During social upheavals, how do people come together to sustain themselves and each other?

By the end of this hook, I can… 

• evaluate the impact of the federal census on communities’ access to resources
• describe how current community organizations in Chicago support the Chicago Native community during crises
• infer the values that drive community organizations to provide mutual aid during crises

This exercise directly relates to:

• Challenges of the 21st century

Inquiry

• SS.9-12.IS.5. Gather and evaluate information from multiple primary and secondary sources that reflect the perspectives and experiences of multiple groups, including marginalized groups.

Civics

• SS.9-12.CV.9. Evaluate public policies in terms of intended and unintended outcomes and related consequences on different communities including the marginalization of multiple groups.

History

• SS.9-12.H.14. Analyze the geographic and cultural forces that have resulted in conflict and cooperation. Identify the cause and effects of imperialism and colonization.

Note to teachers: We invite you to use the components of the Indigenous Chicago curriculum that best align with the needs of your classroom. The following suggested steps can be modified as needed, and we invite you to use the teacher’s history brief to inspire new exercises that best meet the needs of your students. Please note that we suggest shortening, rather than modifying, the language of historical sources to best reflect the original source’s context, intention, and voice.  

Chicago has long been a place of coming together for Native people from across North America (and, more recently, for Indigenous people from around the world). 

As the Chicago intertribal Native community grew throughout the 20th century, they built resources to support and sustain each other. When people face social upheaval, what do they do to sustain themselves and their connections to one another?

Let’s start by looking at the present. 

1. Read this 2022 article from the Chicago Sun-Times (also included in the next section). As you read, ask:

• • How do the Native women in the article describe the importance of an accurate census count? 
  • Why is getting an accurate count complicated? 
  • What does this issue tell us about the tangible impacts of (in)visibility on communities’ well-being?

2. Having an accurate census count has implications for funding for social issues, especially in moments of crisis like COVID. Read the excerpts of the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative’s 2020 Report on Education and COVID-19 related data included at the end of this document. As you read, ask:

1. • How did the Chicago Native community rally to support one another during COVID? 
   • What resource centers worked to support the community?
   • What kinds of aid did those centers provide?

3. Identify a list of the social values that might lead a community to respond to a crisis like COVID in the ways the Chicago Native community did. What does this tell us about how people sustain themselves and each other in times of social crisis?

You can read the full article here.

Elvia Malagón is a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who focuses on social justice, immigration, and income inequality. 

Source citation: Eliva Elvia Malagón, “More Chicago Residents in 2020 Census Identify as Native American,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 8, 2022. 

More Chicago residents in 2020 Census identify as Native American

But Dorene Wiese, president of the American Indian Association of Illinois and a longtime Chicago resident, says it’s an undercount that could hurt Native American communities.

By  Elvia Malagón   Apr 8, 2022, 5:00pm CDT

When Dorene Wiese read a report that listed Brighton Park as one of the Chicago neighborhoods with the most Native Americans, she knew it couldn’t be right.

It’s one of the reasons why Wiese, president of the American Indian Association of Illinois and a longtime Chicago resident, questions census and other data related to Native American communities.

She says that in Chicago, members of these communities are most concentrated in Irving Park, Portage Park and West Ridge.

Wiese said she thinks the U.S. Census’ count of Native Americans is inaccurate and is conducting her own research on the Native American population and community needs in Illinois.

“This is, I believe, another way in which the federal government is trying to erase American Indian people from history, from data,” Wiese said. “They don’t want to be able to serve American Indians any longer to give us what they promised us.”

In the past 10 years, the Native American community in Chicago has grown to more than 34,000 residents — an increase of more than 21,000 people, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of 2020 Census data.

The 34,543 includes people who marked American Indian as their racial category on the census while also selecting Hispanic/Latino as their ethnicity.

The community areas in Chicago with the highest number of Native American residents included Belmont Cragin, South Lawndale, Gage Park, Brighton Park and West Lawn. These communities also have large Latino populations.

Belmont Cragin, located on the city’s Northwest Side, saw the biggest increase of more than 1,800 residents who identify as Native American and Alaska Native. In total, about 2,690 residents in this neighborhood identified as Native American in the 2020 Census.

The community was once mostly concentrated in and around Uptown. But that has changed as gentrification saw many in that area move away, said Clovia Malatare, a longtime Chicago area resident who is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

In 2020, about 340 people in Uptown identified as Native American, a slight increase from 286 in 2010, according to the Sun-Times analysis of the census.

Nationally, the Census Bureau has acknowledged it undercounted Native Americans. Its “Post-Enumeration Survey” found that American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations were undercounted by 5.6%.

