Module 4: Activism and Resistance

How do people advocate for the rights of their communities in the face of violence?

The fourth module of the Indigenous Chicago curriculum emphasizes the way that Native people in Chicago have pushed back against colonial aggression since the beginning of colonial occupation. While it is common to only teach Indigenous activism and resistance in coverage of the late twentieth century, this module features content on activism and resistance across the 19th and 20th centuries and encourages you to reframe several well-known moments in Illinois and Chicago history through the lens of Indigenous resistance. Within some of these earlier conflicts, it’s important to contextualize violent resistance on the part of Indigenous people as being part of a larger system of colonial violence. Existing narratives of these conflicts often frame Native people as violent aggressors and paint colonists as innocent victims. A more historically accurate narrative reveals that the invasion of European and American settlers prompted these violent responses as Indigenous people fought to protect their communities and homelands. This is a great module in which to encourage students to compare different historical sources written by different people, and to encourage them to locate more contemporary narratives of these conflicts written by Native nations themselves. Several of these are featured in the module.

Non-Indigenous settlement at Chicago began to increase in the late 18th and early 19th century following the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, which established the Northwest Territory and opened what is now the Midwest to U.S. expansion, and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which the Wyandot, Lenni-Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Odawak, Ojibweg, Potawatomi, Myaamiaki, Eel River, Kickapoo, and the Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias, and Weas (who would later become the Peoria Tribe), ceded 6 square miles around the mouth of the Chicago River (in addition to other land tracts throughout present-day Indiana and Ohio) in exchange for $20,000 worth of goods up front and $9,500 worth of goods on an annual basis, as well as additional cash payments ranging from $500-$1000 per tribe. Native people also retained the right to hunt, plant, and live on the land ceded, as well as move freely through the land and water ceded. These changes enabled the construction of Fort Dearborn in 1803, but when the fort was completed in 1804, Chicago was very much still an outpost in Neshnabéwaki (the lands of the Potawatomi, Ojibweg, and Odawak) that stretched from what is currently called Manitoba to present-day southeastern Michigan and encompassed much of what American settlers designated the Northwest Territory).  The creation of the fort was also influenced by the election of Thomas Jefferson and his desire to expand the United States, especially after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Still, at the time of the construction of Fort Dearborn, Neshnabéwaki (and the rest of what is often called the American West) remained a territory controlled by Indigenous people into which settlers had to integrate themselves. 

Not long after the construction of Fort Dearborn, Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa began their effort to establish a broad international alliance made up of many Native nations that could halt continued American invasion of Native territories. While Tecumseh and his brother, who was also known as the Shawnee Prophet, have received the most attention, they were only two of the dozens of leaders of an intergenerational resistance movement in eastern North America that stretched back to the mid-eighteenth century. Native “prophets,” or religious leaders, in the movement urged others to reject Anglo-American customs and material goods, to strengthen themselves by reinvigorating traditional ceremonies and lifeways, and to unite across Native nations to ensure the perpetuation of Indigenous ways of life. The movement gained support from present-day northern Florida to southern Wisconsin to central New York. At the same time, it also divided Native communities, as many retained their loyalties to their own established political units of tribe, clan, and village. Some Potawatomi leaders near Chicago like Main Poc and Shab-eh-nay were intrigued by the movement and built relationships with Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, while others continued to pursue alliances with Americans. 

In the late 1800s and early 1810s, there were several American attacks on Native villages in the southern Great Lakes, including on Tecumseh’s own village at Tippecanoe. These events, and the continued expansion of American settlement, spurred Tecumseh and his allies to create a bigger plan for resisting illegal American settlement.  In June of 1812, Tecumseh and his allies laid out more detailed plans for war. A plan was formed to attack Fort Madison in present-day Iowa, Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison in present-day Indiana, and Fort Dearborn at Chicago at the same time in August. The attacks would be coordinated through wampum belts, small beads made from shells that were strung together to record histories and communicate messages. 

