“Chicago is, and always has been, a native place.” This belief is at the heart of the Indigenous Chicago project, a collaborative effort uniting the Newberry Library, the Chicago American Indian community, and tribal nations with ancestral ties to the city.
To expand the way we think about Chicago’s Indigenous history, the group developed a collection of curriculum, digital media, and interactive maps. Here are some of the major takeaways from this project’s exploration of our city’s Indigenous heritage.
Which Native nations call Chicago home?
The Chicago area is home to the Neshnabé (Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe), Illinois Confederation (Peoria, Kaskaskia, and others), Myaamia, Wea, Sauk, Meskwaki, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee peoples.
Today, the city is home to a diverse Native community representing hundreds of different tribal nations. More Chicagoans identify as Native American today than they did ten years ago, but collecting accurate data can be complicated as assimilation policies “systematically stripped” Indigenous people of their identities. In 2020, 34,543 identified as Indigenous compared to 13,337 people in 2010, according to census data.
The Chicago area has been a crossroads for Indigenous nations for thousands of years. Some lived here permanently, while others traveled seasonally in cycles tied to plant growth and animal migration. Indigenous Chicago’s interactive map shows where these tribal nations lived through the mid-19th century.
What are the origins of Chicago’s name?
It’s been said that Chicago is named after the Algonquian word for wild onions — but that’s not quite right. “Algonquian” refers to a large group of different languages, so there’s no single word for the plant or for the place now called Chicago.
Chicago could be a French spelling of shikaakwa, an Indigenous word from the Miami-Illinois language for wild onion, according to the American Name Society.
What animals and plants were significant to Indigenous communities?
In her piece, “A Myaamia Artist's Map of Chicago,” artist Megan Sekulich of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma used the waterways of northern Illinois as an outline and filled the space with plants and animals that are culturally significant to myaamiaki, the Myaamia people.
You may recognize animals like the sandhill crane (cecaahkwa), the painted turtle (mihšihkinaahkwa), the gray squirrel (anikwa), and the white-tailed deer (moohswa). Some of the plants featured include wild onion (šikaakwa), corn (miincipi), and elderberry (wiiphšalwi).
Megan also created a linework-only version of the illustration that you can print out and color in.
