By the end of this exercise, I can… 

• describe Indigenous activism in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s

This exercise could also be paired with teaching about: 

• The African American Civil Rights Movement

Civics

• SS.9-12.CV.8. Analyze the methods individuals can use to challenge laws to address a variety of public issues.

History

• SS.9-12.H.3. Evaluate the methods used to promote change and the effects and outcomes of these methods on diverse groups of people.
• SS.9-12.H.7. Identify and analyze the role of individuals, groups and institutions in people’s struggle for safety, freedom, equality and justice.
• SS.9-12.H.8. Analyze key historical events and contributions of individuals through a variety of perspectives, including those of historically underrepresented groups.
• SS.9-12.H.10. Identify and analyze ways in which marginalized communities are represented in historical sources and seek out sources created by historically oppressed peoples.

Relocation

After decades of being pushed out of their homelands, Native people in the 20th century increasingly returned to Chicago. This included both people whose communities had been removed from Chicago before the mid-1800s and people from Native nations elsewhere. In the early and mid-1900s, there were few social services for Native people in Chicago. So, community members got together and created the services they needed. This reflects Indigenous values of generosity and care that have shaped Indigenous kinship systems for thousands of years. These services often filled needs the federal government promised to meet but never did. The organizations that Native people created became hubs of social life and political advocacy. Among the many important organizations were:

• The Indian Council Fire (ICF) was founded in 1923. It provided housing, legal help, education, and employment support for Native people in Chicago and the Midwest. 
• The American Indian Center (AIC) opened in 1953. It soon became an important site for community gatherings. From 1964-1972, the AIC ran the Canoe Club and numerous other clubs, which provided important spaces for intertribal community building. The AIC also held (and continues to hold) frequent powwows (you’ll learn more about powwows in the exercise below!). 
• St. Augustine Center provided significant support for Native people who moved to Chicago as part of the U.S. government’s relocation program (see below). It was open from 1961 to 2006. St. Augustine provided supportive services to Native people who lived in the city. It especially served Native people new to Chicago and Native people who had few resources. 

Native people moved to Chicago across the 20th century for a variety of reasons. The largest arrival of Native people at one time resulted from the voluntary relocation program that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) ran from 1952 to 1972, which the government officially authorized under the 1956 Indian relocation act. The BIA used the program to encourage Native people to leave their reservations and move to cities like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Seattle. This is called Relocation. The BIA used promotional posters, photographs, and videos to paint a picture of what life could be like in cities. They promised relocatees good housing and employment. These promises weren’t kept. Few relocatees ever saw these benefits. Instead, most Native people who relocated faced discrimination that led to poor housing, unemployment, and poverty. Many felt isolated from their home communities and cultures. 

Native nations have a government-to-government relationship with the United States based in treaties and the trust relationship. This means both Native nations and the US government have made promises that they must keep. The United States has rarely kept its promises to Native people. Relocation policy was another broken promise.

Relocation attempted to remove Native people – especially young adults – from their communities. It tried to end Native peoples’ sense of identity and belonging to their communities. Many people relocated through the federal program, and many others relocated on their own because of the need for work. Native people came together in their new environments in cities to support one another and build new communities. They retained their cultural identities through urban organizations and by maintaining their connections to their reservations. 

Red Power and the Native American Committee (NAC)

Activism in Native communities in the 20th century took many forms and covered many topics. Some forms of activism focused on supporting the Chicago Native community, some focused on advocating for issues in Native peoples’ homelands, and some focused on national issues. 

