Our History

Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Columbus Day)

Four hundred years, fifteen hundred deals, one city in the middle. Today we write for The Nations.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude for Chicago Register · Monday, October 12, 2026

Look at your calendar. Today has two names on the same square. Columbus Day. Indigenous Peoples’ Day. One man and every nation he never met, sharing a Monday.

Now say the name of the city we live in. Chicago. Shikaakwa. Ask what it means and you’ll get a fight. Wild leek, wild onion, skunk, depending on who you ask. Every one of them comes back to the smell along that river in spring. The French wrote down what they heard and moved on. Nobody asked the people who said it first. That’s where we start. With what got kept and what got taken.

The name stayed. Did anything else?

The Dutch showed up on the Hudson River in the 1620s. The Americans called off formal treaty making in 1871. Outside powers and influences made somewhere north of fifteen hundred deals with the nations of this continent. Purchases, councils, promises, treaties, agreements by other names. The United States alone ratified about 370 of them. We went looking for one that was kept the way the nations understood it when they agreed to it. We couldn’t find one. Historians like to argue about how to count “broken.” We hope you will find that argument as pathetic as this newspaper does.

When the payments come late or short, when the land that was reserved “forever” shrinks every few years, when the hunting rights vanish the minute settlers show up, when a deal gets signed by half a tribe or by men nobody chose, the word you use for it doesn’t change much. Formal treaty making was called off in 1871. Purchases, councils, promises, and agreements are the other surnames.

So this isn’t a story about paper. It’s a story about people, and about how the same squeeze got put on nation after nation for three hundred years until it reached the mouth of a muddy river on Lake Michigan and built a city on top of them.

We’re going to give The Nations a voice today.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, first.

The Nations were not one people. They were dozens of nations with their own languages, their own politics, their own grudges and their own wars. The Haudenosaunee, the Five Nations the French called the Iroquois, fought the Wendat. The Illinois fought just about everybody at one point or another. Nations raided nations, took captives, pushed each other off land. Human beings did what human beings do. That’s not a footnote. It’s the whole key. Because the outside powers didn’t invent the fault lines between the nations. They found them, leaned on them, and widened them until the ground split. But the nations also had something the Europeans never really understood, or understood perfectly well and chose to ignore. A deal, to them, was not a sale. It was a relationship. You didn’t sign it once and walk away. You came back. You talked. You exchanged gifts. You renewed it. The Haudenosaunee had a picture for this. Later, when they made their great alliance with the English, they called it the Covenant Chain, and they said a chain like that has to be polished. Leave it alone and it rusts. So every so often both sides were supposed to meet, have a sit down, talk through what had gone wrong, and polish the chain.

A Trading Post on the Hudson

The first big door opened in 1624, about 160 miles up the Hudson River, at a place the Dutch called Fort Orange. Today it’s Albany, New York. The Dutch West India Company didn’t come for land. Not at first. It came for beaver. Europe had gone crazy for felt hats, and the best felt in the world came from beaver fur. A beaver pelt in the woods was worth a few knives or a kettle. The same pelt in Amsterdam was worth a lot more than that. Somebody was going to stand in the middle of that gap and get rich. The Dutch planned to be that somebody. They built a small fort, stocked it with goods, and waited for the furs to come to them.

Two nations lived closest to that door. The Mahican on the east and the Mohawk to the west, the easternmost of the Five Nations. Both wanted to be the ones standing next to the Dutch, because whoever stood next to the door controlled what went in and what came out. Everybody else would have to go through them. So they fought over it. The war over who got to stand next to the trading post ran from about 1624 to 1628. In 1626 the Dutch commander at Fort Orange, a man named Daniel van Krieckebeeck, decided to help the Mahican and marched out with a few soldiers. The Mohawk killed him and most of his men. Think about that. Two years in, the company’s own man picked a side and died for it. The Dutch learned a lesson from that. Pick the winner. The Mohawk won. The Mahican were pushed east, off the river.

Then the guns came.

At first the Dutch sold metal goods. Axes, kettles, knives, cloth. All of it changed daily life in the villages, and all of it made the nations need the trade a little more each year. By the 1640s the Dutch at Fort Orange were selling guns to the Mohawk. Not a few. Hundreds. The French to the north were careful about arming their allies. The Dutch, out on the edge and worried about their own skin, weren’t careful at all.

Here’s where it stops as a trading post story.

The beaver ran out. The Mohawk and their brothers in the Five Nations had trapped their own country so hard to feed Fort Orange that by around 1640 there wasn’t much left. But the Dutch still wanted furs, and the Five Nations still needed the goods, and now they had guns.

