Founded in 2007 by Dr. Dorene Wiese (White Earth Band Ojibwe), the American Indian Association of Illinois (AIAI) is among the most recently Native founded and driven organizations in Chicago. AIAI provides student centered assistance and services for students in public, private, and tribal schools not only in Chicago but throughout the United States. A few of the programs implemented by AIAI include the Medicine Shield Indian School Program, the Black Hawk Performance Company, and the Native American Language Institute. AIAI's leadership is dedicated to grounding the Native youth of the city today in the longstanding activism within Chicago and individual's ties to their tribal nations.  Its leadership under Dr. Wiese and others also connects the organization to institutions that are no longer active, including the Institute of Native American Development (INAD) at Truman College and Native American Educational Services (NAES) College. This connection has grounded IAIA in the goals of many Native driven organizations in Chicago, to provide space for Native students to receive support and make their mark within the rich history of the Native community within the city.

Looking northwest across the bridge we can see Merchandise Mart, a well known commercial building, typically known for its Art Deco design and the fact that it was built by Marshall Field & Co and owned by the Kennedy family for a number of years. However, what many don't know is that it was also the site of a Wea Summer Village and a Jesuit Mission from 1696 to 1702. The village, which included Wea people (who were part of the larger Myaamia group at that time), as well as Kaskaskia and Peoria people, pre-dated the Jesuit mission. Jesuits hoping to convert Native people knew that they had to integrate into existing Native communities to have any hope of success, and Native people had long-standing practices of welcoming newcomers into their villages. Today, Peoria, Kaskaskia, and Wea people are recognized within the Peoria Nation of Oklahoma, and Myaamia people are recognized as the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Both of these communities continue to use a dictionary that was created at this mission for language revitalization efforts.  Several centuries later, after Merchandise Mart was built, it also served as the home of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) (today called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) from 1942 to 1947. During this time, delegates from the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Nation, the Fort Belknap Nation, the Rosebud Sioux Nation, the Uintah and Ouray Nation, the Osage Nation, and the Blackfeet Nation all visited the OIA in Chicago. Though the OIA moved back to Washington D.C. in 1947, the voluntary relocation program that designated Chicago as a relocation city and brought thousands of Native people here was founded just five years later in 1952.  Proceed south two blocks on La Salle, then turn left on Randolph, stopping at the corner of Randolph and Clark in front of the Thompson Center.

On August 18th, 1835, roughly 5,000 Potawatomi converged at the Agency House to receive their final annuity payment from the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. At the conclusion of this meeting, the Potawatomi began singing and drumming, and approximately 800 began to dance as a procession formed.  With their hair done in a roached style and “decorated with a profusion of hawk’s and eagle’s feathers, some strung together so as to extend nearly to the ground,” Potawatomi mourners began dancing with their weapons in-hand as myriad more beat drums, sticks, and other hollow objects together. Judge John Dean Caton, a resident of Chicago at the time of the procession, recounted before an audience 35 years later at the Chicago Historical Society. As Caton writes, “\[f]oreheads, cheeks, and noses were covered with curved stripes of red vermilion, which were edged with black points… \[they were] principally armed with tomahawks and clubs… \[and] were led (sic) by what answered for a band of music…”  From the Council House they marched west, dancing as they moved along the Chicago riverfront “stopping in front of every house they passed,” before crossing the North Branch of the river. After crossing the bridge, the procession made its way south before again crossing the South Branch on the Corduroy Bridge (located roughly at the site of the present-day Lake street bridge). As they crossed, the procession halted in front of the Sauganash Hotel as its patrons stared in awe. The processioners continued to dance, and from the hotel windows, Caton stated that he and the other patrons could see the entirety of the procession as it snaked across the South Branch back up to the North Branch bridge. Caton and other onlookers misinterpreted this procession as a “war dance,” but in fact, it was a mourning procession that served as a visible act of defiance against Chicago’s alleged “founders.” It illustrates that Neshnabé people did not willingly cede the land on Lake Michigan’s shores. It was taken from them, and they protested their loss.

The Chicago American Indian Center was founded in 1953, but has existed in several locations across its history. At each place, it has worked to promote community across Native people living in Chicago, advocate for the welfare of Native people in the city, and sustain and educate others about Native cultural and artistic traditions.

The “Big Chief” steel and fiberglass statue stands at 30 feet tall (current world’s tallest "cigar store Indian") where Mead Ave. meets the Southwest highway in Oak Lawn. Depicting a Native American man with a headdress, the figure is shown with one arm raised covering his eyes from the sun and the other holding a bundle of sticks (possibly tobacco). Created by Wisconsin based company Creative Display, it was first bought for $14,000 by the now closed Cooke County Tobacco Warehouse. Like other so-called “Cigar Store Indians,” this iconography has been used nationally as advertisement for tobacco since the 17th century in England. Sometimes referred to as their much smaller renditions, “Virginie Men,” these tabletop statues were displayed in Eastern U.S. states to advertise tobacco sales but have since been enlarged and displayed outside of businesses for the same purpose.  Since the closure of the Cook County Tobacco Warehouse in 1998, Cardinal Liquor Barn Inc. purchased the statue for $10,000. Jim Shirazi, Cardinal Liquor’s owner, has since spent over $30,000 relocating, cleaning, and restoring the statue. In 2015, Shirazi had the statue repainted, reportedly adding greater detail to the headdress plumage, retouching the buckskin traditional clothing and changing the blue sash to green. Another report remarks that since its relocation the repairs had fixed areas on the statue where it had been “pierced by arrows” while sitting on top of the Tobacco Warehouse.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

The Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum in Chicago was founded in 1977 after John and Betty Seabury Mitchell donated their collection of Native American artifacts to Kendall College before the museum became its own institution in 2006. It's original name was the Green Bay Trading Co, and until 2024, it was known as the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian. This collection contained objects from tribal nations across North America, leading the initial mission of the museum to focus on the history and diversity of all tribes to match the expansive the collection.  After consulting with Native community members in Chicago and throughout the Great Lakes, the museum adjusted this mission to focus more on the histories of Chicago’s Native community and Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes Region of the United States and Canada. It's 2024 renaming reflects this new focus, and the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum continues to work alongside other organizations to highlight Native representation in literature, music, and art in its exhibits and projects.