Red Power refers to the explosion of Indigenous activism throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Activism under Red Power focused on treaty rights, land return, education, Indigenous languages, and combatting poverty, among others. Red Power represented an intertribal approach to advocacy. Some of the most famous protests of the Red Power movement were enacted by the American Indian Movement (AIM). AIM is a community organization founded by Ojibwe people in Minneapolis in 1968 to protest police brutality against Native people. They led a number of protests, including marches and occupying buildings. In 1969, another group, called Indians of All Tribes, occupied Alcatraz Island. Alcatraz was a former federal prison and was sitting vacant by the 1960s. Protesters cited the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the United States and Lakota people; they said the treaty meant that any unused federal lands would go back under Native control. For 18 months, hundreds of Native people lived on Alcatraz, until federal officials forced them to leave. Protestors used their occupation to raise awareness of the needs of Native people, including advocating for Native peoples’ civil rights. Red Power topics and tactics sometimes overlapped with other movements for peoples’ civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Red Power organizers shared ideas and sometimes organized with the Black Power Movement, Chicano Movement, Asian American Movement, women’s rights movement, and gay rights movement.

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

Chicago Indian Village (CIV)

Also in 1970, organizers within NAC set up teepees near Wrigley Field to protest the eviction of Carol Warrington (Menominee). Warrington was one of the many Native people who came to Chicago as part of the Indian Relocation program who was not given the support she was promised. Native organizers stayed at the site for about three months. Even after the police forced them out, some kept protesting. They started calling themselves the Chicago Indian Village (CIV). The CIV 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 occupied several important places over the next two years. CIV tactics to occupy abandoned federal land were similar to those used by other Red Power organizations. 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. At the time of the CIV occupation, the Nike missile site was vacant (it previously was a military site for experimenting with anti-aircraft missiles). Since Native people had such poor housing options in Chicago, protestors demanded that the city repurpose the lot to provide housing for 200 Native people, along with a school for Native students. After two weeks on site, the police evicted the protestors on July 1, 1971. You can explore these and other moments of activism across the 20th century in the site tour on the Indigenous Chicago website. 

The CIV also co-organized with groups like the Black Panther Party and the Rainbow Coalition. Many Red Power organizers worked through partnerships with other organizations. This allowed them to join forces and raise more awareness of the issues that impacted their communities. One example of this is the Black Hills Alliance (BHA). Since the United States’ violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie during the gold rush, Lakota people have been fighting for the restoration of the Black Hills. The Black Hills are a sacred site for Lakota people. In the 1970s, a group of white ranchers and farmers in South Dakota started raising concerns about the impact of mining on the ground water. While the Lakota and white ranchers and farmers were often opposed to each other, this was an issue they could come together on. Together, they formed the Black Hills Alliance to protect the Black Hills.  

Throughout the 1940s-1970s, many Lakota people moved to Chicago on relocation and otherwise to find work. They did not lose their connections to home. This allowed messages from organizations like the Black Hills Alliance to reach as far as Chicago. 

Powwows

A note on powwows: One source in this exercise references powwows. Rather than the often used (and inappropriate) expression, “let’s have a powwow to talk about this,” a powwow is a social gathering for Native people. They started in the 1920s and 1930s and built on older dance and music traditions from tribes in the Plains. Powwows spread across the country in the 1940s-1960s. By the 1960s, they had a common format with common dance and song styles. They also include specials and songs specific to the local community. 

Powwows helped the Chicago Native community build a sense of shared identity in the 20th century. When urban community members came together, they shared songs, dances, and food. The community programs they created taught children and youth how to dance and make their regalia (dancing clothes). [NOTE: Regalia is a specific type of cultural clothing, it should never be called a “costume” or a “traditional garb.”]  Powwow has long been a form of entertainment as well as a way of teaching cultural values, sharing histories, and building connections within and between communities. As the Chicago American Indian Center notes, “Powwow is the time for American Indian people to meet and join together in dancing and singing, while renewing old friendships and making new ones. Additionally, powwows provide opportunities to renew thoughts of the ‘old ways’ and preserve a rich heritage. Finally, powwows offer a chance for friends and families of all cultures to take part of the experience.” 

Unlike ceremonies, powwows are social events and are often open to the public. Chicago’s American Indian Center has the nation’s oldest intertribal powwow, which has been held each year since 1953! 

Sources

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

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

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

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

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. 