So they went west to get them.

What followed gets called the Beaver Wars. In 1649 the Five Nations destroyed the Wendat, the French allies around Georgian Bay, and scattered the survivors. Then the Petun, then the Neutral, then the Erie. Whole peoples broken up and sent running. Nations who had lived in what’s now lower Michigan fled west across Lake Michigan into Wisconsin to get out of the way. The Potawatomi were among them.

Remember that name. The Potawatomi will be standing at the mouth of the Chicago River two hundred years later, and part of the reason they’re there is that a war that started over beaver hats on the Hudson pushed them around the lakes.

By 1680 the war reached the Illinois country. A Five Nations war party hit the great village of the Illinois on the river near Starved Rock, a couple of hours southwest of where we are sitting. Fifty-six years after a trading post opened in Albany, the shock wave had traveled a thousand miles to our backyard. They just had to keep buying beaver, keep selling guns, and let the nations do the rest. The money stayed in Amsterdam. The bodies in the woods.

The Haudenosaunee remember that first relationship with the Dutch a different way. They carry a wampum belt called the Two Row. Two purple lines running side by side on a white field. One line is a canoe, the nations. The other is a ship, the Europeans. Two vessels on the same river, side by side, neither one steering the other. That was their idea of the deal. Live next to each other. Trade. Don’t try to run each other’s boat. The Dutch almost always get a pass in the history books. The English and British get blamed, the French get romanticized. The Dutch get remembered for Manhattan and tulips. But the first gun pipeline into the interior ran through a Dutch counter. The first company that figured out you could let the nations fight over your front door ran out of Amsterdam.

When the English took the colony in 1664, they renamed Fort Orange as Albany and kept the whole system running. New owners.

The Mahican, the people who lost the fight to stand next to the door, never stopped moving. East to Massachusetts, then to New York again, then out to Wisconsin. Today their descendants are the Stockbridge Munsee Community in Shawano County, Wisconsin, a few hours north of Chicago. They crossed half a continent and ended up closer to us than to the river they started on.

The French

Up north, the French were running a different store with the same shelves.

Samuel de Champlain picked his side early. In 1609 he went south with his Wendat and Algonquin allies and fired his gun into a group of Mohawk at the lake that now carries his name, killing chiefs on the spot. The French were smarter about the long game than the Dutch. There weren’t many of them. They couldn’t hold the continent with soldiers. So they learned to hold it with relationships. The nations called the French governor Onontio. Every year the French handed out guns, powder, cloth, kettles, brandy and silver. To the French it was the cost of doing business. To the nations it was the polish on the chain, proof the relationship was still alive. The first was brandy. Liquor ran through the fur trade like water. Some French priests begged the crown to stop it, because they could see what it was doing to the villages. The traders kept pouring, because a drunk man trades cheap. That fight, the priests against the brandy, went on for decades, and the brandy mostly won.

The second was faith. Black robes, the Jesuits, went where the traders went and sometimes ahead of them. One of them, Jacques Marquette, came through here with Louis Jolliet in 1673, crossing the little stretch of wet prairie between the Des Plaines River and the Chicago River.

The six mile portage that connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.

The two of them saw it and understood immediately what it was worth. Whoever controlled that little muddy carry could move goods between Quebec and the Gulf of Mexico.

The nations knew that. They’d been using it for centuries.

Here’s a story most Chicagoans have never heard, because it doesn’t flatter anybody.

West of us, the Meskwaki sat on the other great carry, the Fox and Wisconsin rivers route between Green Bay and the Mississippi. They charged a toll. French traders who wanted to pass had to pay, and the Meskwaki didn’t let the French arm their enemies to the west for free. The French couldn’t stand it. A nation running its own tollbooth on the French road. So the French spent most of thirty years, from about 1712 into the 1730s, trying to destroy the Meskwaki. They turned the Meskwaki’s neighbors against them. In 1730 French soldiers and their allied nations caught a large Meskwaki group out on the Illinois prairie, men, women and children, and killed hundreds of them. The Meskwaki survived. Barely. They joined with the Sauk. Their descendants live in Iowa today, on land they bought back themselves in the 1850s.

When a European crown charges a toll on a road, we call it a tariff.

When a nation does it, it’s a reason for war.

1763, The Year the Gifts Stopped

In 1763 the French lost the war with Britain and handed over everything east of the Mississippi. Not to the nations who lived there. To the British. The nations weren’t at the table. They weren’t even told until it was done.