Listed in the Chicago American Indian Service Directory as one of the "American Indian Owned and Operated Businesses in the Chicago and Metropolitan Areas" the Chicago Indian Artist's Guild had Sharon Skolnick (Fort Sill Apache) as its proprietor. In the 1970’s it had a gallery on the fourth floor of the American Indian Center on Wilson. Skolnick also founded the Okee-Chee Wild Horse Gallery in Andersonville to continue to highlight the work of Native artists within Chicago.

Native peoples from around the United States came to the 1933 World's Fair to perform. Many came as a part of the official American Indian Villages, but the Seminole Village was a privately operated exhibit on the Midway. It was created entirely for entertainment (a popular attraction was the alligator wrestling) and had very little information about Native people's daily life.

The Agency House is where the US government engaged with Native people, especially regarding past treaties. This is where the Native signers of past treaties such as the 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien collected annuity payments for land ceded. Chicago’s first Indian Agent, Charles Jouett, moved his family into the Agency House in 1805. The Jouett family employed a Pottawatomi woman, Nokenoqua, as a housekeeper and held at least one enslaved person in bondage there. Alexander Wolcott was appointed as Indian Agent in 1817. It is believed that Wolcott worked with Antoine Ouilmette to recruit Alexander Robinson to negotiate the three treaties in 1829, 1832, and 1833 that lead to the removal of Anishinaabe and the official founding of Chicago as an American city.

Removal did not end the presence of Native people in Chicago or the region. While some of Chicago’s most prominent Native people–such as Archange Ouilmette and Sauganash (Billy Caldwell), removed to reservations West of the Mississippi River. Some fought removal for the rest of their lives. Chechepinquay (Alexander Robinson), who was born Odawa, moved to Chicago after the War of 1812 having lived his entire life on Lake Michigan. He was born to a Odawa mother and a Scottish father at Fort Mackinac after which he grew up in a Potawatomi community on the St. Joseph’s River. Robinson was one of a number of Native people who helped the American survivors of the Battle of Fort Dearborn, and he became involved with the fur trading business in Chicago soon after the War of 1812. He married Archange Ouilmette’s sister Catherine Chevalier (Potawatomi) in 1826. Catherine was the daughter of Marianne (Potawatomi) and François Chevalier and the granddaughter of Potawatomi leader Naunongee, which meant she was connected to one of the most notable Indigenous and fur trade families in the western Great Lakes. Robinson became a significant figure in treaty negotiations in the early 1800s. He was given land and money in three different treaties in 1829, 1832, and finally, at the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. In this final treaty, he received a section of land on the Desplaines River North of Chicago. He and his wife, Catherine Chevalier, lived the rest of his life on this “reservation." He died on April 22, 1872, and his family continued to live on the property until the middle of the twentieth century.

The Tunica-Biloxi Chicago Branch Office is a satellite office for the Tunica- Biloxi Nation of Louisiana. In Chicago, it serves as a gathering place for both Tunica-Biloxi tribal members, as well as the broader Native community in Chicago. The office hosts both educational and cultural gatherings about a variety of subjects, including beading, language, and cooking. Members of the Tunica-Biloxi Nation have been living in Chicago for more than 100 years, even though their an ancestral lands, reservation, and governmental operations are located in Marksville, Louisiana. Tribal members in Chicago began trying to establish a satellite office in Chicago in the 1990s, but it was not until 2019 that the branch office was officially opened.

In the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis, the Odawak, Ojibweg, and Potawatomi ceded a twenty mile wide strip on the western boundary of Lake Michigan, ten miles north and ten miles south of the Chicago River as well as a strip of land extending to the Fox River. This treaty established the Indian Boundary Line, an invisible line that Indigenous people had to move their villages north of; but they still retained the right to hunt and fish on the ceded land. The Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people who negotiated this treaty were hungry and in dire need of supplies due to the War of 1812 and decreasing amounts of game in the region. They agreed to this treaty in exchange for commitments from settlers to provide $1000 worth of much-needed goods annually for twelve years. In 1937, the city established this plaque at the intersection of Rogers Ave and Clark St. to commemorate the treaty.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

When Fort Dearborn was built in 1803, it was a military outpost in a landscape still occupied and controlled by Native people. The fort sat across the Chicago River from the fur trading post and was built within only six square miles of land that had been ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. All other land surrounding those six miles was still owned by Native people until future treaty cessions in 1816. In the decade after the fort was built, Neshnabé people living in the area began to increasingly see it as a threat to their land and lifeways. These groups contested the Treaty of Greenville and argued that no representatives from Chicago were present at the treaty signing, and they grew increasingly frustrated with white settlers who had begun to farm the land and disrupt the environment that Native people had long maintained. These tensions erupted in the Battle of Fort Dearborn. After the battle, Fort Dearborn was raided for what supplies had not been destroyed and the building was burned to the ground. The Neshnabé people who lived and traded in the area continued to do so with some non-Native relatives. Beyond the mouth of the river, the labor of the Potawatomi, Odawa Sauk, Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, and Kickapoo people made the fur industry in the city immensely profitable. When the Americans returned to Chicago in 1816 and rebuilt Fort Dearborn, they once again entered an already thriving market.

The American Indian Health Services of Chicago (AIHS), began as a non-profit in 1974 and has continued to be a pillar of the Chicago Native community. It is “dedicated to providing quality culturally competent healthcare to the American Indian and Alaska Native community and other underserved populations.” AIHS offers services including gatherings focusing on mental health, its Senior Socials, counseling services, and general community outreach. These range from their Diabetes Talking Circle, Wellbriety Meetings, a storytelling series, Men’s Talking Circle, and their powwows.  AIHS’s existence and a continued need for their services within the community also show a larger issue that impacts Native American communities: access to quality and knowledgeable healthcare. For Native people who participated in the Bureau of Indian Affairs's voluntary relocation program in the mid-twentieth century and struggled to find consistent work or support from the BIA, affordable healthcare or health insurance was difficult to find without community support. The lack of culturally competent care outside of AIHS and community based efforts had been and continues to be a struggle for Native peoples, especially Native women in cities.   The founding of AIHS followed the same mission as earlier organizations, to provide whatever the Chicago Native community needed. After fifty years of serving the community, AIHS continues to adapt to and serve all Natives of Chicago.