Wiese said she worries an inaccurate count of the Native American population could skew statistics on housing, education and poverty that could make it harder to get funding and other resources for the community.

She wants the Census Bureau to require people to list their tribal affiliation or descendancy to get a better understanding of how many Native Americans there are in different areas.

Wiese said the surveys she has conducted have found the majority of the people in Chicago are linked to the Ojibwe, Lakota, Choctaw and Navajo Nations — from the Midwest, the Great Plains and the Southwest.

The Census Bureau defines the racial category of American Indian or Alaska Native as someone “having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.” The terminology American Indian dates back to the language that was used in treaties that were created in the 1770s between the U.S. government and sovereign tribal nations.

It’s one of five racial categories used by the Census Bureau. The federal agency has a separate question about Hispanic or Latino origin in addition to the race question.

Across the country, the census found increases in the number of Hispanic/Latino Native Americans, said Carolyn Liebler, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. That could have been because of changes the bureau made in how it codes answers or because people changed how they identified.

“I think what’s happening is that people who were already there, who are already Latino, just changed how they respond to the question and decided to call themselves Indigenous instead of white,” Liebler said.

Since the 1960s, the number of people identifying racially as Native American has grown, and often people are changing how they identify their race on the different decennial counts, Liebler said. She’s done research on who identifies as Native American and has found there is a group that sometimes identify as Native American but other times choose another racial selection in that self-reporting.

“There’s just a group of people who feel like, ‘I’m both this and that,’” Liebler said.

She said some multiracial people she has interviewed have said how they were seen — either as white or Black — influenced what they selected in answering questions about their race.

Also, people sometimes become more comfortable with their identity after decades of assimilation programs that have ranged from boarding schools for Native American children to relocation programs that encourage people to move to cities, Liebler said.

Pamela Silas, associate director for community outreach and engagement for Northwestern University’s Center for Native American Indigenous Research, said people could become more emboldened over time about claiming their identity, in particular people from Indigenous backgrounds from Central America and South America. 

Still, Silas said the Native American community overall doesn’t fully get measured because of the way the term Native American is racialized around ancestry, even though affiliation is more important in nations. She also points out what many nations called themselves now translates simply to people or humans.

Native American identity can be complicated, even controversial, with some using “blood quantum” — how much “Indian blood” a person has — as the determining factor, Silas said. “But if they’re raised in that same community, with the language, with the teachings, with the community, it was never about blood quantum,” she said. “It was about your affiliation in this nation and whether or not that nation accepted you as a citizen.” [for full images and interactive features, see the article on the Chicago Sun-Times website] 

Contributing: Jesse Howe, Andy Boyle

Elvia Malagón’s reporting on social justice and income inequality is made possible by a grant from The Chicago Community Trust. 

Read the full report here.

The Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative (CAICC) is a delegation of organizations across Chicago that support the Native community. Founded in 2012, the collaborative works together to improve conditions for Native people living in Chicago and provides a unified voice for issues related to the Chicago Native community. 

Source citation: Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative, Beth Redbird, Carrie Stallings, and Katherine Castillo Valentin. “Toward Building American Indians’ Futures: The Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative’s 2020 Report on Education and COVID-19 Related Data.” (Chicago: Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative, 2020). 

American Indians in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chicago & The Role of the American Indian Health Service of Chicago

As of November 2020, Chicago is one of the newest epicenters in the COVID-19 pandemic. In the third week of November, 1 in 15 Chicagoans had the virus (NBC Chicago 2020). However, despite the skyrocketing nature of case numbers over the last several months and the city’s growing concern over increasing intakes at hospitals, the city only recently released COVID-19 related data on its American Indian population.

The American Indian Health Service of Chicago has kept its own data given the city’s broad exclusion of American Indians from COVID-19 data. Amid the spring outbreak, 30 American Indian patients in Chicago tested positive for the virus. Amid the most recent outbreak, 8 patients have tested positive. With the holiday season quickly approaching, she expects this number to rise.

As in other parts of the country, Chicago-based American Indians have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. The AIHSC has administered and received results for 277 tests given to their American Indian patients. Of those tests, 38 were positive. The positivity rate of American Indians in Chicago is nearly 5% higher than that of the general population of Chicago (Illinois Department of Health 2016). According to recently updated COVID-19 data from the Illinois’ Department of Health, the positivity rate among American Indians is 10%, still 2% higher than Chicago’s total population.

In combination, this data is revealing. Clearly, many American Indian patients do not go through the AIHS but instead choose other hospitals, likely due to proximity. Given this, both sets of data are necessary to capture the conditions among American Indians amid the pandemic. However, of all those tested, nearly 4.5 million Chicagoans have left their racial categorization blank. Given the distrust that American Indians commonly hold towards data collection efforts stemming from historical research and medical abuse they have suffered, it is highly probable that many American Indians left their race identification question blank (Schanche Hodge 2012).

