Projects
Change through Collaboration
This photo by Dan Battise was part of the Seeing Indian in Chicago exhibition held at the Newberry in 1985. Call number: Ayer Modern MS Seeing Indian
Indigenous Chicago
The Chicago area has long been a historic crossroads for many Indigenous peoples and continues to be home to an extensive urban Native community. Indigenous Chicago is a multifaceted project exploring these histories, centering Indigenous voices, laying bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesturing toward Indigenous futures. It is a living project and archive that will continue to be added to in collaboration with Native communities.
Visit the Indigenous Chicago Website
The goals for Indigenous Chicago have been developed in collaboration with members of the Chicago American Indian community, including youth and elders; tribal representatives from Indigenous nations removed from Chicago; and Indigenous scholars.
The goals include:
- Making the invisible visible
- Advancing the priorities of the Chicago Native community
- Situating Chicago as a Native place since time immemorial
- Growing a community archiving practice
- Serving a broad, multi-generational audience that includes schools, the Native community, and the broader public
- Supporting the growth of the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative (CAICC)
In September 2024, we launched a series of programs and resources on the Indigenous Chicago website that highlight the Native past, present, and future of Chicago:
- An exhibition at the Newberry
- A website with digital mapping and walking tours
- Curricular materials for K-12 students
- New oral histories with community members
- A series of public programs
We began hosting community listening sessions and initiating other forms of community outreach in January 2020 to ensure that Native community members are intimately involved in the project.
If you are interested in future project updates, please email us to join the project's mailing list.
Improving Access to Indigenous Collections
In 2020, the Newberry received a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to improve Native communities' access to the Newberry's Indigenous Studies collections. The initiative includes partnerships with three Native communities to learn how we can better serve their needs and support their priorities.
The partners on this project include the Forest County Potawatomi Nation, the Santa Ana Pueblo Nation, and the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative. We are conducting regular meetings and listening sessions with each community to identify the collection materials that are most important to them. Then, we will determine how we can collaborate with each community to better support tribally-led projects.
We are in the process of examining our own internal practices so we can represent tribal histories and knowledge more accurately and more respectfully.
To aid us in this work, we are consulting Indigenous scholars, organizations, and published materials like the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. So far, we have updated our policy regarding access to culturally sensitive materials, identified and revised racial slurs in catalog records, and added tribally-specific subject headings to improve the searchability of materials in our online catalog.
We envision this grant as only the beginning of a long-standing commitment to supporting the priorities and research needs of Native communities. Through our partnerships and internal review, we hope to learn what is needed to sustain an ongoing outreach and collaboration program operated by the McNickle Center.
News
Newberry Library Will Collaborate with Native Communities to Expand Access to Indigenous Studies Collections
The Newberry Library and a group of tribal and community partners will work together on a multiyear project to expand access to the library’s extensive Indigenous Studies collection.
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The McNickle Center staff are Samantha Majhor (Interim Director), Haku Blaisdell (Associate Director for Outreach and Strategy), and Sarah Jiménez (Program Assistant).