The historic Green Mill Lounge located in Uptown Chicago has a legacy connected to its place in the city during Prohibition, its ties to Al Capone and his associates, and performances by stars of the Jazz Age. But this history also has ties to the Native community in the city. Its poetry slam nights attracted writers and performers from around the city, including Native writers and poets. E. Donald Two-Rivers (Ojibwe) became involved in these poetry nights as he became involved with institutions in the Native community and the poetry scene in Chicago. The Green Mill also held weekly poetry slams that were sponsored by the Red Path Theatre, founded in part by Two-Rivers in the 1990s. Two-Rivers also held a book release party at the Green Mill for his first book A Dozen Cold Ones in 1992, and remained connected to the establishment through his work with Red Path Theatre Company and the lounge's long-term ties to artists in Chicago.

Located on the ninth floor of the old main Post Office, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office was occupied several times by Native activists who were advocating for more resources and more of a voice within the BIA in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The sit-in on December 26, 1969 was organized by the Native American Committee, a group formed within the American Indian Center to support Red Power activism. The committee occupied the BIA office to support the occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969-1971) by the group Indians of All Tribes and other Native activists. By December, the Alcatraz occupation had entered its second month of what would become a two-year occupation.  Another one of the most publicized sit-ins by Native activists in Chicago occurred on Monday March 23, 1970. This was part of a coordinated mass sit-in campaign that also included five other BIA offices in Denver, Colorado, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sacramento, California, Cleveland, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and other Native institutions argued that the BIA needed to assist Natives that lived off of reservations. The protests also critiqued the BIA more broadly, especially policies like the voluntary relocation program and Termination.  This sit-in at the Chicago BIA office resulted in 23 arrests on trespassing charges including Minnie Bacon, Mike Chosa, and Steven Fastwolf. However, like other national-level protests, these sit-ins also brought national attention to issues Native communities faced in cities and on reservations. Native activists sought aid to help with housing, health, job, and food security, which they had been promised through treaties and through the voluntary relocation program. These sit-ins were Native communities' way of exerting their right to aid.

There were a number of cabins and taverns on Wolfe Point because this area was relatively dry compared to the lakeside buildings. These homes and businesses were owned by both Native and non-Native people, including Alexander Robinson, or Che-che-pin-quay. Robinson was born to an Odawa mother and Scottish father, so like Billy Caldwell, he excelled at navigating both Native and American worlds and was a key negotiator in the 1829, 1832, and 1833 treaties. He married Archange Oulimette’s sister Catherine Chevalier (Potawatomi) in 1826. Catherine was the daughter of Marianne (Potawatomi) and François Chevalier and the granddaughter of Potawatomi leader Naunongee, which meant she was connected to one of the most notable Indigenous and fur trade families in the western Great Lakes. Their home and trading post had frequent visits from Native people like Billy Caldwell until the 1833 Treaty of Chicago forced them out of the area. As part of the 1829 treaty, a plot of land was reserved for Robinson on the Des Plaines River where he moved in the 1830s and lived until 1872. It was the only Potawatomi “reservation” in the area in the post-removal period. His family remained connected to the land until the mid-1900s.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) American Indian Education Program provides support for Native American students and their families within the CPS district. Services it provides include after-school tutoring, cultural programming, workshops for students and parents, and programming geared toward students finishing their education within the CPS system or continuing to college. The program is overseen by the Citywide American Indian Education Council (CAIEC), and they monitor the program while also serving as intermediaries between the Native American community and CPS.

Mainstream narratives of Chicago’s founding have primarily featured European and American settlers. But stories of René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet as visionary adventurers and John Kinzie and Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable as founding settlers have concealed a much more complicated reality. In fact, Indigenous people lived on the land now called Chicago a long time before Europeans set foot here, and many remain here today. Indigenous people used this area for seasonal and more permanent village sites, to gather food sources like wild rice and wild onions (or ramps), and to travel to other parts of the larger Great Lakes and Mississippi River networks. The first European settlers entered into an already existing network of trade and familial relationships created before their arrival. How does this change the way we understand the founding of Chicago as a city? This City Story re-centers Indigenous people to encourage a re-thinking of the familiar “founding” myths. It casts aside unnecessary superlatives like “first” settlers and “last” Native peoples in order to understand the more complicated origins of Chicago. Sources  Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884) Ann Durkin Keating, Rising up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2012) Juliette Kinzie, Wau-Bun, the “Early Day” in the North-West (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856)  Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)  Terry Straus, ed., Indians of the Chicago Area (Chicago, Ill: NAES College, 1990).

The Grand Council Fire of American Indians, later called the Indian Council Fire (ICF), was founded in 1923 by both Native American and non-Native American participants. From 1923 to 1953, the ICF assisted the Chicago Native American community with legal, education, housing, and employment matters. ICF was the first major Native American organization in Chicago and the Midwest. Many of its Native American members had been members of the Society of American Indians and other national multi-tribal organizations. During the administration of Mayor William Hale (“Big Bill”) Thompson in the late 1920s, the Indian Council Fire challenged the city of Chicago to include more accurate Native American history in school textbooks. Leter in the 20th century, they also advocated for accurate representations of Native people in public history spaces, such as having a historical monument erected at Alexander Robinson's cemetery.  ICF held monthly meetings that combined entertainment and socializing from October to May each year. The organization also provided events for both its non-Native American and Native American members. Programs included the Indian Players Little Theater group, a young women’s chorus, and a Native American boys’ basketball team. ICF also published a quarterly newsletter, Amerindian (1952), edited by ICF secretary Marion Gridley. This newsletter espoused an assimilationist philosophy and emphasized the importance of higher education for Native Americans. It appealed to those who modeled themselves after Carlos Montezuma—or at least his focus on gradual, voluntary assimilation—but the organization seemed out of touch and somewhat condescending to many of the Native Americans who began to trickle into Chicago during the 1940s. Nationally recognized Native Americans such as Charles Eastman, Reverend Philip Gordon, and Gertrude Bonnin regularly spoke at the monthly meetings.  In addition to providing modest social services and community youth programs, the ICF focused a great deal of attention on participating in the annual Chicago Indian Day celebration held every September since its adoption in 1919. In 1953, however, the ICF redrafted its bylaws and decided to shut down its social service program in favor of focusing solely on the Annual Indian Achievement Award, which it continued to sponsor well into the 1990s.  In 1965 the Indian Council Fire was dissolved for failure to file the 1964 annual report and pay the required fee. Although quickly reinstated, there were conflicts within the organization and previous members regarding the merger of the Indian Council Fire organization with two organizations (Indian Council Fire Publications Inc. and Indian Achievement award) started by previous ICF president, Marion E. Gridley. These conflicts are well recorded within the correspondence and position paper written by the Board of Directors of the ICF at the time.