However, as Tecumseh and his allies made plans, war broke out between the Americans and the British, and Tecumseh and Main Poc immediately joined British forces in Detroit. Still, they sent regular messengers to communicate with their allies, and monitored American activities with their planned attack in mind. That July, the British and their Native allies had captured the Fort at Mackinac, In response, the American commander at Fort Dearborn at that time, Captain Nathan Heald, received an order to evacuate the fort and either destroy all of the weapons and ammunition held there or distribute them to Native allies. Without Fort Mackinac, which sat at an important access point between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and was an important site for supplying and protecting Fort Dearborn, the U.S. did not believe it would be able to provide Fort Dearborn with supplies and support. Some Potawatomi leaders like Winamek (who also delivered the evacuation message) encouraged Heald to evacuate before any Native people in the region who had allied with the British learned of their plans, concerned they might try to attack the Fort. Heald ignored this advice and proceeded with his plans to evacuate civilians at the time stiplulated by the U.S. government. He also called a council with Potawatomi people at Chicago to inform them of the evacuation plans and promised that he would distribute the weapons and other provisions to the Potawatomi if they would escort those evacuating the fort to Fort Wayne, in present-day Indiana. However, Heald failed to keep his promise about the distribution of arms and provisions.  Instead, he destroyed the supplies. 

The night before the battle, a wampum belt was delivered to Potawatomi leader Mad Sturgeon signaling war should begin. Since those at Fort Dearborn had been ordered to evacuate the next day,  it was an ideal time to attack the American garrison and the betrayal by Heald had further angered Potawatomi leadership. On the morning of August 15, the evacuation of the fort began. Shortly thereafter, Potawatomi fighters under the direction of Sigenauk (Blackbird) and Nuscoteomeg (Mad Sturgeon), along with some Kickapoo, Sauk, and Ho-Chunk supporters, attacked the convoy of American settlers and their Myaamia allies who had traveled to the fort to assist with the evacuation. There’s no denying the battle was brutal, and many American soldiers and civilians, as well as Native fighters lost their lives. But as Simon Pokagon argues in his narrative, many Native people also came to the aid of white settlers. Potawatomis like Leopold Pokagon, Chechepinquay, or Alexander Robinson, Black Partridge, Shab-eh-nay, Wabaunsee, Sauganaush, or Billy Caldwell, and Archange Ouilmette all protected settlers they had built relationships with as part of the fur trade. The white settlers who had integrated themselves into Native kinship networks were living in accordance with Native protocols and were not seen as a threat to Native lifeways, unlike the soldiers and settlers who had begun to farm and settle on unceded land. The attack was ultimately a part of a larger resistance movement to American invasion, not a random act of violence, and indeed, the planned attacks on Forts Madison, Harrison, and Wayne were also carried out just a few weeks later. Following the battle, the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sauk, and Ho-Chunk fighters also burned Fort Dearborn to the ground. 

The Battle of Fort Dearborn holds a prominent place in the collective memory of Chicago’s founding (it is the first star on the Chicago flag) and for many years was called the “Massacre of Fort Dearborn.” Common narratives have framed it as an unprompted and unexpected attack on innocent settlers. While the event did result in the death of civilians, it is important to understand it as a battle (about which the Americans were forewarned by their Potawatomi allies Winamek and Mucktypoke (Black Partridge)) within a larger resistance movement emerging from several decades of conflict and rivalry between British and American settlers who sought to claim territory and transform the land and waterways in significant portions of Neshnabewaki. Over those decades, many Native people, including some Potawatomis, had developed trade and military alliances with longer-standing British partners who better understood the protocols of the fur trade world and were often more generous than their American counterparts. By the dawn of the War of 1812, many Native people in the region saw Fort Dearborn as a symbol of a particularly brazen form of American conquest. Nathan Heald’s broken promise was one in a long line of betrayals by American officials that in many respects continue to shape the federal government’s relationships with Native nations today. The attack on Americans leaving Fort Dearborn was a response to this betrayal and the ongoing invasion of Indigenous territories.

Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, was a Sauk leader born in 1767. In 1804, the U.S. government signed a treaty with the Sauk and Meskwaki (Sac and Fox) at St. Louis that ceded land between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers on the west side of what is now Illinois. However, as was common in many treaty negotiations, the treaty was executed by a small group of five Sauk and Meskwaki leaders who did not have the authority within their own nation to cede this land. Black Hawk and others disputed the treaty, which contributed to their decision to side with the British in the War of 1812. While leaders like Black Hawk, Tecumseh, and Tenskwatawa opposed any invasion of their homelands, they saw the British (as opposed to the Americans) as more likely to uphold their promises to his community. 

In 1828, the US government ordered Sauk people to leave their village of Saukenuk (present-day Rock Island, IL) and remove across the Mississippi River. Sauk leader Keokuk led some west. However, Black Hawk refused to accept the removal because he did not accept the Treaty of 1804 as valid. Black Hawk’s community traveled seasonally as part of a sustainable cycle of hunting and agriculture. When his followers left for their winter hunting grounds in 1828, they returned in the spring to find white squatters living on their land. As Black Hawk explained in his autobiography (see Excerpt 1), this caused significant issues for his community, in particular, their ability to plant corn. He tried several diplomatic solutions between 1829 and 1830, but white leaders told him that there was nothing they could do as the land on which his village sat was already being sold to white individuals. Upon returning to white settlers in his village for a third time in the spring of 1831, Black Hawk agreed to sign what has become known as “the Corn Treaty,”  an agreement to remove to Iowa Territory and never return to Saukenuk without explicit permission from the federal government in exchange for replacement corn for the corn his people wouldn’t be able to grow. However, the corn that the United States issued to their community as its part of the treaty was bad, so the conflict continued (see Excerpt 2). 

Facing starvation and continued harassment by settlers in Iowa Territory, Black Hawk again returned to the idea of reclaiming his village in 1832. Having received guidance from Sauk leader Neopope and Sauk/Ho-Chunk spiritual leader Wabokieshiek (referred to as the prophet in Black Hawk’s autobiography) that the British, Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk would support his cause, Black Hawk decided to return to Saukenuk for a fourth time, leading a group of 400 of his people back to their village so that they could plant corn for the following year. Though Black Hawk repeatedly told General Atkinson (who he refers to as White Beaver) that his community was there in peace to plant corn, the Illinois militia still murdered three Sauk men who approached the militia under a white flag. This ultimately sparked what has come to be known as the Black Hawk War, a series of battles that ensued between Black Hawk, his followers, and US forces. Black Hawk ultimately surrendered, but not before many of his followers were brutally murdered. The United State military then undertook an effort to exterminate all Sauk people, evident in a quote from one American participant in the Bad Axe Massacre, who callously commented after killing a Sauk infant, “Kill the nits, and you’ll have no lice.” American officials later cited Black Hawk and his followers as a reason for needing to remove all Native people from Illinois.

Black Hawk’s return to his home village in an attempt to plant crops that would feed his people is an important example of resistance to US policies that sought to remove and sever Native people from their lands. It is also an important example of women’s work in resisting American expansion in their roles as people who tended fields and sustained their communities and land claims through their agricultural labor. It was the women in Black Hawk’s community who told him that the corn in the area they were removed to was unsuitable, and urged him to lead the community home. While many examples of Native resistance during this period can be framed as fights over territory, Black Hawk’s attempt to return home should remind us that in many cases, this resistance was fundamentally about survival. He and his people faced a choice between remaining on new land where they were being harassed and had no food, or peacefully attempting to return home where they could plant crops.

Though most of the events of the Black Hawk War took place in western Illinois and southern Wisconsin, Native people in Chicago were also impacted by the conflict. While some Neshabék fought alongside the Americans, other Neshnabé people with no connection to the war were ordered by the federal government to flee their homes and live in a refugee camp in Chicago, and they were told they would be identified as “hostile Indians” and killed if they did not follow the order. In the midst of the war, Congress also passed “An Act to Enable the President to Extinguish Indian Land Title within the State of Indiana, Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan,”  which set aside $20,000 for the purpose of treaty negotiations to extinguish land titles. The act was a precursor to the Treaty of Chicago in 1833 that extinguished the remaining Native land titles in the state of Illinois.

