Potawatomi to reclaim tribal land in DeKalb County

SPRINGFIELD – More than 175 years after their reservation in Illinois was illegally sold at auction, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation is now in line to get their land back.

Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation Friday authorizing the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to hand over to the tribe the ownership title to Shabbona Lake State Park, a 1,500-acre tract in southern DeKalb County that largely overlaps the tribe’s original reservation.

“This moment reflects the power of collaboration and the shared desire to build a future rooted in justice and respect,” Prairie Band Potawatomi Chairman Joseph ‘Zeke” Rupnick said in a statement. “Illinois has shown true courage and vision by leading the way in the Land Back movement, demonstrating that healing and reconciliation are possible.”

Although ownership of the land will revert back to the tribe, visitors to the park should not notice any difference, at least not for now.

Senate Bill 867, sponsored by state Sen. Mark Walker, D-Arlington Heights, also requires the tribe and DNR to enter into a land management agreement that will keep the land open for public recreation.

Prairie Band Potawatomi officials have said publicly they have no plans to develop the property for a casino or any other commercial use. They also point to a 2005 Illinois statute that requires the governor to seek legislative approval before entering into a compact authorizing a tribe to conduct gambling in Illinois.

“This legislation puts Illinois on the right side of history – fostering a partnership with indigenous communities and returning what was wrongfully acquired,” Walker said in a statement. “I have worked with the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation on this bill since 2018, and today we celebrate this achievement together.”

In a 2024 podcast interview with Capitol News Illinois, Rupnick described the tribe’s history in the area. He noted that before European settlement, the Potawatomi people occupied much of the Great Lakes region. But as settlement occurred, they were gradually pushed into smaller enclaves.

In the 1829 Treaty of Prairie Du Chien, Prairie Band Chief Shab-eh-nay was granted two square miles of land, or 1,280 acres, in what is now DeKalb County that was intended to stay in his family’s possession in perpetuity. But the following year, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to grant land west of the Mississippi River to tribes that agreed to give up their lands in the east.

That led to the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, in which the Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa tribes ceded 5 million acres in present-day Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin in exchange for land west of the Mississippi. Many of the Potawatomi eventually resettled in what is now northeast Kansas.

That treaty, however, did not include the 1,280 acres that had been granted to Chief Shab-eh-nay, Rupnick said, and Shab-eh-nay continued to live on that land for several years.

Around 1849, Shab-eh-nay went to visit the rest of the tribe at their new reservation in Kansas, a trip that would take several weeks on horseback. Upon his return, Rupnick said, Shab-eh-nay learned that his land had been declared “abandoned” by the Illinois General Land Office and sold at public auction.

“That’s when he discovered that people were living in his house,” Rupnick said. “They actually picked up his house and moved it to another location and people were living in it. He tried to fight that through the court systems. They told him that he had abandoned his land, that the General Land Office had sold all of his land because he abandoned it, and they allowed the settlers and whoever else to live there.”

The Prairie Band Potawatomi have argued since that time that the land is still legally theirs because Congress never authorized the sale, and as recently as 2001, attorneys for the U.S. Department of the Interior acknowledged the tribe had a legitimate claim to the land.

“The federal government has acknowledged wrongdoing in the sale of the land,” Walker said in his statement. “With the support of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and members of the Prairie Band, this transfer is not only a common-sense solution, it’s the right thing to do.”

Until last year, Illinois was one of only a handful of states with no federally recognized tribal reservations. That changed in April 2024 when the Interior Department placed into trust 130 acres from the original reservation that the tribe had repurchased, making that property an official reservation.

After the Shabbona Lake State Park transfer is executed, that land is expected to be added to the reservation.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.