Kekek is such a great name. Who was Cooper anyway?
Chicago today is home to many Indigenous people. On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we share some works that delve into the Indigenous history of Chicago. Follow the links to explore them.
Chicago has been a crossroads for thousands of years, due in part to its portages. Many tribes have been living here and doing business here. Indigenous villages might have had members of more than one tribe (and occasionally French fur traders) living in them. The Newberry Library exhibit, Indigenous Chicago, has a website with some excellent new maps that show the Indigenous history of Chicago - people and places.
When viewing these maps, some may be shocked at how many forced expulsions of tribes occurred locally - in the 1830s, 1840s and earlier - by the US Army. Some know about the Trail of Tears, and maybe the Trail of Death. The website of the Myaamia tribe has a very moving day-by-day account of their cruel journey in 1846.
Image by Sunshine Soledá de Vries
In the early- and mid-1800s, the young U.S. saw a spree of renaming birds after naturalists and others, during the same time its Army was forcibly removing indigenous people from their homes. Here’s an excerpt from a great podcast that touches on bird names, and features two ornithological workers wrestling with how to rid their field of the colonialism that still infects it.
Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza: “So, you miss a lot of educational opportunities on having names that reflect vocalizations or some kind of movement or whatever, right? A feature that can be easily told in the field.”
Kristina L. Cockle: “The whole idea that the point is to discover something and then give it a name is a very colonial endeavor …For Europeans… it was ‘I discovered this bird by shooting it and taking it to a museum so therefore I’m going to name it’ …In fact those birds already had indigenous names that explained their behavior and their vocalization and were probably being used by indigenous people to hunt the bird or to show the European naturalist where the bird was… Part of laying white people's claim to the land was to collect and name birds.”
Today there is an effort underway to change the eponymous bird names to names that describe the species.
We also want to note that this year, Illinois has federally-recognized indigenous tribal lands for the first time since the 1800s.
On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we invite you to reflect on our shared history and how we engage with the bird of this Land. Comments are allowed on this blog; please share your thoughts. Thanks for reading.