Despite the shortcomings of the Illinois Department of Health’s data, it too reveals that COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting American Indians. CAICC and its member organizations are acutely aware of the inequality present within the pandemic data. They also know that COVID-19 has made clearer other kinds of inequality present within the community.

In the U.S., American Indians are more likely than whites to be impoverished and food and housing insecure. The pandemic has led to increased financial strain resulting from widespread job loss, and poor communities of color have been hit the hardest. According to a recent survey administered by NPR and Harvard, 55% of American Indian households reported they have experienced serious financial problems in the wake of the pandemic (NPR, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2020). Among American Indian respondents, 41% had almost entirely depleted any savings they had prior to the pandemic. Figure 13 demonstrates the disproportionate stress that American Indians have endured amid the pandemic, with American Indians reporting that quarantine has caused them more stress than other racial/ethnic groups (Redbird). CAICC and its member organizations are conscious of the stress and strain that their community is experiencing— it is the reason they have rapidly responded to the developing needs of the community. Their ongoing work is described in the following portion of the report.

Getting to Work: Programming among CAICC and its Member Organizations in the Wake of COVID-19

The American Indian Association of Illinois

The American Indian Association of Illinois (AIAI) is a Chicago based organization that provides educational programming, extensive academic and social support, and financial planning for its students and student families. Founded in 2007 by Dr. Dorene Wiese, The AIAI’s culturally based educational programming is designed by and for American Indian students and is grounded in tribal knowledge.

Like other organizations in the region, the AIAI has been at the forefront of COVID-19 response in the American Indian community. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been incredibly disruptive to its educational programming. The Association has struggled to meet the technological needs to transition its programming into a virtual format. Even though the AIAI has faced technological constraints, it has continued to offer after school programming online.

Despite these struggles, the AIAI works to stay involved in COVID aid programming. For instance, after applying for and receiving a grant from Decolonizing Wealth Project, AIAI was able to deliver cleaning supplies and masks to many community members. Students of the AIAI were very involved in the distribution of supplies, particularly with the Elders in the community. Furthermore, the AIAI has been working with the Indian Health Service to collaborate on efforts to bring various aid programs to the American Indian community in Chicago.

Students of the AIAI have been central in its transition to COVID-19 aid programming. For example, students worked with AIAI staff to make posters and tiktoks (short public-facing videos) to teach kids healthy habits such as how to properly wear a mask and wash their hands. The students have helped with distributing these posters and teaching younger students at the AIAI how to take care of themselves, both physically and culturally, during the pandemic.

The president of the AIAI, Dr. Dorene Weise, noted that funding constraints have made it difficult to transition in the pandemic. However, she knows that a lack of funding is not a unique issue in urban Indian Country. She pointed out that despite the fact that over 70% of American Indians live in urban areas, they receive far less funding than other American Indian communities. For Dr. Weise, the lack of funding dedicated to urban American Indian communities limits the capacity of urban organizations— a lack which can be detrimental in a pandemic.

The American Indian Center

The American Indian Center (AIC) has long operated as one of the central points of community building among the American Indian community of Chicago. Unfortunately, when the pandemic broke in the United States, the AIC had to indefinitely close its doors to the public.

Despite its closure to the public, the AIC staff has been actively aiding the community throughout the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, the AIC started a food distribution program. The AIC partnered with a food distribution company which worked to provide food staples to dozens of American Indian families in the Chicagoland area. However, the distributor was funded through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. When that funding was cut, the food distributor had to cease its partnership with the AIC, ending the distribution program. Even though the AIC had to end its food box program, it found other ways to aid the community amidst the pandemic. The AIC developed its own food program and has continued to provide meals at the AIC for pickup throughout the pandemic.

Food is not the only need which the AIC has paid attention to during the pandemic. Given that many organizations which put on culturally focused programming, including the AIC, had to close their doors, the AIC has been attentive to the cultural and spiritual needs of its community. For example, the AIC has included sage and sweet grass in some of its food distribution programming. They have also continued to hold some events in a virtual format, including the Men’s Talking Circle and Journey to Wholeness Wellness Circle. Soon, they will premiere the 67th Annual Chicago Powwow in a virtual format.

The AIC has aided the community in other ways, too. A big concern for the AIC has been the educational wellness of the students in the community. In response, they have been printing homework packets for families, hosting a virtual little one-story time, and making coloring books with pictures from American Indian artists.