The British general in charge, Jeffery Amherst, looked at the French gift system and saw a waste of money. To him the presents were bribes. Why keep paying people who’d lost? He cut the gifts. He cut the powder and shot the nations needed to hunt. To the nations, that wasn’t a budget decision. It was the other side saying the relationship was dead. It was a declaration that they were now just people living on somebody else’s property. An Odawa leader named Pontiac pulled together nations from all over the Great Lakes, and that spring they hit the British forts one after another and took most of them. It was the closest thing to a united front the nations had built yet.

At Fort Pitt, where Pittsburgh is now, the British officers had a smallpox ward. A trader there named William Trent wrote in his journal that they gave two visiting Delaware men two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. Then he wrote, in his own hand, “I hope it will have the desired effect.”

That line is in the record. Nobody had to make it up.

London panicked and drew a line down the mountains, the Proclamation Line of 1763, telling colonists not to settle west of it. It was a line on a map that nobody on the ground planned to respect. Colonists poured over it. Speculators back east were already buying up claims to the land on the far side.

And it wasn’t just the British out here. Eighteen years later, in 1781, a Spanish force came up from St. Louis, crossed northern Illinois in the dead of winter, and raided the British post at Fort St. Joseph, in what’s now Niles, Michigan, right in the middle of Potawatomi country.

Spain, France, Britain, and soon the Americans, all moving through the same woods and villages, with gifts in one hand and something else in the other.

The Americans

In 1783 Britain signed the peace that ended the American Revolution and handed the new United States everything from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. The nations who lived on that land weren’t at the table in Paris. Again. Same city, twenty years apart, same empty chair. Britain gave away country it didn’t own, to people who didn’t live there, without asking the people who did.

In 1791 a confederacy of nations led by Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee caught an American army under Arthur St. Clair in western Ohio and destroyed it. Hundreds of American soldiers dead. To this day it’s one of the worst defeats the United States Army has ever taken, worse in proportion than Little Bighorn, and I never learned about it in school.

Three years later at Fallen Timbers, near today’s Toledo, an American army under Anthony Wayne beat the confederacy. The warriors fell back to the British fort nearby, Fort Miamis, expecting their ally to open the gates.

The British kept the gates shut. The nations had been counting on Britain. Britain had decided they weren’t worth a war with the Americans.

The next year, 1795, the nations signed the Treaty of Greenville and gave up most of Ohio. And tucked into that treaty is the first time this city shows up in an American deal.

The nations agreed to give up “one piece of land six miles square at the mouth of the Chikago river.” A spot for a fort.

That’s the birth certificate for Chicago. Six square miles, carved out of a loss.

The Debt

The fort went up in 1803. Fort Dearborn. Same year, the President of the United States wrote a letter.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, and marked it private. In it he laid out the plan in plain English. The government would push its trading houses out among the nations, and he said they’d “be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”

The man who wrote that all men are created equal wrote, in a letter he didn’t want anybody else to read, that the plan was to get the leaders in debt and collect the debt in land.

You know this play. If you’ve ever had a credit card, you know this play. It’s the company that’s happy to let you run a tab.

Harrison ran with it. Over the next several years he signed deal after deal, often with whichever chiefs would sign, whether or not their people agreed. In 1809 at Fort Wayne he got about three million acres in Indiana and Illinois from a handful of leaders.

Tecumseh | The man who said the land belonged to The Nations

Tecumseh was a Shawnee who’d been fighting the Americans since he was a teenager. His idea was simple and it terrified Washington. No single nation, and no single chief, had the right to sell land, because the land belonged to all the nations together. If one chief signed, it didn’t count. Every nation had to agree, or nobody could sell.

He wasn’t wrong about the play being run on them. The deals that worked best for the buyers were the ones made with one village, one faction, one chief who’d been gifted and wined and put in debt. Divide them, sign them one at a time, and you never have to face all of them at once. Tecumseh saw it clearly and tried to fix it by making them one.

When Harrison met him at Vincennes in 1810, Tecumseh is reported to have said, “Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth?”

It’s a fair question this paper thinks.

He and his brother, a prophet named Tenskwatawa, built a town in Indiana where people from many nations came to live together. Prophetstown.

In 1811, while Tecumseh was away in the south recruiting, Harrison marched on it and burned it. Tippecanoe.