Many historians believe that the Americans’ brutal massacre of so many of Black Hawk’s followers also left other Indigenous communities feeling vulnerable and ultimately more willing to agree to land cessions like those outlined in the treaty. This fear was not an exaggeration: American officials referenced the violence Black Hawk’s people experienced in treaty negotiations as a threat of what would happen if Native leaders did not agree to cede their lands. In these moments, many Native leaders chose outcomes that were less than ideal, but that they thought would give their relatives and descendants the best chance for survival. 

In the pre-module, you examined Simon Pokagon’s The Red Man’s Greeting. Pokagon was a leader of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. Using their strong association with the Catholic Church, the Pokagon Band arranged to remain in their Michigan homelands following the Treaty of 1833. You can read more about this on the Pokagon Band’s website under “History.” Pokagon printed his text The Red Man’s Greeting (though it was also published under The Red Man’s Rebuke) on birch bark and distributed copies at the World’s Fair. It was a scathing critique of the World’s Fair and of colonization. Pokagon also appeared on one of the parade floats, wrote a speech that was delivered at the fair, and presented the mayor of Chicago with a facsimile of the 1833 Treaty of Chicago that was also printed on birch bark.

Understanding Pokagon’s critique requires understanding the context of the World’s Fair and the other representations of Native people at the event. Held 400 years after Christopher Columbus’s initial invasion of North America, the event was meant to celebrate colonialism and four centuries of “progress.” Much like the various images discussed in Module 1 that position Native people in opposition to progress and civilization, the fair included various representations of Native people as prehistoric, uncivilized, and backward, the opposite of the fair’s celebration of progress and innovation. An American Indian building and village organized by Harvard anthropologists–which featured constructed, stereotypical representations of various Native communities across North America–and an exhibit on Indian boarding schools featuring performances by Native children were used to highlight efforts to ‘civilize’ Native people. Hundreds of Indigenous peoples from across the United States and the hemisphere came to work at the fair for their own reasons. Some simply came for the adventure, some came to make money, and some came to protest how white settlers represented Native people. One famous Indigenous intellectual response came from Simon Pokagon, who confronted settlers’  idea of Native people as “uncivilized.” 

When reviewing The Red Man’s Greeting, it is important to put Simon Pokagon in the context of other writers and Native intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century. While Pokagon makes clearly anti-colonial statements throughout his text and emphasizes Chicago as an established Native place, he also makes some statements about the disappearance of Native people that you may recognize as playing into the myth of the “vanishing Indian.” This damaging myth remains prevalent in representations of Native people. As a result, it has contributed to false notions that Native people no longer exist.  It may seem strange to see Pokagon – a living Native person with strong ties to his community – playing into these misrepresentations and predicting the demise of his own people. However, it’s important to understand that he was likely being strategic. Many Indigenous intellectuals during this period made similar claims that were clearly meant to capture the interest (and, importantly, sympathies) of white audiences. 

In the last 500+ years, European and American policies towards Indigenous peoples have included extermination, containment, assimilation, extortion, reorganization, and other approaches. In what scholars and others call settler colonialism, each of those approaches target the physical survival and sovereign status of Native nations in order to replace them with settler populations and governments and to acquire Indigenous lands for non-Indigenous use. After the United States stopped making treaties with Native nations in 1871, the federal government forced tribal nations onto smaller and smaller tracts of land dubbed “reservations.” By shrinking their land base and seriously restricting their mobility and economic prospects, the federal government sought to limit the power of Native governments. As outlined in Module 2, this practice was paired with a series of federal assimilation policies from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries that undermined Native political power and dispossessed Native people of their land. Throughout the 20th century, Native people worked as individuals and within organizations to fight for Native sovereignty and self-determination. 

