Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish and the Three-Mile Square
Near Kalamazoo, Michigan
Before Kalamazoo was a city, before it was even a county, there was a three-mile square of land set aside for a Potawatomi leader whose name translates roughly as "the little wild cat." His name was Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish, and the reservation established for his band under the Treaty of Chicago in eighteen twenty-one sat precisely where downtown Kalamazoo now stands.
The Treaty of Chicago was negotiated by Territorial Governor Lewis Cass with leaders of the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe nations. It resulted in the cession of most land south of the Grand River, but it carved out five reserved areas, one of which was the three-mile square for Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish's band. For six years, that reservation was recognized as theirs.
Then came the Treaty of Saint Joseph in eighteen twenty-seven. Under pressure from American land speculation and the federal government's systematic policy of consolidation, four of those five reserved areas were extinguished, including the one in Kalamazoo. The land was opened to American settlement. Within two years, Titus Bronson arrived, and a few years later he platted a town.
Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish's people refused to go west. They did not cooperate with removal orders sending other Potawatomi bands to Kansas and beyond. Instead they moved north, into lands they already knew, and eventually settled near Gun Lake, about twenty-five miles north of here, at a place that became the Bradley Indian Mission in eighteen thirty-eight. Their descendants became the Gun Lake Tribe, federally recognized and still present in Michigan today.
The downtown you are driving through sits on land that was, within living memory of the settlers who built it, a recognized Potawatomi reservation. No monument marked the boundary for most of Kalamazoo's history. In recent years, signs designed by the Kalamazoo Reservation Public Education Committee went up around the city, marking those original lines. The boundaries are visible again, even if most drivers pass through them without knowing.