Despite its best efforts to transition to more virtual programming, the AIC has struggled as well. Given funding constraints, the AIC has low-quality internet and a lack of technology. These technological disadvantages have meant that much of the programming at the AIC has had to pause. Without greater funding, the AIC expects that this will continue to be an issue.

The American Indian Health Service of Chicago

The American Indian Health Service of Chicago (AIHSC) is one of 34 urban health centers for American Indians in the United States. The mission of the AIHSC is to promote and elevate the health status of American Indians through culturally sensitive, affordable, and accessible healthcare. The board of directors consist of eleven-member community-based volunteers of which 51 % are American Indians (PL 94-437, Indian Health Care Improvement Act, Title V: Urban Indian Health Programs). The organization is the only American Indian operated medical and behavioral health clinic in the state of Illinois.

Naturally, amidst the pandemic, the American Indian Health Service of Chicago (AIHSC) has had to respond to the rapidly changing health needs of the American Indian community in Chicago.

As the only Urban Indian Health Clinic in the area, RoxAnne Unabia, the interim executive director of the AIHSC, says the center has been stretched to capacity, especially in the wake of alarmingly high COVID-19 infection and mortality rates and the need to continue providing health services to the American Indians in Chicago. Despite the city’s long-term exclusion of American Indians from its COVID-19 data, the American Indian Health Service of Chicago (AIHSC) has collected its own. Unabia has kept a close eye on outbreaks as they have occurred in Chicago. Amid the spring outbreak, 30 American Indian patients in Chicago tested positive for the virus. Amid the most recent outbreak, 8 patients have tested positive. With the holiday season quickly approaching, AIHSC expects this number to rise.

Throughout the pandemic, the AIHS has collected and maintained other types of data about their patients, too. For example, the AIHS has documented where their patients live within the Chicagoland area. While the patients of AIHS are not representative of the entire American Indian community of Chicago, the distribution of patients across zip codes explicitly contradicts and census’ reported distributions of the American Indian population of Chicago. According to the 2013-2017 American Community Survey, the neighborhoods with the most American Indians Brighton Park and Lake View. However, the most American Indian AIHS patients are located in Irving Park (18% of patient population) and Portage Park (12% of patient population). These contradictions warrant further study. At the very least, the contrasts between the census and AIHS data further evidence a need for community-driven data collection efforts for the American Indian community of Chicago.

The AIHS has had to address patients’ other health needs unrelated to COVID-19. As the only Urban Indian Health Clinic in Illinois, many American Indians within Chicago rely on the AIHS for medical care. The demand for routine medical care has not waned throughout the pandemic, so when the AIHS has to temporarily close its doors to those asking for routine care, many were turned away.

Despite its change in operations, the community’s needs became apparent. For example, many children in the community needed to immunize before school began in the fall of 2020. Additionally, the AIHS knew that preventative and maintenance care should be offered to their most COVID-19 vulnerable patients. In August, when COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed, the AIHS had address its backlog of medical requests. Consequently, the AIHS has been seeing seniors and elders and providing them flu shots and other care and also has been working to immunize all of their child patients. Unabia says the AIHS hopes to continue to be able to protect the community by managing and bettering their health as the pandemic continues.

Trickster Cultural Center

Trickster Cultural Center is a cultural organization working with and for Native Americans. At the center, community members can view community-based arts and engage with numerous culturally based programs. The center also serves the Native American veteran community of Chicago in a variety of ways, including programming and food assistance. Given that the center primarily focuses on visual arts, its pandemic-driven closure could have meant that it had to cease all of its programming. However, quite the opposite has been true.

The center has continued to put on a variety of programming throughout the pandemic. The center’s work has included outdoor Aztec dance practices, virtual talking circles, and webinars. True to its roots, the center has also had a variety of virtual exhibits. These virtual exhibits allow viewers to explore the entirety of Trickster’s collection— floor by floor. One of its current exhibits is titled, “CULTURALLY CONNECTED While Physically Apart”, and features figurative carvings from different Indigenous cultures across the globe.

The Trickster team has extended itself beyond the cultural needs of its community members by addressing their material needs during the pandemic. In the Summer, the team held an event at the Gail Borden Public Library to assist American Indian residents in applying for emergency funding. The center has also operated as an early and same day voting site for the 2020 presidential election and has distributed relevant voting information to community members. Also, Trickster has been delivering care packages to homebound veterans and veterans in need. The center has also partnered with CAICC to distribute financial and material resources to American Indian families in northwestern suburbs and downstate who, as non- Chicagoan residents, were not eligible for CAICC’s COVID-19 aid program. Given that the center is also a part of a coalition of 54 other cultural organizations, CEO Joe Podlasek prides himself on the center’s ability to collaborate with other organizations. Moving forward, Trickster hopes to continue to offer programming as the pandemic continues.

Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative’s COVID-19 Aid Program

In conjunction with the COVID-19 response provided by its member organizations, the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative (CAICC) devoted some of its resources to COVID-19 aid as well. As one of the central organizations for the urban American Indian Chicago community, CAICC felt that starting its own program was not only a good thing to do, but the right thing to do, too.

CAICC’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Grant program began in late March post the pandemic’s outbreak in the United States. It was funded through a variety of donors including the Spencer Foundation, Greater Chicago Food Depository, and individual donors. It was designed to support those who needed relief in a variety of ways, including help with medical supplies, food and food delivery, child and Elder care, technological access, housing, and cultural and ceremonial support. The program was made available to any person who identified as a member of a Native American tribe or First Nations reserve who made less than $65,000 annually and lives in Chicago. The entire pool of available funding was requested, demonstrating the great need among the urban American Indian community of Chicago.

In the following section, the results of CAICC’s COVID-19 aid program will be described, including the reach of the program, the type of aid that was distributed, and some demographic information of the requestees. CAICC gathered this information in an effort to better understand who was requesting aid from their program. In doing so, they hope to be better equipped to meet the needs of its community, especially as the pandemic continues and more funding becomes available.

Reach of COVID Program & Distribution of Funding

Thus far, CAICC’s ongoing COVID-19 aid program has assisted nearly 150 families and individuals in the Chicagoland area. To understand the efficiency of the program, it is important to understand where aided families are located.

Figure 14 demonstrates that the majority of families that were helped are located in Chicago. However, 29 other cities (redacted due to less than three respondents in these places) were reached by the aid program— and these cities are distributed across the entire state of Illinois. Furthermore, the figure shows that the majority of funding was used for rent, utilities, and food. These findings demonstrate that the community of American Indians in the Chicago area is large and dispersed; furthermore, they struggled with meeting basic needs such as food and housing security in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additionally figure 15 details the distribution of aid from the program. Looking at the graph, it becomes apparent that many respondents requested aid in multiple areas. A majority of respondents needed help in all 3 of the top requested types of aid: rent, utilities, and food. However, those are not the only areas of need among the community. Help with internet, technology, healthcare, and transportation access were also commonly requested.

Who did CAICC’s COVID-19 program help?

It is evident that CAICC’s COVID-19 aid program aided a variety of people from all across Chicago. However, CAICC wanted to know which tribes were represented among their aid recipients as well. Figure 16 demonstrates similar findings to the results of CAICC’s Education Survey. Ojibwe tribal members are overwhelmingly present within the data, with 35 respondents identifying as such. Besides Potawatomi, the following four most represented tribes— Choctaw, Navajo, Lakota, and Ho-chunk— were also within the first 8 of the most represented tribes among CAICC’s Education Survey respondents. The differences between the two surveys could exist for a variety of reasons. One, it could be that the requestees of the COVID-169 aid program are a distinct group from the respondents of the education survey. Given that many of the respondents in CAICC’s Education Survey data made more than $65,000 and thus would be ineligible for CAICC’s COViD-19 aid, this explanation is likely true. However, it is also true that these surveys are not representative of the urban American Indian community in Chicago.

Without more accurate data about which tribes the community is actually composed of, it is not possible to explore whether one of the tribal distributions from either dataset is out of the ordinary. 

Those who requested COVID-19 aid from CAICC were also asked how many children were in their household. Figure 17 shows that there are a variety of family sizes among the requestees. Many requestees, over 50, specified that they had zero children in the home. Part of the large number of 0 children families can be explained by the fact that 11% of respondents were Elders and students (Figure 18). Figure 17 also shows that that majority of households have at least one child— nearly half of requestees reported having children. The majority of families have at least 1, 2, or 3 children, though a significant portion have four. Only a handful of families who requested aid have 5 or 6. The average number of children was between 1 and 2. These results reveal that most families have children to take care of amid the pandemic. It also shows that there is a great amount of need among children as well. Over 75 families, who are largely housing and food insecure, have children. Thus, their children are housing and food insecure as well.

Summary of CAICC’s COVID-19 Aid Program

Together, these results demonstrate an incredible amount of diversity in the urban American Indian community of Chicago. Requestees come from all over the state of Illinois, and represent a variety of tribes, ages and family structure types. However, without additional information such as income, housing status, and employment status, it is difficult to say how great the need is among the community. Still, the data demonstrates that the need is large, especially given the rapid depletion of funding from the program and the continuation of requests for aid despite the application’s closure.