Indigenous Chicago
Chicago has always been a Native place.
Home to the Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Myaamia, Wea, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Ho-Chunk peoples, the place we now call Chicago has long been a historic crossroads for many Indigenous people and remains home to an extensive urban Native community. Yet most Chicagoans are unaware of the city’s history as a home to diverse Indigenous peoples and the vibrant Indigenous communities present today. Part of a multifaceted initiative developed in partnership between the Newberry, advisors from the Chicago Native community, and representatives from tribal nations with historic connections to Chicago, this exhibition reflects the dynamic and complex aspects of Native life in Chicago from the seventeenth century to the present. The exhibition draws largely on the Newberry's collection while also showcasing new work by contemporary Native artists, including Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi), Camille Billie (Oneida), and Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk).
Indigenous Chicago is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Originally published in 1893 and 1901, Simon Pokagon's birch bark stories were printed on thinly peeled and elegantly bound birch bark. In this edition, these rare booklets are reprinted with new essays that set the stories in cultural, linguistic, historical, and even geological context. Experts in Native literary traditions, history, Algonquian languages, the Michigan landscape, and materials conservation illuminate the thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge that Pokagon elevated in his stories. This is an essential resource for teachers and scholars of Native literature, Neshnabé pasts and futures, Algonquian linguistics, and book history.
Robert G. Athearn Award from the Western History Association In City Indian Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck tell the engaging story of American Indians who migrated to Chicago from across America to work and emerged as activists. From the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the 1934 Century of Progress Fair, American Indians in Chicago voiced their opinions about political, social, educational, and racial issues.
City Indian focuses on the privileged members of the American Indian community in Chicago: doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. During the Progressive Era more than any other time in the city's history, they could be found in the company of politicians and society leaders, at Chicago's major cultural venues and events, and in the press, speaking out. When Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson declared that Chicago public schools teach "America First," American Indian leaders publicly challenged him to include the true story of "First Americans."
As they struggled to reshape nostalgic perceptions of American Indians, these men and women developed new associations and organizations to help each other and to ultimately create a new place to call home in a modern American city.
City Indian focuses on the privileged members of the American Indian community in Chicago: doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. During the Progressive Era more than any other time in the city's history, they could be found in the company of politicians and society leaders, at Chicago's major cultural venues and events, and in the press, speaking out. When Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson declared that Chicago public schools teach "America First," American Indian leaders publicly challenged him to include the true story of "First Americans."
As they struggled to reshape nostalgic perceptions of American Indians, these men and women developed new associations and organizations to help each other and to ultimately create a new place to call home in a modern American city.
"a tour de force of comics" (Ed Park, The New York Times)
One of the Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2020, as chosen by the American Library Association
One of the Best Books of 2020, as chosen by Publishers Weekly "Fortunately for readers of this raw and intimate graphic memoir, Terry never fully lets go of his youthful vulnerability. . . . Reckoning with sobriety requires connection and humility, as Terry makes the case for with sincerity and beauty, as he ties his recovery to his spiritual homecoming." --Starred Review, Publishers Weekly A brutally honest but charming look at the pain of childhood and the alienation and anxiety of early adulthood. In his memoir, we are invited to walk through the life of the author, Jim Terry, as he struggles to find security and comfort in an often hostile environment. Between the Ho-Chunk community of his Native American family in Wisconsin and his schoolmates in the Chicago suburbs, he tries in vain to fit in and eventually turns to alcohol to provide an escape from increasing loneliness and alienation. Terry also shares with the reader in exquisite detail the process by which he finds hope and gets sober, as well as the powerful experience of finding something to believe in and to belong to at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance at Standing Rock.
After World War II, American Indians began relocating to urban areas in large numbers, in search of employment. Partly influenced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, this migration from rural reservations to metropolitan centers presented both challenges and opportunities. This history examines the educational programs American Indians developed in Chicago and gives particular attention to how the American Indian community chose its own distinct path within and outside of the larger American Indian self-determination movement. In what John J. Laukaitis terms community self-determination, American Indians in Chicago demonstrated considerable agency as they developed their own programs and worked within already existent institutions. The community-based initiatives included youth programs at the American Indian Center and St. Augustine's Center for American Indians, the Native American Committee's Adult Learning Center, Little Big Horn High School, O-Wai-Ya-Wa Elementary School, Native American Educational Services College, and the Institute for Native American Development at Truman College. Community Self-Determination presents the first major examination of these initiatives and programs and provides an understanding of how education functioned as a form of activism for Chicago's American Indian community.