1. Activism by Indigenous people in Chicago focuses on both issues within the Chicago Native community and issues affecting Native communities in other places. Just as Native people who were removed from Chicago have maintained connections with Chicago as their homelands, Native people who came to Chicago from elsewhere (either as part of relocation or after) have often maintained strong connections with their home communities. In this exercise, we’ll start local by looking at activism that primarily impacted the local Chicago Native community and we’ll finish with how the Chicago Native community has worked in solidarity with Indigenous struggles elsewhere. Review the information in the Background section above. What do you notice about the Chicago Indian Village? About Alcatraz? About the Black Hills Alliance?

2. To prepare for the primary sources you’re about to look at, create a chart like the one below (adapted from Nokes, 2022, p. 130):

3. Review the Background section on the Chicago Indian Village (CIV).

• • What was the CIV?
  • Who was Carol Warrington?
  • Who was Mike Chosa?

4. Take a look at Source 1, these press photographs of the Chicago Indian Village taken for the Chicago Daily News (printed again in a later section). As you read in the Background section, Native people in Chicago organized in response to the lack of adequate housing available to Native people living in Chicago. This included the Chicago Indian Village. Look at the first three photographs, which focus on Menominee community organizer Carol Warrington.

As you answer the following questions, it might help to read the Newberry Library’s description of these three photos:

Three photographs show Carol Warrington, a Menominee woman who began a rent strike in 1970 to pressure her landlord to improve the poor conditions in her apartment near Wrigley Field. When she was evicted on 5 May 1970, the Native American Committee (NAC) took on her cause. One of the photographs shows Warrington and her children in a teepee borrowed from the American Indian Center (AIC) in Chicago, which was pitched in an empty lot across the street from her former home. Mike Chosa, a leader of the NAC, encouraged others to join him in demanding justice for Warrington and better living conditions for Indigenous Americans. Another photograph, dated 16 June 1971, shows Warrington and another Native woman cooking for protestors on a portable stove in the empty lot. Some protestors from the NAC left after a few days to pursue other goals; those who remained, under the leadership of Chosa, adopted the name Chicago Indian Village (CIV). The third photograph of Warrington shows her speaking to Lincoln Park Zoo director Lester Fisher on 30 December 1971 during a sit-in staged by Indigenous protestors. 

• • What do you notice about the photos? 
  • Who seems to be in the photos? How do they look (angry, happy, excited, resolute, etc.)? 
  • What forms of taking care of each other, organizing, and/or advocacy do you notice?
  • What additional information does the caption give you? 
  • What strategies for advocacy do you notice in the photos and the catalog description? 
  • What do these photos and their descriptions tell you about the Chicago American Indian Center in the 1960s and 1970s? 
  • Based on these images and descriptions, describe the efforts of Native people in Chicago to protect the well-being of the community. 

5. Move to the next two photos. These two photographs show Mike Chosa and other Chicago Indian Village supporters leaving Belmont Harbor on Lake Michigan at the end of a CIV protest. Analyze the information available in the images:

• • How does Chosa (left) look leaving the site? 
  • Who do the people walking with him in the front appear to be (police, journalists, fellow protestors, etc.)? 
  • What does this indicate about the protest’s impact? About what other people outside the protest thought of it?

6. Combine these images with the ones of Carol Warrington. What strategies for raising awareness or creating social change did Chicago Native community members use in the 1960s and 1970s? 

7. The next photographs show the occupation of the Chicago Bureau of Indian Affairs Office (BIA). As you learned in Carlos Montezuma’s essay in SQ 2, the BIA has long symbolized both the federal government’s responsibilities to Native people and its failures to follow through on its commitments. 

As you read in the Background section, when the Native American Committee (NAC) formed within the Chicago American Indian Center in 1969, it joined national movements for Red Power. From November 1969 to June 1971, Red Power activists occupied Alcatraz island off the coast of San Francisco. Read the National Park Service’s overview or view this 6-minute video from CBS Sunday Morning. You can also explore the National Park Service’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the occupation in 2019. 

• • Summarize the Occupation of Alcatraz.
  • Why did Native people occupy Alcatraz?
  • What were they hoping to accomplish?