Native peoples from around the United States came to work at the 1933 World's Fair. Many lived and worked in the American Indian Village where they worked as performers. Performers were paid as much as $1.75 per day with children also working for $0.40 per day. The "Winnebago Village" (Ho Chunk) included at least seventy-five Ho Chunk people from Wisconsin. Many had performed before and after at the Wisconsin Dells where performance of Native identity became an ongoing attraction. By 1933, performance of Native identity had become popular outside of the World's Fair in vaudeville and at tourist sites. Performers like Chief Eagle Feather (Cherokee) promoted themselves by creating a perception of authenticity in their work that was popular among audiences.

The California Indian Manpower Consortium, Inc. (CIMC) was founded in 1978 to promote the social welfare, economic development, and educational needs of Native communities in California. Although the nonprofit is based in California, it has created a consortium of tribal nations, tribal communities, and organizations across the United States. As the only field office outside of California, the Chicago office is able to cater to the needs of the Chicago community. CIMC provides job training, educational training, job search or placement, leadership programs, and counseling or career planning.

The American Indian Gift Store was among the businesses promoted as “American Indian owned and operated” in the 1982 Chicago American Indian Community Service Directory. Owned by Chee Joe Spencer, a silversmith, it was also listed in the Native American business section in the Chicago Tribune in 1990, demonstrating some acknowledgement of the importance of representation or the continued presence of a Native-owned businesses.

Archeological maps of Chicago, as well as oral stories from Native communities, tell us that Chicago was home to both permanent village sites and more seasonal camps for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Though the Thompson Center is more often recognized for its unique post-modernist design and rotunda, it is also the site of one of these many seasonal camps.  These camps were used for "seasonal rounds," annual patterns of coming to a particular place at a particular time. Indigenous people developed these cycles based on the growth cycles of plants and the migrations of animals. Many Indigenous people lived this way before colonization because it was a sustainable way of life. These seasons followed a predictable pattern for planting, hunting, fishing, and harvesting. Moving this way allowed for communities to regularly renew their connections to each other. In Chicago, some examples of seasonal activities include: Collecting sap from maple trees to make sugar and syrup and harvesting plants like ramps in the Spring; fishing and tending to vegetables like corn, beans, and squash in the Summer; hunting migrating birds like ducks and geese and harvesting wild rice in marshes and small lakes in the Fall, and hunting muskrats, otters, and beavers in marshes, as well as deer in forested areas in the Winter.  Because of how close this camp is to the river, we can guess it may have been a spring camp used for harvesting ramps, or a summer fishing camp. Ramps, which are a type of wild onion, are where Chicago gets its name. Several Native place names for Chicago have meanings related to this plant, including Zhegagoynak (Potawatomi) “place of wild onions” and Šikaakonki (Myaamia and Illinois) "wild leek place." Others have names related to strong smells, such as Gųųšge honąk(Ho-Chunk) "skunk run" and Sekākoh (Menominee) "place of skunks." If you've ever walked into a patch of ramps you will understand the reason these words are related - the smell of these spring onions is known to be overwhelming.  Proceed east on Randolph for one block, then turn right on Dearborn, proceeding for one block before stopping in front of the Picasso statue in front of the Richard Daley Center (.3 miles).

Chicago hosted two World’s Fairs, the 1893 “World’s Columbian Exposition” and the 1933 “Century of Progress International Exposition.” These fairs had a lasting impact on the way the city sees itself in the world. Two of the four stars on the Chicago flag, a ubiquitous symbol of city pride in the twenty-first century, represent the two fairs. Popular books, movies, and board games about the fairs abound. Native people had a complex relationship with the World’s Fairs. The events created an opportunity for Native people from around the country to assert their identity on the world’s stage. They created employment opportunities in a new cash economy at the turn of the century and allowed Native people to send money back to their communities. The World’s Fairs were also a powerful reemergence of Indigenous people in Chicago after their forced removal from the region. While many Native people lived in and visited Chicago during the nineteenth century, the 1893 fair was the first mass gathering of Indigenous people since leaders gathered in 1833 to negotiate the theft of millions acres of their land. However, commissioners of both World’s Fairs refused to grant Native people the opportunity to tell their own story. In fact, they often worked against them. For both fairs, the authorities in charge of recruiting Indigenous people were anthropologists who saw Native people solely as part of the past. They did not view their cultures as equal to those of the other nations of the world. As you will see in the following City Story, Native people were dehumanized by fair organizers, but you will also see the ways in which Native people defied that image. Sources: Rosalyn R. LaPier and David Beck, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). David Beck, Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Abigail Markwyn, “‘I Would Like to Have This Tribe Represented’: Native Performance and Craft at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exposition,” American Indian Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 329–61. Lisa Cushing Davis, “Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon and The Red Man’s Rebuke,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 108, no. 1 (2015): 32–53.

A full-scale replica of Fort Dearborn was constructed for the 1933 World's Fair. The fort’s blockhouse and barracks were built on the fair's Midway, overlooking Lake Michigan at the end of 26th Street. Fort Dearborn was used as a symbol of the colonial era of Chicago during the 1903 Chicago Centennial Celebration where the first Fort Dearborn replica was constructed. Native actors, along with white actors portraying colonial soldiers and pioneers, were hired for the Fort Dearborn exhibit. While that dynamic reified an adversarial image of Native people, it created a space where local Native people could tell stories directly to fair visitors. Some of the only Indigenous people who lived in Chicago to work at the fair were hired for the Fort Dearborn exhibit. They posed for photos and worked as guides at Fort Dearborn–sharing stories of Indigenous history. To learn more about the role of Fort Dearborn in Chicago’s Indigenous history, see the “Re-Thinking Chicago’s Founding City Story.”