A few of these people include:

Famous Yavapai Apache activist, Wassaja, or Carlos Montezuma, who spent much of his life working as a physician in Chicago. Montezuma was adopted as a child by a white family, published a newsletter called Wassaja that frequently critiqued the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he was a founder of a national advocacy organization called the Society of American Indians.  You can learn more about Montezuma’s life in this brief  biography from the University of Illinois, who named a building after Montezuma in 2016.

As discussed in Module 2, the Indian Council Fire (ICF), founded in 1923, was also an important activist organization in Chicago throughout the 20th century. In addition to providing a space for community gatherings and celebration, the ICF advocated for the employment of local Native people in the 1933 World’s Fair and attempted to improve textbooks to more accurately portray Native history in the 1920s. 

Later in the 20th century, events like the 1961 Chicago Conference also brought Native activists together in Chicago. Sponsored by the University of Chicago in collaboration with local Native leaders and the Chicago American Indian Center, the conference brought nearly 500 Native leaders together to discuss national policy, especially the serious threat that the U.S. government’s looming policy of termination (in which the federal government threatened to end or “terminate” the unique status that tribal nations in the United States hold as sovereign nations) held for Indigenous nations. Those who attended the conference wrote the Declaration of Indian Purpose, an important document that was ultimately presented to President John F. Kennedy and helped inform federal policy toward Native people. You can learn more about the Conference in Module 2. 

In the late 1960s, several local initiatives in Chicago sought to create advocacy campaigns that resonated with national efforts like the Red Power and American Indian movements. In 1969, the Native American Committee (NAC) formed within the American Indian Center to support Red Power activism, in particular, the occupation of Alcatraz Island by the American Indian Movement that began that year. In 1970, NAC led an occupation of the Chicago Bureau of Indian Affairs Office in solidarity with the occupation. 

Also in 1970, organizers within NAC also set up teepees near Wrigley Field for a roughly three month-long campaign to protest the eviction of Carol Warrington (Menominee), one of the many Native people who came to Chicago as part of the Indian Relocation program (discussed in Module 2) who was not given the support she was promised. After the police forced occupants out of the Wrigley Field area, some extended their protests and began calling themselves the Chicago Indian Village (CIV). This group was led by Mike Chosa and Betty Jack Chosa, siblings from the Lac de Flambeau Ojibwe reservation in Wisconsin who came to Chicago during relocation. The CIV staged several additional occupations over the next two years, mirroring the approach taken by activists within the national American Indian Movement of occupying abandoned federal land. They also co-organized with organizations like the Black Panther Party and the Rainbow Coalition. Between 1971 and 1972, they occupied several sites. These included an abandoned Nike missile site at Belmont Harbor, a United Methodist Church summer camp facility in Naperville called Camp Seager, Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Big Bend Lake in Des Plaines, Camp Logan near Zion, and Fort Sheridan. You can learn more about the organization and its efforts in the Divided Trail documentary, which chronicles Mike and Betty Jack’s life and activism. Part 1 explains Chosa and Jack’s move to Chicago, the poor conditions they found when they arrived, and their founding of CIV. You can explore these and other moments of activism across the 20th century in the site tour on the Indigenous Chicago website. 

Beck, David R. M. “Fair Representation? American Indians the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” World History Connected 13:3 (2016). https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/13.3/forum_01_beck.html

Beck, David R. M. Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

Black Hawk, with J.B. Patterson, “Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, embracing the traditions of his nation, various wars in which he has been engaged, and his account of the cause and general history of the Black Hawk war of 1832, his surrender, and travels through the United States.” (St. Louis: Press of Continental Printing Co., 1882). 

Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Edmunds, R. David and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

Fixico, Donald. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). 

Tom Greenwood Papers, Box 1, Folders 1-14. Newberry Library. 

Hall, John. Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 

Keating, Ann Durkin. Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 

LaGrande, James B. Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 

LaPier, Rosalyn R. and David R.M. Beck, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 

Low, John. Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago. (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2016). 

Morseau, Blaire, ed. As Sacred to us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in their Contexts. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023).

Nelson, John William. Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023). 

Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 

Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. 2nd edition. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). 

Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).