Reassessing the archive of the Black Hawk War, The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the enclosure of Indigenous land, histories of resource extraction, and the literary culture of settler colonialism. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have long treated the conflict as gratuitous, Adam John Waterman argues that the war part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources specifically, mineral lead--and the emergence of new cultures of killing and composition. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi, contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the consolidation of U.S. control over a vital military resource. Rendered as metallic type, Mississippian lead contributed to the expansion of print culture, providing the occasion for literary justifications of settler violence, and promulgating the fiction of Indigenous disappearance.
Treating the theft and excarnation of Black Hawk's corpse as coextensive with processes of mineral extraction, Waterman explores ecologies of racial capitalism as forms of inscription, documentary traces written into the land. Reading the terrestrial in relation to more conventional literary forms, he explores the settler fetishization of Black Hawk's body, drawing out homoerotic longings that suffuse representations of the man and his comrades. Moving from print to agriculture as modes of inscription, Waterman looks to the role of commodity agriculture in composing a history of settler rapine, including literal and metaphoric legacies of anthropophagy. Traversing mouth and stomach, he concludes by contrasting forms of settler medicine with Black Hawk's account of medicine as an embodied practice, understood in relation to accounts of dreaming and mourning, processes that are unforgivably slow and that allow time for the imagination of other futures, other ways of being.
In the heyday of the Anishinaabe Confederacy, the Potawatomis spread across Canada, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Pressured by the westward expansion of the fledgling United States of America, they became the most treatied of any Indian tribe. Forced removals and multiple treaty-era relocations resulted in cultural chaos and an enduring threat to their connections to the ancestors. Despite these hardships, they have managed to maintain (or restore) their rich heritage. Beginning with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, photographer and Citizen Potawatomi Sharon Hoogstraten visited all nine nations of the scattered Potawatomi tribe to construct a permanent record of present-day Potawatomis wearing the traditional regalia passed down through the generations, modified to reflect the influence and storytelling of contemporary life. While the silver monochrome portraits that captured Native life at the turn of the twentieth century are a priceless record of those times, they contribute to the impression that most Indian tribes exist only as obscure remnants of a dimly remembered past. With more than 150 formal portraits and illuminating handwritten statements, Dancing for Our Tribe portrays the fresh reality of today's Native descendants and their regalia: people who live in a world of assimilation, sewing machines, polyester fabrics, duct tape, tattoos, favorite sports teams, proud military service, and high-resolution digital cameras. The Potawatomi nations have merged loss and optimism to reinforce their legacy for generations to come. We learn from the elders the old arts of language, ribbonwork, beading, and quillwork with renewed urgency. Preserving Potawatomi culture, tribal members are translating traditional designs into their own artistic celebration of continuing existence, lighting the path forward for the next seven generations. Dancing for Our Tribe illustrates vividly that in this new millennium, "We Are Still Here."
Almost universally, newly independent states seek to affirm their independence and identity by making the production of new maps and atlases a top priority. For formerly colonized peoples, however, this process neither begins nor ends with independence, and it is rarely straightforward. Mapping their own land is fraught with a fresh set of issues: how to define and administer their territories, develop their national identity, establish their role in the community of nations, and more. The contributors to Decolonizing the Map explore this complicated relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging with recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself. These essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries and three continents--Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Ranging from the late eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth, contributors study topics from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring complications created by the partition of British India and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. A vital contribution to studies of both colonization and cartography, Decolonizing the Map is the first book to systematically and comprehensively examine the engagement of mapping in the long--and clearly unfinished--parallel processes of decolonization and nation building in the modern world.
All the hustle needed to keep going.
- 3½ inch vinyl stickers - Custom shaped die-cut - Gloss laminated for indoor and outdoor use - All three included in every pack.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians has been a part of Chicago since its founding. In very public expressions of indigeneity, they have refused to hide in plain sight or assimilate. Instead, throughout the city's history, the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians have openly and aggressively expressed their refusal to be marginalized or forgotten--and in doing so, they have contributed to the fabric and history of the city.
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their "Indianness." Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.
Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their "Indianness." Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.
The inside story of American Indian life in Chicago
This dynamic social history focuses on Chicago during a thirty-year period of remarkable demographic growth that saw the city's American Indian population increase by twentyfold. James B. LaGrand places the Indian people within the context of many of the twentieth century's major themes, including rural to urban migration, the expansion of the wage labor economy, increased participation in and acceptance of political radicalism, and growing interest in ethnic nationalism. Drawing on community newsletters, periodicals, oral histories, and census materials, this case study demonstrates the profound effects of this pan-Indian identity on both urban and reservation Indian communities.