People and Land Use

The first evidence of humans in the Chicago Region dates back to at least 10,000 years ago, when small bands of nomadic hunters camped on bluffs above the Des Plaines River - the same river that serves as the western boundary to Oakton's Des Plaines campus today. Stone spear tips from these people have been found at Calumet Beach on Chicago's south side. It is likely these early Chicagoans were hunting megafauna like the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) before a warming climate and human hunting pressure combined to drive the species extinct at the beginning of the Holocene epoch (11,700 years ago to present).

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Hunter-gather cultures were established in the region by about 8,000 years ago, and early woodland-inhabiting people lived in the Chicago Region by about 4,000 years ago. These people practiced small-scale agriculture, clearing areas in the woods to grow squash and sunflowers. They apparently traded with other people in far away regions, as evidenced by copper items that originated from near Lake Superior to the north and alligator teeth from the Gulf Coast.

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By about 1,000 years ago, Mississippian people created large villages and cities just outside of the Chicago Region along the Mississippi River to the southwest. Cahokia, just across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis, was the largest city north of central Mexico until Philadelphia reached over 40,000 people in the 1780s. Between 1050 CE and 1100 CE, Cahokia’s population increased from about1,000 people to about 15,000 people. At its peak, archaeologists estimate that as many as 40,000 people lived in the 0.7 square mile central city. The city contained 120 earthen mounds over an area of about 6 square miles, which would have required an estimated 56,500,000 cubic feet of earth to be moved in woven baskets. One of the largest mounds covers 14 acres, rises 100 feet, and was topped by a 5,000 square foot building reaching 50 feet tall. One of the important technological advances that allowed for such a large city to form was the domestication of “The Three Sisters”—maize, beans, and squash—that were grown together in polyculture and provided the basic nutritious sustenance for the civilization. Tobacco and tomatoes were also important crops of the Mississippians.

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By the time Europeans made first contact with Indigenous people of the Chicago Region, in the 1500s and 1600s, the Illini and other descendants of the Mississippian cultures lived near the southern Great Lakes. Most groups were seminomadic and practiced small-scale garden agriculture. Families were part of kinship clans, and clans were loosely confederated into tribes. By 1600, Miami tribes, including the Wea and Piankashaw, inhabited the Chicago Region. To the northwest of the region were the Chippewa, Ottawa, Winnebago, Dakota, and Meskwaki. At this time, the Potawatomi lived in northern Michigan, while the Sauk, Fox, Mascouten, and Kickapoo lived in southern Michigan. The Shawnee inhabited areas to the south and east, and the Illini lived in the Illinois River valley.

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In the 1640s, a group of Potawatomi migrated around the northern end of Lake Michigan to settle near Green Bay, where they allied with their relatives, the Chippewa and Ottawa, to form a confederacy known as “The Three Fires.” The Potawatomi moved south through Wisconsin during the rest of the 1600s, ultimately pushing the Miami and Illini out of the Chicago Region by about 1700. The Potawatomi were the primary Indigenous inhabitants of the region as European settlers began to flock into the Midwest in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

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Indigenous Land and Property Rights

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Land and the resources associated with it were not “owned” by either groups or individuals in Indigenous society. People had “use-rights” to locations where they would garden, fish, gather roots and fruits, and tap sugar maples for sap to make sugar. Villages that had use-rights in a territory permitted others to hunt, fish, and gather there with the permission of those who resided in the territory. Even after the US government imposed allotments and legal titles to land, the resources on the land continued to be viewed by indigenous people as associated with use-rights.

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Indigenous Peoples valued personal property primarily as a means of strengthening social bonds. It was taboo to accumulate lots of material goods by individuals or groups while other community members were deprived of essentials. Food was always shared with kin and needy members of the community. When a hunter killed a deer, they shared the meat by hosting a feast. After a communal hunt, the meat was divided among the families of the participating hunters. Community feasts were frequently held when food was abundant and during the fall harvest. Tools, clothing, and decorative items were given to others as gifts, both to reinforce friendship and to meet a kinship obligation.

