Indigenous Chicago Digital Maps
These maps reinterpret Chicago's history from Native perspectives. Within each map are numerous external links. If you are using the maps in the gallery, you may experience difficulty getting back to the home page. If you would like to navigate external links, please use the QR code to the right to access this site on your mobile device.
Native Place Names
This map shows some of the many place names for significant locations across the central Great Lakes. Native communities have lived on these lands since time immemorial and continue to hold reciprocal relations with these places. The names they have given these locations attest to Native peoples' relationships with them.
Where possible, we have included the English translations for each name, a sound clip, and a source.
Travel Routes
This map shows some of the many routes that Indigenous communities and individuals traveled through the continental interior for diplomatic, ceremonial, economic, cultural, and other purposes. Many of these routes passed through or near the Chicago region, where portages connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. These routes are identified by terms from several Indigenous languages that reflect intimate, intergenerational relationships with these landscapes. Neither the specific routes nor the particular Indigenous languages included are meant to be exhaustive and we hope viewers will contribute their knowledge of and names for these routes.
Village Sites
This map shows permanent Indigenous village sites, as well as temporary camps and sites for seasonal labor in the Chicago area from the pre-contact period to the mid-19th century. Relying on archaeological data alongside contemporary Native knowledge, we have separated larger, more permanent sites from more temporary camps and sites for community labor. Where the information exists, we have included information about leaders that lived at these sites, the time periods they were occupied, and the tribal nations who lived there.
Treaties
This map shows the eight treaties that either ceded land in what is now northeastern Illinois or were negotiated at Chicago. It also highlights land that was never ceded by treaty.
Treaties are nation-to-nation agreements, in this case, made between the United States and tribal nations. While some treaties were made to end conflicts, others were coerced, made on unequal footing, and later broken. But it's too simple to say that Native nations didn't know what they were signing or didn't understand land ownership. Indigenous communities had long-standing practices for recognizing territorial boundaries that pre-date colonization, and they made difficult decisions that considered the interests of future generations. Treaties are binding agreements that uphold legal obligations still intact today.
Removal
This map shows removals in or near the Chicago region or removals of tribal nations whose homelands include Chicago. It depicts approximate removal routes based on primary and secondary historical accounts.
The removal routes featured here represent only the first stages of Indian Removal (1830 - 1851) out of the Great Lakes. However, these communities were subjected to more removals as the nineteenth century progressed to places as far south as present-day Oklahoma. Some of these removals were directly orchestrated and overseen by US officials, while in other cases, communities made the difficult decision to leave a place for the safety of their communities and the well-being of future generations. Even when removals were not directly overseen by U.S. troops, they were still forced departures from land as a result of settler colonialism. Removals of any kind were often deadly, tragic events.
Landscape Change
This map reconstructs the landscape and waterways of Chicagoland at the moment when Native people were removed from the city, and just before drastic changes were made to Chicago's land and waterways. That these changes happened as removal took place is not a coincidence—the proposed changes to Chicago's landscape motivated the forced removal of Native people. This map is an ongoing project. At present, we have completed the mapping of Lake County, Illinois and much of Cook County, Illinois, as well as major waterways in surrounding counties.
Relocation
This map shows the many places Native people traveled from when they moved to Chicago as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’s voluntary relocation program in the mid-twentieth century. This program was part of the U.S. government’s broader campaign to assimilate Native people by removing them from their home communities, but it failed. Those who moved to cities like Chicago created new intertribal communities of mutual aid and support, and this diversity is reflected in Chicago’s contemporary Native population.
Federal records are limited, and therefore, this map is not exhaustive. If possible, we have recorded the tribal nation an individual was from, but in many records, the only information we have is what town, school, or Indian agency they were transferred through. The number of people who relocated from a specific place is represented by the thickness of the lines representing travel routes.
Iconography
This map shows examples of the many representations of Native people and histories that exist across the Chicagoland area in statues, monuments, signage, architecture, and other types of public art. The vast majority of these representations romanticize, misrepresent, or minimize the contributions of Native people. Others do not include Native people at all, but celebrate colonialism or depict narratives of “discovery.” Native people have long critiqued representations like these and created their own public art to celebrate Native teachings and lifeways. We have striven to represent all of these types of iconography across the map.