This beautiful bricolage mosaic mural was created in 2009 by Cynthia Weiss, Tracy Van Duinen, and Todd Osborne after being commissioned by 48th Ward Alderman Mary Ann Smith. Prior to its construction, Weiss, Duinen and Todd facilitated community discussions with various Native community members and organizations in Chicago to discuss how they want to be represented. These discussions spanned across two years before the current design was solidified. The location of the mural was also selected deliberately for how roads like Rodgers, Broadway, and even the general area around the mural’s location, were all former Native trails.  The mural is intended to represent the past and current Native American community in Chicago, but deliberately avoided generalizing “Indian culture.” The imagery on the mural seeks to connect generations of the Indigenous community by incorporating figures from traditional culture alongside ‘gaps’ in the mural in which mirror fragments allow the viewer to reflect how they too occupy a part within this greater art piece and community.   The mural’s name was inspired by Ojibwe artist E. Donald “Eddy” Two-Rivers’ poem “Indian Land Dancing.” Learn more about E. Donald Two-Rivers here.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

In 2019 Santiago X (or X) was commissioned by the Chicago Public Art Group and The American Indian Center of Chicago to pay homage to the original inhabitants of Illinois. X is an Indigenous futurist artist and a citizen of the Coushatta of Louisiana and CHarmoru from the island of Guam. Pokto Cinto is the Koasati (language of the Coushatta) translation of Serpent Twin. The effigy mound is made in collaboration with various artisans and community members such as Nilay Mistry (landscape artist) and honors the ancestral practice of mound building by using soil from various tribal lands. Located in Schiller Woods, Pokto Cinto marks the Des Plaines River on one end of Irving Park road and is bookended by a forthcoming Coiled Serpent mound in Horner Park.  Pokto Cinto and Coiled Serpent Mound are the two ends of the forthcoming Northwest Portage Walking Museum which aims to show the connection between Indigenous cultures in Chicago and the land which surrounds it.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

Andrea Carlson’s mural along the Chicago rivier waterfront reminds us “Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék/You are on Potawatomi Land.” Created in June 2021 and displayed until 2024, Carlson’s (oil on canvas) mural spanned across five banners and measured 15 feet high and 266 feet long. The land beneath the banner is part of Chicago's lakefill: land that was added to the original lakeshore beginning in the 19th century, after treaties ceding the land up to the lake were signed. Because this land did not exist when the treaties were signed, it remains unceded. In 1917, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi sued the city for this land, in a case (Williams v. City of Chicago) that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.  In light of the 2020 protests which removed two Christopher Columbus from Chicago, and inspired by the Williams v. City of Chicago (1917), Carlson wanted to create a reminder and declaration of the original inhabitants and their ongoing presence within Chicago. This mural, not only created by a Native artist, but also in community with the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, draws attention to the man-made lakefront as a breach of the treaty agreement. By declaring and reminding audiences that we are on Potawatomi land, Carlson pulls us to recognize that we reside not only on land which was stolen but also that colonial occupation continues today. By placing “You are on Potawatomi Land” in the present tense, she stresses that Indigenous people retain their connections to this place and perpetually belong here.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.  There is a duplicate point for this site on the Downtown Walking Tour

The Caroline and Ora Smith Foundation, housed in Chicago, supports opportunities for Native American girls and women in grade school to graduate programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Founded by Mary Smith (Cherokee) and named after her mother and grandmother, the organization's overall mission is to facilitate a larger number of Native American women in STEM fields. Although it is based in Chicago and working with its first cohort in Chicago and Milwaukee, the Foundation is working to offer community and culturally specific programming to Native women across the United States.

The portage between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers served as an important piece of infrastructure for Native peoples long before European settlers arrived in the region. The portage was often called “Mud Lake” because of the way it fluctuated between marsh and dry land over the changing seasons. Called the Portage des Chenes, or “Portage of the Oaks,” by the French, it was one of two portages that connected the Mississippi River watershed to Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes via the Illinois River (the other portage was between the Des Plaines River and the Calumet River). These portages allowed Native people to travel and trade throughout the region for millennia. Louis Jolliet and Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, the first European settlers to traverse the Indigenous portage in 1673, were guided every step of the way by Native people. Jolliet and Marquette drew maps based on the expertise provided by Odawa people at the Jesuit Mission of St. Ignace on the upper peninsula of Michigan. They were then led by Myaamia guides as they traveled to the Mississippi River via the difficult Wisconsin and Fox River portage. On their way back, Kaskaskia guides led them through the Chicago portage to Lake Michigan. The entire journey would have been impossible without the extensive knowledge of the Native people who had used the portage for generations. In spite of this support, the monuments at the site today (one of which is pictured here) show Marquette leading the journey, while the Native guide crouches behind him, in a submissive position. This is one of several depictions of Marquette and Jolliet throughout Chicago, each of which perpetuates a false narrative of the subservience of Native people.

As seen in this relief sculpture, French explorer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Father Jacques Marquette, are often credited with discovering Chicago in 1673. However, Native people had been living at and traveling through Chicago for centuries before their arrival. Likewise, their journey through the Chicago portage, a critical link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed, was made possible with the assistance of Native guides. Jolliet and Marquette drew maps based on the expertise provided by Odawa people at the Jesuit Mission of St. Ignace on the upper peninsula of Michigan. They were then led by Myaamia guides as they traveled to the Mississippi River via the difficult Wisconsin and Fox River portage. It was Native people they encountered near the convergence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers who told them about the Chicago portage, and Kaskaskia people (of the larger Illinois Confederation) that led them safely through the portage.  Despite their significant reliance on Indigenous knowledge and assistance, the legacy of Jolliet and Marquette often overshadows the leadership and contributions of Native people. In representations like this one, Marquette and Jolliet are centered and appear to be leading, while Native people cower behind or below them in subservient positions.  Proceed north a short distance to the bust of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in Pioneer Court.

