ended in Kansas. The two-month trek on foot proved too difficult for some of the Potawatomis. They had too little food to eat and they were exposed to typhoid. The journey claimed the lives of 42 people, half of those who died were children. A few people escaped; 756 arrived first at Osawatomie in Miami County. There they expected to find shelter from the coming winter. No housing had yet been built.
The Catholic Church had established the Sugar Creek mission in Linn County and many of the Potawatomis moved there. The elderly French-born Sister Rose Philippine Duchesne came in 1841 to teach Potawatomi girls at the reservation. She worked at the mission until she became too feeble to serve. The Potawatomis named her Quahkahkanumad, which stood for “Woman Who Prays Always.” She was canonized in 1988.
In 1848 the mission was moved to Pottawatomie County. Today the St. Philippine Duchesne Memorial Park is located on the site of the former Sugar Creek mission. Six hundred Potawatomis are buried at the site.
“Potawatomi Trail of Death,” Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society, 2012 https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansapedia/potawatomi-trail-of-death/17944.
[Uplinked Oct. 17, 2025]
Ordinary Time 