Harrison rode that battle all the way to the White House thirty years later. “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”

Tecumseh sided with the British in the War of 1812, because who else was there? In August 1812 the Americans abandoned Fort Dearborn and tried to march out. They got about a mile and a half down the lakeshore, near today’s 18th and Prairie, before Potawatomi warriors hit the column. Dozens died, women and children among them, and the fort burned. For almost two hundred years the city has called it a massacre. It was a war. The Potawatomi were fighting for their own ground, a year after Harrison burned Prophetstown, against an army that had come to take the land out from under them. They had every right to. Today the park on that spot calls it a battle. Same morning, different pen.

It’s also one of the four red stars on the Chicago flag. Next time you see one hanging off a porch, look at the first star. That’s this.

In October 1813 Tecumseh was killed in Ontario. The British, once again, did not hold.

And when that war ended in 1814, the treaty between Britain and the United States talked about the nations, but the nations had no way to make anybody honor it. Britain went home. The nations were alone with the Americans.

Tecumseh’s idea, that they had to stand as one, died with him.

Chicago

Now we’re home.

After the war the Americans rebuilt Fort Dearborn and came back for more. A deal in 1816 took a strip of land running southwest from the lake, because somebody already had a canal in mind, a ditch through the old carry to connect the Lakes to the Illinois River. Another in 1821, signed right here in Chicago, took much of southwest Michigan.

At that 1821 council a Potawatomi leader named Metea stood up and said no. He told the American commissioner, Lewis Cass, that the nations had sold enough land, that the land was given to them by the Great Spirit, and that they could not keep selling it away from their children. The deal went through anyway.

By the early 1830s the little settlement around the fort was full of traders, most of the traders held paper on the nations. Debts for goods given on credit. The tab Thomas Jefferson had been so glad to see run up was about to come due.

In 1832 the Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back across the Mississippi into Illinois to plant corn on land he said had never been fairly sold. The army and the Illinois militia chased them up into Wisconsin and slaughtered most of them at the Bad Axe River, many of them trying to swim the Mississippi to get away. The Chicago Blackhawks got the name in 1926 from its first owner, Frederic McLaughlin. He’d served in World War I with an Army division nicknamed the Blackhawk Division, after Black Hawk. So the name runs from the man, to the army that hunted him across Illinois and Wisconsin, to an army unit named after him, to a hockey team. A young Abraham Lincoln even signed up for the militia that chased him.

A Potawatomi leader named Shab-eh-nay, the settlers spelled it Shabbona, rode around northern Illinois warning white families that war was coming so they could get out. I never learned about this in school.

Black Hawk was captured and paraded through eastern cities. In 1833 he dictated his life story, and in it he said the thing the nations had been trying to say for two hundred years.

“My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil.”

So long as they occupy it. Remember that. Somebody else is going to use those exact words against his neighbors later.

That same year, 1833, the United States called the Council of Three Fires, the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe, to Chicago to sign away what was left of their land around the lake.

Here’s the part nobody talks about. On 12 August 1833 the town of Chicago organized itself. Elected trustees. Made itself official. The treaty that signed the land away wasn’t signed until 26 September. Six weeks later.

The town showed up before the deed did.

That’s not a technicality. That’s the whole story of this place. Chicago wasn’t founded on empty land that somebody bought. It was issued on top of land that was already full of people, by men who already knew how the meeting was going to end.

An English traveler named Charles Latrobe was in town for the council, and he wrote down what he saw. The village packed with thousands of Native people camped all around. Traders, horse dealers, liquor sellers, men chasing claims, all crowding in on the payout. He was not impressed.

The nations gave up about five million acres. In return they got promises of land west of the Mississippi, annuities, goods, and money. And a big piece of that money went straight to the traders. The treaty set aside $150,000 to pay off claims against the nations, and the claims came in at about $175,000. Part of the price of land went right back to the men standing around the table holding the tabs.

The Last Dance

Two summers later, in August 1835, the nations gathered in Chicago one last time before they left.

About 800 men, painted and dressed in their finest, danced through the town along the river. Settlers watched from doorways. Their wives and children watched too, and the women wept. Some of the white people who saw it called it a war dance. Others called it a funeral. John Dean Caton wrote a famous account about it.

Then they left. Most went west, across the Mississippi, to Iowa and later Kansas.

Two years after that, in 1837, Chicago got its city charter. That’s the birthday the city celebrates. Two years after the dance.

If you ever walk the river near Wolf Point, where the branches meet, you’re standing close to where it happened. There’s no plaque that tells you what that day was as far as I know. If there is, send me an email because I would like to see it.

The same pressure fell on everybody. What happened next depended on who you were and what you were willing to do. Here are but three.

