Early Contact and Travel Through Chicago
Chicago was an established Native place centuries before non-Native settlers arrived on the western shores of Lake Michigan. This land was home to dozens of permanent and seasonal village sites across time, and it was a common place of trade and convergence because of the Chicago portage, 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 to multiple other travel routes across the center of the continent.
Modern representations of Chicago’s founding center non-Native settlers like Jacque Marquette, Robert Cavalier de LaSalle, and Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, erasing the fact that Native people have lived on this land since the beginning of time, and that non-Native settlers were entirely dependent on Native knowledge, technologies, and guides to maneuver routes like the Chicago portage. In reality, Marquette’s journals note that it was Kaskaskia people who guided him through the portage, and other people within the Illinois Confederation who provided him with food and supplies necessary to survive the winter.
Native people throughout the Great Lakes and Inohkinki (the Illinois Country) also had established kinship networks and protocols for relationality, and they educated settlers on protocols for greetings, gift exchange, and communicating intentions. Much of this education was done by Native women who married non-Native fur traders. Through these marriages, non-Native settlers were incorporated into Native kinship networks, allowing them to safely travel and trade within these networks. But Native women were not passive participants in these arrangements. Many, like Marie Magdalaine St. Jean (Onandoga), who signed the contract above on behalf of her husband, were equal partners with their husbands in the fur trade business.
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 an important example of early kinship between Black and Native communities.