This monument is one of several dedicated to Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, the first non-Native settler to traverse the Chicago portage in 1673. However he and his party, which included French explorer Louis Jolliet, were guided every step of the way by Native people. Jolliet and Marquette drew maps based on the expertise provided by Odawa people at the Jesuit Mission of St. Ignace on the upper peninsula of Michigan. They were then led by Myaamia guides as they traveled to the Mississippi River via the difficult Wisconsin and Fox River portage. On their way back, Kaskaskia guides led them through the Chicago portage to Lake Michigan. The entire journey would have been impossible without the extensive knowledge of the Native people who had used the portage for generations. In spite of this support, monuments across the city show Marquette leading the journey, while Native guides crouch behind him or turn to the side, in submissive positions. This is one of several depictions of Marquette throughout Chicago, each of which perpetuates a false narrative of the subservience of Native people.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

After its incorporation into the city of Chicago in the 1880s Uptown worked to compete with downtown, leading to the construction of well-known landmarks such as the Uptown Theatre, the Aragon Ballroom, and the Green Mill Lounge. The Great Depression led to a once thriving area with luxury housing to be broken down into smaller apartments that could be cheaply rented. This was the Uptown that White Appalachians, African Americans, and Native Americans encountered when federal policies or economic necessity drove them to migrate to the neighborhood from across the country from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Native people that moved to Chicago were motivated by economic necessity or pushed by federal policies created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) seeking to assimilate them into American society. These policies included the voluntary relocation program (1952-1972) followed by the relocation Act of 1956, other job placement programs, and decades of other assimilation policies. Chicago was chosen by the BIA as one of five original relocation sites for relocation due to the high volume of factory work and other jobs, along with it being an urban setting that was seen as being in opposition to Native reservations. But Chicago had already been chosen by Native people. It had been a site of Native villages prior to the establishment of the city, and those who remained in spite of removals or moved to the city did not always see it as being in opposition to their home communities. This Chicago Native community that existed prior to relocation founded the Indian Council Fire, the American Indian Club, and worked with other groups to create the foundations of the institutions that would follow. This Native community was scattered throughout the city, not concentrated in one neighborhood. In its first nine years the voluntary relocation program relocated almost 5,000 Native peoples to Chicago. The need for housing for the mass number of people, and the low paying jobs many were forced to take meant that many were forced into cheap housing around the city, with Uptown becoming the neighborhood with the largest population of Natives. Native people also came together to support one another when the BIA failed to provide the housing, jobs, and support that it had promised. In opposition to the efforts to assimilate Native people, relocation resulted in the creation of a new, intertribal community in which people supported one another through mutual aid. Sources:  Ann Durkin Keating, ed. Chicago’s Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008: 286).  James B. LaGrand. Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-75. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002).  John J. Laukaitis. Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952-1996. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).  Douglas K. Miller. Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).  Chicago American Indian Oral History Project Records - Native Voices in the City manuscript, Newberry Library.

People from all over the world gathered for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, or the 1893 World’s Fair, and that included many Native peoples from around the country. Like most people at the fair, many Indigenous people traveled there to work, to perform, or to sell goods. Others protested the fair. Simon Pokagon wrote the pamphlet critical of the fair, "A Red Man's Rebuke" (later "A Red Man's Greeting") on birchbark and distributed it at the fair. Upon reading it, Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison requested that Pokagon become involved with some ceremonial aspects of the fair. This included Pokagon riding on a float on "Chicago Day" and performing in a tableau of him signing the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which his father had actually signed 60 years earlier. Harrison then accepted the treaty at a ceremony attended by 70,000 people in front of the "Columbian Liberty Bell." Pokagon wrote a speech for the event in which he gave his vision for the future of Indigenous people in America. Using his new-found publicity from the World’s Fair, Pokagon became a prominent activist for Indigenous rights before he died in 1899.

In 1833, representatives from the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa nations were called to Chicago to negotiate additional land cessions in the Midwest. In the 18th and 19th centuries, land cessions from Indigenous nations were made through treaties (legal agreements) with the U.S. federal government. These treaties were often negotiated at established meeting places like Chicago and are not necessarily named for the land that is being ceded.Such is the case for the 1833 Treaty of Chicago which ceded land tracts in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin and orchestrated the forced removal of Neshnabé people from 8 million acres of land in what are now the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.  The US was not at war with the Neshnabé people, but they took advantage of the outrage over the Black Hawk War to force a treaty with them, passing a law that allowed commissioners to purchase all the remaining land held by Neshnabé people in the lower Lake Michigan area. In September of 1833, hundreds of Neshnabé people arrived in Chicago to negotiate the cession of land. They built massive encampments around Fort Dearborn and lived there the month before finally meeting with US Commissioners on September 21 for negotiations across the river from the fort.  The treaty was signed on September 26, and it began another migration into the city. Knowing that Neshnabé leaders would soon be receiving their treaty payments, hundreds of American traders from the midwest descended on the city to collect on supposed debts they claimed from Native people. These creditors made up $175,000 of the almost $1,000,000 listed in the treaty. In the cash-poor economy of the Midwest, these payments were a massive influx of federal dollars into the region.  Over the next decade, Neshnabé people were removed from the 8 million acres of land in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan in a fragmented and abusive way over the course of nearly a dozen different removals. At least 5 of these removals began at or crossed through the Chicagoland area. You can explore these routes further in the project’s Removal Map.

Harvard Anthropologist Frederic Putnam was in charge of the official narrative of Indigenous America at the 1893 World's Fair. He used the Anthropology Building and the American Indian Village (different from the one on the Midway) to describe Native peoples' lives as entirely in the past. This was directly contradicted by the dozens of Native people working at his exhibits and other places in the park. The American Indian Village included sixteen Kwak-waka’wakw people from the Northwest Coast sponsored by Canada, nine Penobscot people from Maine, fifteen Haudenosaunee people in longhouses sponsored by New York, and five Diné people from Colorado. The Native people in the American Indian Village had very different experiences from each other. Some were paid decently and made money selling goods. Others, like the Diné people, were unpaid by their host state, Colorado, and were taken advantage of by the agents who brought them to Chicago.

