Module 1: Chicago is a Native Place

What makes Chicago an Indigenous place, past, present, and future?

The first core module of the Indigenous Chicago curriculum begins with the fundamental understanding that the city we now call Chicago has always been a Native place. Nationwide, K-12 standards tend to only talk about Native people during early colonial contact and treaty-making. Traditional narratives of the city typically begin with the encounter between Native people and French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, and end with the removal of Native people from the state of Illinois after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. In reality, Native people have lived, traveled through, and held relationships with the lands and waters that we now call Chicagoland since time immemorial. Native people continue to live in and maintain relationships with that land today. This section encourages students to ask questions about Indigenous presence and ongoing connections to these lands and waters. The module is well suited to help students build what Alutiiq scholar Leilani Sabzalian calls “anticolonial literacy,” or the ability to critically examine colonial materials in ways that reveal Indigenous presence and undermine historical narratives that justify colonial harms.

Native people have been in the Chicago region since time immemorial – a phrase that means before human memory, or the beginning of time. Each of the Native nations that has a historical connection to Chicago has their own unique creation or origin story that tells them how they came to be. These stories describe Native peoples’ relationships to their homelands and outline relationships between people, as well as plant and animal relatives. 

Native peoples’ teachings testify to their origins here in North America – this is what it means to be Indigenous. One way Indigenous peoples narrate their connections to lands and waters is through story. In Indigenous contexts, stories are not myths or legends – rather, they are complex teaching tools. In hearing the stories, listeners can pull out lessons that help them figure out how to live sustainably with each other and with lands and waters. Indigenous stories link Native peoples to their homelands and teach about each nation’s relationships with and responsibilities to their lands and waters. Rather than seeing humans as better than plants and animals, these stories narrate all living beings as interdependent. Indigenous stories contain information about ecology and ethnobotany, medicine, language, arts, history, and politics, among others. They also teach us about civics – how we should treat one another to build sustainable, balanced, interrelated societies. 

Indigenous values for land include reciprocal relationships. Indigenous peoples’ languages, religions or spiritual teachings, technologies, medicines, and foods come from their relationships with certain lands. This means that Indigenous people initially approached treaties as commitments to mutual use, but did not see them as whole exchanges of land for money, goods, and services. As treaty-making continued, Indigenous nations made difficult decisions to relinquish their legal ownership of lands in order to protect the safety of their communities. However, connections to land cannot be severed. Indigenous peoples maintain deep relationships with their homelands, whether they live there now or not. Indigenous people see the value of the land as inherent: all life has value just for being alive. They also recognize that lands, waters, plants, and animals have their own rights, perspectives, and desires. In contrast, settler laws value land based on the presence of resources that can meet human wants. Settler systems see the land as inanimate, which means it cannot have its own perspectives or desires.

Traditional Indigenous laws prioritize the health and well-being of humans, lands, waters, animals, and plants. Indigenous values of generosity and care have shaped Indigenous approaches to land, government, and kinship for millenia. Indigenous people have long welcomed newcomers into their existing kinship networks. This is both because of cultural practices of continually building new relationships and because of the new opportunities to learn, trade, and build diplomatic connections. 

When you work with your students on this module, start by emphasizing that Native people have been here since time immemorial – a term used to signify a time before human memory, or the beginning of time. Each of the Native nations that has a historical connection to Chicago has their own unique creation or origin story that narrates how they came to be. These stories situate Native peoples’ relationships to the lands that encompasses their homelands and outline the relationality between people, as well as plant and animal relatives. Contrary to the commonly taught Bering Strait Theory, Native peoples’ teachings testify to their origins here in North America – this is what it means to be Indigenous. One way Indigenous peoples narrate their connections to lands and waters is through story. As you work with students on origin stories, frame them as legitimate historical texts (not as myths or legends) that we can turn to for information about Native nations’ long-standing connections to the Chicago area in the realms of ecology and ethnobotany, medicine, language, arts, history, and politics, among others. These stories often also teach us about civics – how we should relate to one another to build sustainable, balanced, interrelated societies. We can look to Indigenous stories as historical texts that teach us about Native nations’ long-standing connections to the Chicago area. In Indigenous communities, you might hear the same story many times throughout your life. As a listener, your job is to listen carefully each time you hear the story because you will hear something new based on where you are in your life at the time. Indigenous storytellers know how to shape the story based on what the audience needs. They might tell more or less detailed versions of stories based on the audience. They might also leave out certain information (especially if information in the story is considered sacred) because not everyone has a right to all information all the time within Indigenous storytelling. This is because in Indigenous contexts, knowledge is shared with you when you’re ready, when you need it, and/or when you can use it to help the community be well.

