For the last four years, colleagues, the Urban Native community in Chicago, and I have been working on a public humanities project to tell the history of the city now called Chicago through an Indigenous lens. One aspect of this project includes an Exhibition I co-Curated which will open on September 12, 2024 and run until January 5, 2025. Read more below and visit the new Indigenous Chicago website!
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).
Image: An artistic rendering of Chicago’s landscape and waterways by Megan Sekulich (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma). Read more about the piece.
CURATORS
- Rose Miron, Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies
- Analú María López (Huachichil/Xi’úi), Ayer Librarian and Assistant Curator of American Indian and Indigenous Studies
- Doug Kiel (Oneida), Department of History, Northwestern University
- Dave Spencer (Mississippi Chata/Dine), American Indian Center of Chicago
RELATED ADULT EDUCATION CLASSES
- Reinterpreting Historical Photographs of Native Americans (starts September 11)
- Relocation and Native American Self-Determination in Chicago, 1950-1970 (starts September 14)
- Indigenous Chicago (starts September 24)
- Echoes of Tradition, Visions of Tomorrow: Contemporary Indigenous Visual Arts, Fashion, and Performance (starts September 24)
RELATED PROGRAMMING
- Saturday, Sept. 28, 1 pm: Native American Dance and Regalia
- Thursday, Oct. 10, 6 pm: Indigenous Artists and the Archive
- Thursday Oct. 17, 6 pm: Mapping Indigenous Chicago
- Thursday, Nov. 21, 6 pm – Indigenous People and the Chicago Portage
Public Programs at the Newberry are free and open to all. Registration is required.
A NOTE ON OUR COLLECTIONS
The Newberry is home to one of the largest print and manuscript collections related to American Indian and Indigenous Studies in the world. We acquired the items in good faith from what were believed to be their proper owners. Yet we also acknowledge the long history of removal of cultural heritage from American Indian and Indigenous communities, sometimes through inappropriate, exploitative, or unethical means. We recognize this historical context and seek to build reciprocal relationships with the communities from which these items and the knowledge they carry came. Today, we continue to grow the collection to include materials representing Native writers, artists, and activists, while intentionally working with communities to ethically steward materials within the collection.
Though items in the Newberry collection are not subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the library has developed a policy related to culturally sensitive materials so that tribal nations may help determine how materials related to their communities are used.
In the rare cases where it may be appropriate, the Newberry is open to discussing returning items to Indigenous communities. Most recently, the Sisiyutl house plank—one of the only items of Indigenous material culture housed at the library—was repatriated to the U’Mista Cultural Center in 1998 and returned to Alert Bay in British Columbia in 2020, having been housed at the Newberry in the interim at the request of the U’mista Cultural Society.