The home of Archange (Potawatomi) and Antoine Ouilmette was one of many French and Native households in early Chicago. French and American men frequently married Native women as a way of integrating themselves into existing kinship networks, and Native women expanded the connections of their own kin through these marriages. Archange was the daughter of Marianne (Potawatomi) and François Chevalier and the granddaughter of Potawatomi leader Naunongee, which meant she was connected to one of the most notable Indigenous and fur trade families in the western Great Lakes. Though we don’t know very much about the Ouilmette home other than that it neighbored the Kinzie house, we can make educated assumptions about Archange based on what we know about other relationships between French men and Native women. Archange likely served as a translator for her husband Antoine, instructed him on Native protocols, and was his way of integrating into existing Indigenous kinship networks. Many believe Archange was instrumental in helping settlers navigate the constantly fluctuating portage between the Chicago and Des Plaines River. Though the business of leading people through the portage was in her husband’s name, she would have carried that knowledge of the land from generations of Potawatomi people who lived around and used the portage before her. We also know that Archange helped several of the wives of officers at Fort Dearborn through pregnancies and deliveries, and that she personally helped survivors of the Battle of Fort Dearborn to survive in her house by disguising them as Native women. She and her husband worked directly with Indian Agent Alexander Wolcott to acquire support for the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. In the 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien, she and her children were given a plot of land on the Northern border of the city that includes parts of the present-day cities Evanston and Wilmette. The Village of Wilmette is named after her family.

Carlos Montezuma was a Yavapai Apache physician who lived from 1866 to 1923. He graduated from high school, college, and medical school in Illinois, and established his medical practice in Chicago in 1896. While we do not know if this location at 100 N State Street was his home or his office, the majority of his correspondence was directed to this address.  Having worked as a physician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, Montezuma saw how the federal system failed to fully address the needs of Native people. He was among those in the early 20th century who believed in the need to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA. Montezuma published a newsletter called Wassaja that frequently critiqued the BIA, and he was a founder of a national advocacy organization called the Society of American Indians (SAI). SAI, was a national intertribal advocacy group for Indigenous rights in the early 1900s. Members were often middle class Native professionals like Carlos Montezuma. While there were different opinions within the organization, SAI members often believed that some amount of assimilation into white society was necessary for Native people to be successful. Others outside of the SAI (and some within it) did not believe assimilation was the answer.  Proceed north three blocks north on State, stopping in front of the Chicago Theatre (.3 miles).

This monument was commissioned by previous fur trader, eventual lumber magnate, and Chicago real estate investor, Martin L. Ryerson, who employed John J. Boyle to create “The Alarm.” Originally commissioned under the name “The Indian Family,” the monument is dedicated to the Odawa, one of several Indigenous peoples whose homelands include Chicago. The statue’s pedestal also holds a relief panel on each side, titled, “The Peace Pipe,” “The Corn Dance,” “Forestry,” and “The Hunt." Ryerson, sought to memorialize his relationship with the Odawa, but the representation ultimately cements Native people in time. Moreover, the monument was commissioned in the same period that violence against Native people was still ongoing in the West and Native children were being sent to Indian boarding schools. The creation of representations like these allowed settlers to romanticize Native people and think of them as entirely historical, while ignoring the ongoing atrocities against them.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

Navy Pier originally opened in 1916 as Municipal Pier before a renaming in 1927, serving as a shipping and recreation facility for the city. The Navy Pier ballroom was the site of numerous annual powwows hosted by the American Indian Center that featured dancers from throughout the city. Photographs of powwow participants at Navy Pier for these powwows were featured in the book Chicago's 50 Years of Powwows (2004) sponsored by the American Indian Center, who worked with Newberry staff. While many photographs of powwows across Chicago exist, most of the photographs in the Newberry collection were taken by Chicago community members Dan Battiste, Ben Bearskin, Joe Kazumura, Peter Weil, and Leroy Wesaw. Powwows were held at Navy Pier in 1973, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987. Navy Pier has continued to be an occasional site for powwows, arts shows, and gatherings for Native Americans. One of the most recent powwows held at Navy Pier was in 2011 for the 58th American Indian Center Powwow. Today Navy Pier remains a historic site for not only the city of Chicago, but also to the Native American community.

When Amundson-Mayfair City College was moved to Uptown in 1973 and renamed Harry S. Truman college, it displaced Native American and other families as housing was demolished to construct the college. However, after opening its doors to students in 1976, administrators worked to connect with the diverse community in Uptown and worked with Native People to create space in the college, supporting Natives who wanted to attend the school through initiatives like the Institute of Native American Development and the Red Path Theatre. Today Truman College still serves the Uptown community. 

Native American Educational Services, Inc. was founded in 1974 by the Native American Committee (NAC), an activist group that focused its efforts towards assisting Native people in Chicago with education. NAES was the first Native-controlled private college to offer a four-year degree, and it partnered with Antioch College to be able to offer an accredited baccalaureate program that still allowed Native community members to retain control over the school’s admissions, policies, and coursework. As a part of its growth NAES opened study sites for its students on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Fort Peck Reservation, Santo Domingo Reservation, Menominee Reservation, and in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. NAES’s model combined coursework with work in community in order to prepare students to work for Native organizations and positively impact Native people, and graduates of the college were and continue to be leaders in the Chicago Native community and within their tribal nations.  After losing accreditation in 2005, NAES College became affiliated with Eastern Illinois University to support Native American students who sought higher education. After this collaboration ended, the organization adapted to its current form as Native American Educational Services, Inc. and continues to promote community-based education while collaborating with the American Indian Association of Illinois.

Native American Educational Services (NAES) College was founded by the Native American Committee (NAC) in 1973 to continue their mission of increasing accessible education for the Chicago Native American community. NAES College began as Native American Educational Service (NAES) with the initial founding of the school being grounded in providing Native students with a system of higher education, supporting community members in earning their G.E.D., and promoted traditional academic knowledge combined with tribal knowledge. After the opening of the Chicago campus NAES College expanded to study sites in Minneapolis Saint-Paul, the Menominee Reservation, Fort Peck, Leech Lake, Northern Cheyenne, and Santo Domingo. After issues with a federal grant, NAES administrators partnered with Antioch College to keep the institution going in some form to support Native students who sought higher education. Today NAES College has been reconfigured as Native American Educational Services, Inc. Its library and archives were split between the University of Chicago and the American Indian Association of Illinois (IAIA). In its current form, the organization continues to advocate for Native students through a partnership with AIAI and its president Dr. Dorene Wiese in stewarding the stories of its alumni, faculty, and administrators.

Founded in the 1970s, the Native American Support Program (NASP) at the University of Illinois Chicago supports the success of Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Native Pacific Islander students academically and culturally. This support comes from the program’s origin and administrators from within the Chicago Native community who have had first-hand experience with the issues Native students face while attending college.