Leopold Pokagon led a Potawatomi band in southwest Michigan. He saw what was coming and made a choice. He’d already brought his people into the Catholic church, and at the 1833 council he fought for, and got, the right for his band to stay in Michigan instead of moving west. Catholics, farmers, neighbors. He made his people look like the kind of people the Americans said they wanted around. It worked. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi is still in southwest Michigan today. Write it in the win column. But notice the price. To keep their land, they had to become, at least on the outside, somebody else.

Menominee, a Potawatomi leader on the Yellow River in northern Indiana, made the other choice. When the government came for his band’s land, he refused. Other chiefs signed a deal for it in 1836. He didn’t. He said it plainly, and it was written down. “The President does not know the truth. He, like me, has been imposed upon. He does not know that you made my young chiefs drunk and got their consent, and pretended to get mine. He does not know that I have refused to sell my lands, and still refuse.” In two sentences he named the whole method. Liquor. Men who weren’t authorized. A signature that wasn’t his, counted as if it were.

In August 1838 the governor of Indiana sent General John Tipton and the militia. They called a meeting at the village, told the people they were prisoners, and put Menominee and two other chiefs in a locked wagon. Then they marched about 850 Potawatomi more than 650 miles to Kansas. It took two months. Around forty people died along the way, many of them babies and small children, from bad food, bad water and typhoid. A young French priest, Father Benjamin Petit, went with them and cared for them, and he died from what he caught on that road.

The Potawatomi call it the Trail of Death.

Shab-eh-nay, the man who rode around warning settlers in 1832, did everything right by the Americans’ own standards. He was their friend. He saved their families. In an earlier deal he’d been granted his own reserve of land in what’s now DeKalb County, about 1,300 acres. Around 1849, while he was away in Kansas visiting family, the government auctioned his land off. Congress never approved the sale, which it was supposed to do. He came home and his land belonged to somebody else. He died in 1859 near Morris, Illinois, poor, living on a small piece of ground.

Tecumseh, Pokagon, Menominee, Shab-eh-nay. Four of many. There are hundreds if not thousands more names on a long and neglected list from every nation around these lakes. Metea. Black Hawk. Blue Jacket. Little Turtle. Senachwine. Waubonsee. Some of them have streets and towns named after them now. I will be walking down Menominee shortly.

After the Treaties

In 1871 Congress stopped making treaties with the nations. That sounds like a turning point. It wasn’t. It just changed the name.

After that it was “agreements, executive orders and acts of Congress,” going under new titles. Reservations that had been promised “as long as the grass grows” got cut into pieces. In the 1880s a law broke up reservation land into individual plots and sold off the “surplus” to settlers, and over the next half century the nations lost about two out of every three acres they still had.

The children went next. The government and the churches built boarding schools and took Native kids from their families to “civilize” them. The head of the most famous one, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, summed up the idea in one line. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Faith and schooling, the black robes’ old tool, now with a federal budget.

Here’s why we bring it up. 370 treaties were ratified, you’re hearing the count of one kind of papered title. The deals didn’t stop in 1871. They just stopped being called treaties. Count only what was labeled “treaty” and you miss most of what happened.

The World’s Fair

In 1893 Chicago threw the biggest celebration of Christopher Columbus the world had ever seen. The World’s Columbian Exposition. Four hundred years since he landed. The city that had been a fort, then a mudhole, then a town that burned to the ground in 1871, built a gleaming White City on the lakefront and invited the world.

And The Nations were there.

As exhibits.

The fair had an anthropology section with Native people from around the continent living in model villages so visitors could walk through and look at them. Out on the Midway, the long strip of rides and attractions, the world’s peoples were laid out like a zoo, from the “most civilized” at one end to the “most savage” at the other. Just outside the gates, Buffalo Bill ran his Wild West show, with Native performers acting out the battles their own families had lost, twice a day, for a ticket.

Over at the Art Institute of Chicago that July, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner stood up at a meeting of historians tied to the fair and read a paper that would make him famous. He said the American frontier was closed. The great open land was all settled now. An era was over.

He said it like a milestone. Like crossing a finish line.

Simon Pokagon was also in town that summer.

Leopold’s son. The boy from the band that bent so it could stay. He’d grown up to be a writer, educated, a Catholic, a man who’d spent years in Washington trying to get his people paid what the 1833 treaty still owed them.

He printed a booklet on birch bark, the paper of his own people. The Red Man’s Rebuke.