 

These systems of economic exchange are best described as "gift economies" which are important historical antecedents and alternatives to our more familiar, transactional market economies full of commodities. Botanist and writer Robin Kimmerer eloquently describes gift economies in her essay,

"The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance:"

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"In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual."

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Indigenous Farming

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Indigenous Peoples in the Chicago Region practiced agriculture for hundreds of years before European contact. Maize (Zea mays) was introduced to the Midwest about 1,200 years ago from the southwestern US and Mexico. Farming was largely the work of women, who farmed together as family groups, but men helped take down trees to create sunny clearings in the woods for “The Three Sisters” gardens. Planting times in the spring were associated with close observations of local plants, with locations often selected by finding plants that required rich soil to thrive. Religious ceremonies were often held at the time of planting. Women used hoes to dig conical mounds in rows. Maize kernels were soaked until they sprouted and then planted by hand deep in the mounds. When the maize showed several leaves, women loosened the earth around the mound and planted seeds of squash (Cucurbita spp.) and beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). The bean vines would climb up the maize stalk, and nitrogen-fixing bacteria (Rhizobium spp.) in the root nodules of the bean plants would add usable nitrogen to the soil. The squash plants would put out broad leaves at the base of the “Sisters mound” and prevent weeds from growing nearby while simultaneously shading the soil and keeping soil moisture high which reduced the need for extra irrigation. Consumed together, beans and maize form a complete protein, supplying all the essential amino acids for humans to build proteins. Often, several different species of maize, beans, and squash were cultivated in the same woodland clearings. Some of the crop was stored in bark barrels underground for lean times. Many groups also grew tobacco for use in important rituals.

 

Please see the following journal article for more nuance on the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and advanced technology of Native American agronomy and plant breeding: Reference. Contemporary Native Americans continue their longstanding agricultural traditions such as plant breeding, seed saving, and seed exchanges, and Indigenous seeds are available for purchase from organizations such as Native Seeds/SEARCH.

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Hunting and Fishing

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Men were primarily responsible for hunting game, although women sometimes hunted small animals. Hunting methods were based on detailed knowledge of the behavior of game animals and included shooting with a bow and arrow or gun and setting traps. Hunters had different arrows for different kinds of animals: small ones for birds, rabbits and squirrels; and large ones for deer, bears, wolves and foxes. Indigenous people to the west of the Chicago Region near the Mississippi River hunted bison in the late summer or fall; a large group of people would drive a herd into an enclosure where the bison could be killed. Hunters used deadfall traps on large animals, such as bears, and made snares for rabbits. Deer were taken by hiding a sharpened stake behind bushy vegetation along a deer trail. The deer would be chased and made to jump over the vegetation, where they were impaled. Beavers traveling over land to scout for trees were often caught when they fell into grass-covered holes dug by hunters. Other aquatic mammals, like otters and muskrats, were also trapped for their meat and their valuable pelts, which were traded widely in the region.

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Indigenous peoples generally believed (and many contemporary Indigenous people continue to believe) that successful hunting was predicated on proper relations with the animal spirits that controlled the animals. Boys often fasted repeatedly before a hunt to obtain a spirit helper to aid them on the hunting trail. Hunters held ceremonies to give gratitude to animal spirits before a hunt, and hunters often carried teeth or claws that symbolized their bond with their spirit helper. Even today, many Indigenous people in the Midwest hunt for subsistence, and tribal game wardens monitor hunting.

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Fish were another abundant and important protein source for Indigenous peoples in the Chicago Region. The lakes and rivers have been fished for thousands of years using techniques that include hooks and lines, spears, and traps. The development of harpoons and the gill net about 1,000 years ago allowed for fishing in deeper lakes. Men did most of the fishing and worked the water year-round. In the spring, fish came to shallow waters near shores to spawn, and when large species like sturgeon congregated for spawning, fishermen speared or harpooned them. At night, they fished for walleye with torches, using the light to reflect off the walleye’s unusually large, opaque eyes to locate the fish. Men also fished through holes bored into the ice in the winter, using nets, spears, and hook and line. They often smoked, salted, or froze the fish to preserve them for longer periods of time.

