Indigenous Chicago

At Chicago Cane Cooperative, our commitment to worker-ownership guarantees a democratic, equitable workplace for all our employees. And as a worker cooperative that produces rum, our organizational model is a response to that spirit’s legacy of colonial violence and exploitation: rum was developed in and around the Caribbean, where European empires began their conquest of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples; on the same, stolen lands, the transatlantic slave trade emerged in part to provide colonizers’ sugarcane plantations with captive, unpaid laborers. But while we recognize that rum and the sugarcane from which it’s made were pivotal to systems that terrorized tropical colonies, we must also reckon with the settler-colonial nature of our cooperative’s home city and namesake, Chicago.

As with Caribbean islands and the entire United States, Chicago was taken through coercion and force, stolen from Indigenous people by invading settlers of European descent. Though many mainstream histories of the city begin with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century, Indigenous people have lived in and traveled through this region for millennia. A cultural and geographical nexus, the place now called Chicagoland was home to the Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Myaamia, Wea, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Ho-Chunk peoples, who navigated the local portage to access both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River System. For countless generations, these groups coexisted with local wetlands, maintaining the shallow rivers and marshes for their wild rice beds, fish, and fur-bearing aquatic mammals—sources of both nourishment and tradable commodities.

The region’s inherent specialness was long apparent to Indigenous people, and encroaching colonizers were determined to possess and profit from this land. At first, non-Native travelers required Indigenous guides to navigate the complex portage, the seasonally shifting space between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers. Non-Native settlers—trappers and traders like Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—likewise relied on Indigenous people to ensure their success and safety, and many joined local kinship networks through marriage (du Sable married a Potawatomi woman, Kitihawa).

But the tolerance shown by Indigenous people was certainly not repaid by the mass of settlers who flooded Chicago in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, the newly formed United States government ended British restrictions on westward expansion, opening vast regions to invasion by eager, greedy frontiersmen. Although they had successfully resisted Europeans’ attempts to colonize and incorporate the territory, Chicago-area Indigenous people soon suffered new and fiercer campaigns to make their homeland a U.S. territory.

Deception, threats of violence, and actual bloodshed forced Indigenous groups to accept outrageous settlements and sign ruinous treaties. In the case of the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which ceded six square miles around the mouth of the Chicago River, crucial Neshnabé signatories came from other, distant regions and had no right to forfeit land governed by multiple overlapping groups. Later negotiations for the Treaty of Saint Louis exploited the Neshnabék people’s hunger amid the War of 1812 to force further concessions. And though some Neshnabé allied with U.S. forces in the 1832 Black Hawk War, massacres of rebelling Indigenous people pressured the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Chippewa tribes to cede 5 million acres in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. In August 1835, under the supervision of U.S. officials, around 5,000 Neshnabé were forced from their Chicago homeland and removed to western territories.

Along with the immediate traumas of colonial violence, the removal of Indigenous people from Chicago brought the further indignity of environmental devastation. Having already disrupted relationships between Indigenous peoples and local wetlands, colonial forces expelled the ancient caretakers of Chicago’s marshes. Subsequent urbanization and infrastructure projects that radically transformed: the Chicago River was rerouted, the Illinois-Michigan Canal was built to replace the Chicago portage, and drainage efforts along Lake Michigan erased 367,485 acres of natural wetlands.

However, the catastrophes of colonization never completely severed Indigenous peoples’ connection to their Chicago-area homeland, and Indigenous communities have never been absent from the city. In 1910, Chicago’s Indigenous residents numbered just 188, but the later 20th century saw this community greatly expand. Along with economic factors, federal policies like the Voluntary Relocation Program (1952-1972) incentivized people to leave their rural reservations for “assimilated” life in urban centers. Relocation thrust thousands into abject urban poverty, but rather than forcing their assimilation, Indigenous communities forged a new era of intertribal organizing and solidarity. Indigenous-run aid organizations like the Indian Council Fire provided community members with essential services, while other groups emerged to fight for Indigenous rights, recognition and reparations. Today, the greater Chicago area is home to more than 65,000 Indigenous people representing 175 different tribes. They exist as a vital and vibrant force in the city, having made the stolen soil into a site of cultural resurgence and collective anticolonial struggle.