Origin stories link Indigenous people to specific homelands, and they can also talk about journeys or migrations from one area to the next. Homelands can be a broad term that includes lands and waters across a large area, including the animals and plants that live there. It is also common for Indigenous people from different nations to have overlapping connections to specific places! And while a story might link to one location at one moment, the Indigenous people of that nation might have long-standing connections with the broader region through seasonal trading, hunting, and fishing routes, among others. 

You may have heard histories that use phrases like the Woodland Period, the Mississippian Culture, or Paleo Indians. Terms like these were invented by anthropologists and archaeologists aiming to characterize large groups of Indigenous cultures over large periods of time using fragmented material evidence. Contemporary tribal nations overwhelmingly do not use these terms to identify themselves and their ancestors. Most anthropological scholarship also arbitrarily draws a boundary between “prehistory” and “history” at the invention of writing systems, a distinction that makes little sense for the many Native cultures whose elaborate and sophisticated communication systems and technologies have taken forms other than written scripts. Such terms and notions of prehistory risk implying a sharp distinction between the Indigenous groups of archaeological study and Indigenous communities today. This can undermine the ability of Native people to assert treaty and other rights and to claim ancestors and items that remain in museum collections. As you talk with your students about the period before European arrival in North America, try emphasizing instead: The region that we now call the Midwest has been home to dozens of tribal nations since time immemorial. These individual nations were distinct, and attempts to group them as “Indians” by early settlers flattened important distinctions between tribes.  Before colonialism, many Native communities moved in and out of the region and interacted with each other through alliance building, trade, negotiation, warfare, and cultural exchange. The region has always provided rich resources, and Native peoples have long engaged in locally interdependent relationships with each other as well as with the lands, waters, animals, and plants.

These narratives also undermine the importance of oral traditions for Indigenous people. Oral traditions cannot be written off as simple or silly tales. Rather, these are complex stories that have been carefully passed down through generations. Unlike European memory keeping systems, which prioritize writing things down to remember, Native memory keeping systems often prioritize careful and deep listening to be able to retell a story accurately over time. While settler narratives cast doubt on the trustworthiness of oral traditions as sources, many Indigenous cultures around the world have documented traditions of keeping oral records that go back thousands of years. 

Before the city as we know it existed, this place was known as Zhegagoynak, Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag, Zhigaagong, Šikaakonki, Shekâkôheki, Sekākoh, and Gųųšge honąk, among other names, to the numerous Indigenous nations who lived and had long standing relationships with this place. While you are likely to see several versions of “Checagou” or “Chicagua” on early colonial maps, or hear pronunciations like these on local Chicago tours, we encourage you and your students to explore the many Native places names for this area. Indigenous languages reflect unique cultures and worldviews, and reveal important details of Native peoples’ relationships with and understanding of this place. It is a sign of respect to prioritize these words over French misunderstandings like Checagou or Chicagua. You may also hear people say that Chicago is named after “the Algonquian name” for wild onion or a similar allium, but this is a misnomer. There is no single Algonquian word for such a plant, because “Algonquian” refers to a large group of languages, including those of the Illinois Confederation, Neshnabék, Myaamiaki, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Menominee, among others. In other words, there are many Algonquian words for the place we now call Chicago, which are outlined in the pre-module. 

As the many place names for what is now known as Chicago suggest, Chicago was a place where many wild onions, or ramps grew. These plants served as an important form of sustenance for the Native peoples of this region. Ramps are hard to grow and easy to overharvest. That ramps grew here in abundance for generations tells us that Native people were carefully stewarding the land and the plant population. Chicago was also important as an intersection of several waterways (further discussed in the Convergence module). When the first non-Native explorers arrived in the region, people from the Illinois Confederation showed them the Chicago portage, which was a space between the Chicago and DesPlaines River that travelers would carry their canoes, allowing them to travel from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River Valley, and guided them through the landscape. The portage fluctuated greatly across seasons. At times there was so much flooding that the need to portage completely disappeared and the rivers merged. Other times, there was so little rain or snowmelt that the portage was several miles long. You can imagine how confusing this might have been for settlers who were attempting to map the region. But Native people knew this place and understood its seasonal shifts. Settlers relied on them greatly to navigate this changing landscape. 