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European Settlement, Land Theft, Broken Treaties, and US Government Forced Removals

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Indigenous peoples in the Chicago Region initially acted as guides and traded with the first Europeans to enter the area. Many French fur traders married Indigenous women and were essentially adopted into Indigenous kinship groups. As more settlers entered the region, open conflicts became more common. In 1730, the French and their Indigenous allies were defeated by the British near Starved Rock and Utica, Illinois. The British controlled the region until the outcome of the Revolutionary War when the US staked claim to the Northwest Territory, which included Illinois and the Chicago Region. Indigenous cultures rejected the claim and began to raid the farms and wagon trains of white settlers coming into the region.

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In 1794, a group of Indigenous warriors from the Northwest Indian Confederation, including Potawatomi, Chippewa, Ottawa, Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, and Iroquois people, lost a major battle called the Battle of Fallen Timbers to the US military, led by General Anthony Wayne, near Maumee, Ohio. As a result, the Treaty of Greenville forced the Indigenous groups to cede most of Ohio and parts of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois to the US government. At this time, many Indigenous Peoples abandoned their villages and homelands in the Chicago Region. In 1816, the Potawatomi ceded a strip of land 10 miles wide on either side of the mouth of the Chicago River at Lake Michigan, southwest to the headwaters of the Illinois River. In 1833, one year after Chief Black Hawk’s War, the Treaty of Chicago forced all remaining Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa to leave the Chicago Region, and settle west of the Mississippi River on a reservation in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Other forced removals, such as the Potawatomi Trail of Death in 1838 were painful examples of the white supremacist nature of the violent settler colonial project of the United States.

 

The Potawatomi Trail of Death was the forced removal by militia in 1838 of about 860 members of the Potawatomi nation from Indiana to reservation lands in what is now eastern Kansas. The march began at Twin Lakes, Indiana (Myers Lake and Cook Lake, near current-day Plymouth, Indiana) on November 4, 1838, along the western bank of the Osage River, ending near present-day Osawatomie, Kansas. During the forced march of approximately 660 miles over 61 days, more than 40 people died, most of them children. It was the single largest forced Indigenous removal in Indiana history, and was documented by the letters of Father Benjamin Marie Petit, a Catholic missionary at Twin Lakes who accompanied his Potawatomi parishioners on the forced march (Original Letters Here). The forceful removal of the Indigenous peoples of the Chicago Region paved the way for the forceful destruction of much of the region’s biodiversity over the following 200 years. Despite this ugly history of colonialism and genocide, many Indigenous cultures and peoples have persisted, survived, and returned to the area, and Indigenous peoples continue to make this land their homes. Current Indigenous-led social movements like the LANDBACK movement advocate for a re-setting of right relationships in the present for the injustices of the past.

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The Contemporary Chicago Region

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The last two centuries of white settlement in the Chicago Region has caused obvious wholesale changes in the land. Much of the forest along riverways was cleared, and almost all of the prairies were plowed for farmland. One of the world’s largest cities developed on the shore of Lake Michigan, and industrial factories, paved roads, skyscrapers, and suburban subdivisions replaced many of the region’s native woodlands, savannas, prairies, and wetlands. However, there are still significant patches of natural areas left in the region, and it is in these remnant natural areas that the vast majority of the biodiversity of the Chicago Region survives. Though fragmented by farms, streets, shopping malls, office parks, and suburban neighborhoods, many species have been able to hang on despite the massively destructive land-use changes of the past two centuries. For example, the ultra-urban/suburban Cook County has about 70,000 acres of natural areas of variable quality in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, which amounts to 11.5% of the total land area in a county of 5.2 million people. The natural area remnants and restorations on Oakton's Des Plaines campus connect directly with forest preserve land (Kloempken Prairie), and represent important places where we can continue to connect with the land and the rich biodiversity of this part of Turtle Island (North America), as Indigenous people have done from time immemorial.

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