8. View Source 2, the Chicago BIA occupation photographs (also printed with more context at the end of this document). Notice the posters on the floor, one of which reads, “Return Alcatraz to the Native Americans.” 

• • What do you notice about the people in the photographs? 
  • Why do you think they chose the BIA office as a symbolic space to occupy? 
  • What do these images reveal about Indigenous organizing in Chicago, both in support of the local community and in support of national struggles?  
  • How did Native people in Chicago see themselves as connected to national issues? 
  • Describe the role of the Chicago American Indian Center’s role in community organizing in the 1960s.

9. Now, take a look at Source 3 (also printed at the end of this document), this flier for the 1979 powwow at the American Indian Center in support of the Black Hills Alliance (BHA).

• • Why might a powwow be a good way to raise funds for a specific social cause?
  • According to the flier, where will the powwow be? 
  • What does the price of entry (about $6.50 in 2024 dollars) tell you about how accessible the event was to the public?
  • Research Floyd Westerman and Bill Means. Why would their attendance be attractive to the community and draw more people to the fundraiser? 

10. Now, think about the recipient of the funds. Read Joe Ryan’s two-page overview of the BHA in the American Indian Journal. Ryan talks about a 1979 BHA march to protest mining in the Black Hills. You might also consider viewing the documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States to learn more about the history of Lakota struggles to protect the Black Hills. 

• • Throughout the 20th century, many Lakota families moved to Chicago. What does the connection between the AIC powwow and the BHA imply about Chicago Native connections with Indigenous struggles in other places?
  • Based on this example, how did Native people stay connected to their homelands and home communities? 
  • How might this form of activism (fundraising for an Indigenous cause) reflect Indigenous values for generosity and taking care of each other?
  • How might the AIC’s support of an anti-mining group (the BHA) be a way of protecting and advocating for Indigenous homelands? 

11. Summing it up! Look across the three examples. How would you describe Native activism in Chicago based on these stories? Return to the core question: “How have Indigenous people in the Chicago area seen their activism as connected with the fights of other communities?” Journal about how you see Indigenous activism in the Chicago area as connected with national movements and crises in other Indigenous communities across the 1960s and 1970s.

Carol Warrington was a Menominee woman and mother of six. In 1970, she and her children were evicted, prompting the first encampment outside Wrigley Field that led to the founding of the Chicago Indian Village (CIV). Warrington is considered one of the founders of the CIV and went on to participate in several more occupations with them. 

Mike Chosa was Ojibwe, from the Lac de Flambeau reservation in Wisconsin. Chosa led the protest outside Wrigley Field after Carol Warrington was evicted, and prior to helping found the Chicago Indian Village (CIV), he also participated in the Native American Committee. Chosa came to Chicago in the 1950s as part of the Indian relocation program. 

Source citation: Chicago Daily News, Photos of the Chicago Indian Village, Virgil Vogel Collection, Newberry Library. 

A close-up of the caption on the third image:

The Native American Committee (NAC) was an activist group formed in 1969 within the Chicago American Indian Center. The group was founded to support Red Power Activism through local initiatives, including a 1970 occupation of the Chicago Bureau of Indian Affairs Office (pictured below) and a 1970 encampment outside of Wrigley Field. NAC went on to help found three Native schools in Chicago, and they published a newsletter called Red Letter. 

Source citation: Orlando Cabanban, Photographs of the BIA Occupation, Orlando Cabanban Photographs, Newberry Library. 

The Chicago American Indian Center was founded in 1953 to provide a community space for and create connections among Native people moving to the city as part of the BIA relocation program. The center began hosting annual powwows, as well as other powwows to benefit various causes and organizations. 

The Black Hills Alliance (BHA) is an organization founded by Lakota people and white ranchers and farmers to protect the Black Hills from uranium mining, which was damaging to the ground water. BHA was founded in 1979 and it held significant events that year and the following. 

Source citation: “Powwow to Benefit Black Hills Alliance” flyer. 1979. Virgil Vogel Collection, Newberry Library.