Native people throughout the Great Lakes and Inohkinki (the Illinois Country) also had established kinship networks and protocols for relationality. As settlers moved through the region – which Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa people know as Neshnabéwaki – they depended on Native people for directions and safe passage. Native people educated settlers on protocols for greetings, gift exchange, and communicating intentions and introduced settlers to other Native nations with whom they maintained long-established and peaceable relations. While narratives of colonization often position European settlers as dominating Native people and easily forcing their removal, it’s important to understand that for at least a full century before the first land cessions in the Chicago-area began, settlers were dependent on Native people for guidance, and they incorporated themselves into established Native kinship networks in order to trade, marry, exchange culture, and learn from the people who already lived here. European powers laying claim to large swathes of the continent through their maps were actually projecting fantasies of a continental empire in territories over which they had minimal influence. Native kinship networks became increasingly important as conflicts between Indigenous nations that were exacerbated by colonial changes spread across the Great Lakes throughout the 17th and 18th century. In these moments, Native nations built relationships with people as either ndenwémagen (relatives in Bodéwadmimwen, or the Potawatomi language or myeg yegwan (foreigners in Bodéwadmimwen). Being a relative was essential for a settler’s ability to survive and trade, so many of these bonds were formed through marriages with Native women. Potawatomi women like Kitihawa and Archange Ouilmette connected their husbands, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and Antoine Ouilmette (respectively) with local kinship networks. While most of these marriages were between Native women and French men, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who was a free Black man likely born in Haiti, provides a unique example of early kinship between Black and Native communities. 

Native people throughout the Great Lakes also had established kinship networks and protocols for relationality, which included relationships for diplomacy, ceremony, and mutual protection with other nations. It is a myth that Indigenous people lacked boundaries before colonialism. Indigenous people had long-standing ways of recognizing territorial boundaries between Native nations for governing, hunting, farming, and other needs. The agreements that outlined how Native nations shared or divided space were not one-time papers like the treaties that would come later. Instead, these agreements were rules and protocols for relationships that needed to be renewed on a regular basis. This helped to make sure that the agreements still met everyone’s needs and that everyone knew what they were agreeing to. For Indigenous people before colonization, making agreements with other tribes was a way of ensuring sustainable, healthy, peaceful coexistence through relationships and respect.

These negotiations for shared place made it possible for some Indigenous people to live in Chicago full time, while others passed through Chicago as part of seasonal rounds. These rounds were annual patterns of coming to a particular place at a particular time. Indigenous people developed these cycles based on the growth cycles of plants and migrations of animals. Many Indigenous people lived this way before colonization because it was a sustainable way of life. These seasons followed a predictable pattern for planting, hunting, fishing, and harvesting. Moving this way allowed for communities to regularly renew their connections to each other. In Chicago, some examples of seasonal activities include (among others): 

• Spring: Collecting sap from maple trees to make sugar and syrup, harvesting spring plants like ramps (similar to a green onion) which grow along streams, planting vegetable gardens
• Summer: Fishing for sturgeon, whitefish, trout, walleye, and other fish in the lakes and rivers, tending to vegetables like corn, beans, and squash
• Fall: Hunting migrating birds like ducks and geese, harvesting wild rice in marshes and small lakes, harvesting remaining vegetables grown over the summer 
• Winter: Hunting muskrats, otters, and beavers in marshes, deer in forested areas, and bison on the prairie

That Native people have remained and retain their connections to Chicago is perhaps the most important concept to communicate to your students, given the pervasive disappearance narratives that suggest Native people only exist in the past. As settlers increasingly arrived in North America, they created narratives that justified their occupation of Native homelands. Sometimes, they did this through written sources, like letters to each other and to government leaders, or published narratives. Other times, they created visual representations like drawings or maps that showed Native people as savage or uncivilized. While images like John Gast’s American Progress are well known in the context of the West and manifest destiny, similar images that position Native people on the margins as white settlement expands exist for Chicago too, as outlined in Supporting Question 2. 