While it initially began meeting within the American Indian Center as a club, the Menominee Social Club of Chicago developed as Menominee individuals and families needed support after moving to the city on their own or through the twentieth century voluntary relocation program by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 1994, the Menominee community in Chicago reached out to the tribal government to ask for support, and in 1996 the Menominee Nation Tribal Council recognized the Menominee Community Center of Chicago as a distinct but important part of the Menominee Nation. After this recognition, the Community Center was designated as a non-profit tribal program. The efforts by both those on the reservation and the urban Menominee community members in the creation of the center demonstrates the continued connections between Menominee peoples and the lands and family they have on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin.

This mural, titled "Indians Cede the Land" is one of hundreds of WPA murals across Chicagoland, many of which depict Native people. WPA (The Works Progress Administration) murals were a part of the New Deal program under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Murals like this allow passerby to quickly take in the story and narrative which they display. Typically showing the development of the U.S. from early interactions with Indigenous peoples, western expansion, and modern industry, these murals include Native people but strip them of all information which would make them significant to U.S. or Indigenous history. Rather than capture the complicated history of Indigenous-settler interactions and the transformation of Native land, this mural reduces it to an easily digestible story of progress. By commemorating Indigenous peoples as only located in the past or at a particular point wherein they encountered European settlers, the murals erase Indigenous peoples, or position conquest and removal as a necessary developmental step in the unfolding of U.S. history.  Representations (and misrepresentations) of Native history and people are present across public art and architecture in Chicago. Other aspects of the built environment feature colonial narratives that marginalize Native people or erase them altogether. On this map, we have selected a examples of iconography to feature, but you can see a full map of many more sites across Chicago here.

St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians was founded by Father Peter John Powell in 1961 after he began assisting Native people who had moved to Chicago through the Bureau of Indian Affairs's Voluntary Urban Relocation program (1952-1972). Powell started providing this assistance out of St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church on Chicago’s West Side in the mid-1950s, and prior to this, he had been involved with the American Indian Center as both a supporter and member of the board of directors.  St. Augustine’s began as a series of assistance programs and in its first few years handled over 10,000 cases that included grocery, employment, lodging, clothing, and general assistance for Native families or individuals. It also provided tutoring and cultural programs. After Father Powell resigned from the position of Director of St. Augustine’s in 1971, the position was taken up by members of the Chicago Native community. Board members and directors included Matthew Pilcher (Ho-Chunk), Amy Skenandore (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), Elmira McClure (Ojibwe), and Arlene R. Williams (Oneida). Under Amy Skenandore (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), Bo-Sho-Ne-Gee Drop-In Center was founded under the umbrella of service provided by St. Augustine's to assist community members struggling with addiction and food security. St. Augustine’s also continued to assist people in receiving healthcare and sponsored community events like baby showers. St. Augustine’s continued to serve the Chicago Native community until 2006. When it closed, it had served over 6,000 Native families.

The Institute for Native American Development (INAD) was founded in 1979 after Truman College received a $27,920 grant from the Illinois State Board of Education's Department of Adult, Vocational, and Technical Education. Michael Limas (Diné) proposed the grant and acted as INAD's first director. Under Limas's leadership and INAD's mostly Native staff, the previously low enrollment of Native students in the Chicago City College system gradually rose.  INAD focused on the specific circumstances each student faced to attend college, and organized from this approach within the typical structures of a college. Despite facing budget cuts that limited the extent of support they could offer, the program focused on academic counseling, financial aid, and job placement. By the time INAD was shut down and merged with other services to help students of all backgrounds in 2002, it had enabled almost 2,300 Native people to attend Truman College.

Our final stop on this walking tour is the Defense, a sculpture representing the Battle of Fort Dearbon, which is an event that looms large in the collective memory of Chicago. Represented by one of the four stars on Chicago's flag, the Battle has been positioned as a "founding moment" in the city's history.  However, before discussing the battle, it's important to understand the context of Fort Dearborn, a military outpost built in 1803. Though the fort no longer stands, plaques on the ground around you show the outline of where the fort once stood. When the fort was built, it existed within only six square miles of land that had been ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. In the decade after the fort was built, Neshnabé (Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa) people living in the area began to increasingly see it as a threat to their land and lifeways. These groups contested the Treaty of Greenville and argued that no representatives from Chicago were present at the treaty signing, and they grew increasingly frustrated with white settlers who had begun to farm the land and disrupt the environment that Native people had long maintained. These tensions erupted in the Battle of Fort Dearborn.  The Battle itself did not take place at the Fort, but about a mile and a half south on the shores of Lake Michigan, on August 15, 1812. It ended in the death of more than fifty American soldiers, women, and children and fifteen Potawatomi fighters. The violence is often positioned as a random act of violence and has been used throughout history to cast Native people as savage, but in reality, it was one of several violent engagements during this time period in which Native people fought on both sides, and it was part of a much larger intertribal resistance movement coordinated by Shawnee leader Tecumseh against American invasion.  In June of 1812, Tecumseh and his allies laid out a plan to attack several American forts later that summer: Fort Madison in present-day Iowa, Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison in present-day Indiana, and Fort Dearborn at Chicago. 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 Captain Nathan Heald was ordered to evacuate Fort Dearborn. Tecumseh and his allies learned of this planned evacuation, and decided that this was the right time to execute their attack on the fort. The night before the battle, a wampum belt was delivered to Potawatomi leader Mad Sturgeon signaling war should begin.  On the morning of the evacuation from the fort, Potawatomi fighters, along with Kickapoo, Sauk, and Ho-Chunk allies, attacked the convoy of American soldiers, civilians, and their Myaamia allies who were leaving the fort. In the centuries following the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the story of this event has been told and retold in various ways, but the most common narratives dehumanize Native people and stoke resentment against them. The term “massacre” comes from one of the earliest published histories of Chicago, Wau-Bun, by Juliette Kinzie in 1856. This myth took on further life during the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, when fair commissioners sought to tell a story that cast the city of Chicago as resilient in the face of disaster. The city was just twenty years removed from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the myth of the “Fort Dearborn Massacre'' provided useful inspiration. Today, representations like those in "The Defense" continue to cement a story of Indigenous violence within the myth of the city’s founding.