Settlers also represented Indigenous people as anti-technology, even though Indigenous people had been developing innovative, sustainable technologies for thousands of years. They created an oversimplified either-or narrative where settlers represented progress and industrialization while Indigenous people represented a primitive way of life destined to die out. Settler imaginations about Indigenous people tend to fall into oversimplified stereotypes, even ones that contradict each other! Most notably, settler narratives tend to show Native people as: 

• savage and violent
• meek and spiritual
• possessing special “magic” or sentimentality relative to the land
• as hypersexualized (this is especially true for representations of women and girls)
• desperately impoverished 
• extremely wealthy
• part of the past (but never the present or future)

These fictionalized settler narratives are part of everyday imaginations in the United States and shape how people think about Indigenous people. For more on this see Anton Treuer’s book Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask: Young Readers Edition, among others. 

Images changed over time throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s. While Native people were present (if misrepresented) in earlier images, later ones tended to push Native people to the margins or out of the picture entirely. This is a form of erasure. Where Native people show up in these later images, they are often represented as dying. Historians call this “lasting” – a made-up narrative of the imaginary “last” Native person to do something, which represents Native life ending and settler lives taking over.

Narratives shape how people think about each other. This includes whether people assume Native people are still here or not, and the extent to which people believe the stereotypes listed above. This has real impacts on peoples’ lives: Psychologists have found that when non-Native people assume Native people are part of the past, they trust Native narratives about their own lives less and support Indigenous issues less often. Our ability to see each other and trust each other’s stories about our/their lives shapes our ability to build relationships and work together, now and in the future. 

Today, you can still see issues with Indigenous erasure and “lasting” in statues, monuments, and other plaques within Chicago. These images position Native people as historic; suggest that removal was a natural, pre-ordained, and necessary development; and promote the idea that Native people disappeared. But Native people continue to have relationships with Chicago! Some resisted removal and remained in Chicago. Others who were removed continue to think of these lands as their homelands. Still others returned to Chicago later or traveled here from other Native communities. Chicago is, always has been, and always will be a Native place. 

As the United States expanded, they gained possession of Native land through treaties and by force. This means that in the United States (and in what is known as Chicago), there is both land ceded by treaties and unceded land that was taken by force. Other land within the United States (and in Illinois) remains under the control of tribal nations. In Module 2 (Land and Environment), you can find a full list and description of treaties impacting Chicago, as well as more information about the treaty-making process, which was fundamentally unequal. In this section, we have provided preliminary context to support your teaching of land that was recently reclaimed by the Prairie Band of Potawatomi and other land that remains unceded. 

When the U.S. negotiated the 1829, 1832, and 1833 treaties, they reserved parcels of land for several Native individuals, some of whom helped negotiate the treaties. These Native people and their communities were allowed to remain on these unceded parcels of land, and many did. The 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien reserved 1,280 acres of land for Potawatomi leader Shab-eh-nay and his descendants in what is now called DeKalb County. Shab-eh-nay initially fought U.S. invasion and was an alliance of Tecumseh’s in his coordinated resistance to U.S. forces (more on this in Module 4- Activism and Resistance!), but he later sought peace with the U.S. government and worked with them to negotiate these later treaties. After the treaty, he and his family traveled between this land and the land in Iowa, then Missouri and Kansas that their relatives were removed to until 1850, when they returned from one of these trips to find the reserved land had been illegally auctioned off. The Indian Non-Intercourse Act prevented the sale of land by any individual Native person until the 1887 Dawes Act. While most of this land remains unceded, in 2024, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi reclaimed 130 acres of the original Shab-eh-nay Reservation, making them the state’s first federally recognized tribe. You can see both the reclaimed and unceded land on the Indigenous Chicago Treaty Map. 

Earlier in the twentieth century, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi also made (but lost) a formal claim to recover lands on the Chicago lakeshore. When the treaties affecting present-day Chicago were signed, the lakeshore began at what is currently Michigan Avenue, the land east of that has been filled in with rubble from the Great Chicago Fire and other infrastructure projects. 

Since the construction changed the shape of the shoreline from what it looked like during treaty negotiations, the newly-created land had never been addressed by a treaty. The treaties had ceded rights to land, ending at the lakeshore, but had not ceded rights to Lake Michigan, to the lakebed, or to the water of the lake. 

The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma considers land on the eastern side of the state unceded because the treaty concerning it was signed by a tribe who did not have the sole right to do so. 

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