“In behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.” The whole world had come to celebrate the man whose arrival started all of this, in a city built on his people’s land, on a lakefront where his father’s people had danced their goodbye. One man showed up with his own paper and said no thank you.

The city invited him to speak on Chicago Day that October, the biggest single day of the fair, and he went. He stood up in front of the crowd. They say he rang the replica Liberty Bell. He refused the party and then he came anyway, so they’d have to look at him.

This newspaper calls it having a pair of brass balls.

One fair, two stories. The city’s story of where it came from, and Columbus’s story of where it all started, met on the same lakefront in the same summer, and the only person who brought the nations’ side of it was a Potawatomi man with a booklet made of bark.

The Lakefront

Most of Chicago’s lakefront east of Michigan Avenue didn’t exist in 1833. The city made it, by dumping fill into the lake for decades. Grant Park sits on it. So does a good chunk of downtown. In the early 1900s some members of the Pokagon band went to court and said, very simply, that land didn’t exist when we signed. We never sold it. It’s ours. In 1917 the Supreme Court said no. It said their right to the land had only lasted as long as they lived on it, and they hadn’t lived on the Lake Michigan shore in Illinois for more than fifty years. So long as they occupy it. Black Hawk’s words, from 1833, turned all the way around. They’d lost the land because they didn’t live there, and they didn’t live there because they’d been made to leave. We’re not going to argue the law. It doesn’t matter much. For almost ninety years after that court said no, a statue of Christopher Columbus stood in Grant Park, on that filled-in land.

In the 1950s the same government that marched the Potawatomi out started handing Native families bus tickets back in. It called the program relocation. Leave the reservation, it said, go to the city, there’s work there. Chicago was one of the main stops. People came from all over the country. Many found the jobs weren’t there and the help ran out fast. They stayed anyway. They built their own. In 1953 they opened the American Indian Center, the oldest urban Indian center in the country, and it’s over in Albany Park. Go check it out. Today more than 65,000 Native people live in the Chicago area, from about 175 nations. The third largest urban Native population in America. Chicago never stopped being Native. The government just kept changing who it counted, and where. Illinois, the state whose name comes from the Illinois nation, had no federally recognized tribe at all until April 2024. That’s when the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Shab-eh-nay’s descendants, finally got about 130 acres of his old land placed back in trust as a reservation.

To get it, they literally had to buy it back. It cost them about $10 million.

In 2025 the state handed back the 1,500 acre Shabbona Lake State Park on top of it. Put it in the win column. They outlasted it.

The Meskwaki bought their land back in the 1850s. The Prairie Band bought theirs back in the 2020s. Different century, same answer.

If you want it back, you pay for it.

THE RECORD

We said at the top that this isn’t a story about paper, and it isn’t. Fifteen hundred deals, and the paper was never the point. The paper just recorded who was in the room, who wasn’t, and who wrote it down. Here’s what the record shows, from Albany to the Midway. They found the cracks between the nations and pushed. The Mahican against the Mohawk. The Five Nations against the Wendat. The French and their allies against the Meskwaki. One village against another, one chief against his own people. They ran up the tab and collected it in land.

Thomas Jefferson wrote it down.

They poured the liquor and counted the signatures. Menominee wrote that down.

They paid the go betweens and moved everybody else.

They drew lines on maps nobody planned to respect.

When somebody refused, the soldiers came. At the Meskwaki camp in 1730. At Prophetstown in 1811. At the Bad Axe in 1832. At the Yellow River in 1838. Every deal had a polite meeting at the front and armed men waiting behind it.

Force sits behind all.

The nations kept showing up to polish the chain anyway. Two hundred years of councils, speeches, belts, petitions, lawsuits, birch bark booklets. They kept their end. They kept showing up.

When you drive past Waubonsee Community College or through Shabbona, Illinois, do you know who those men were? Do your kids?

When the city has a fight over a statue, how often do we ask who stood on that ground before the statue did?

If you were made to leave a place, did you abandon it?

And the hardest one. If you’d been Pokagon, Menominee or Shab-eh-nay, which one would you have been? Be honest. Most of us would have bent. Some of us would have been the go between and taken the reserve and the pension. And that’s exactly why it worked for three hundred years.

Here’s what you can do, today, without anybody’s permission. Learn the names of the nations whose land you’re standing on. Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe. Miami. Illinois. Ho-Chunk. Sauk. Meskwaki. Kickapoo. Menominee. Say them like you say Chicago. Drive out to Shabbona Lake, which belongs to the Prairie Band again, and walk it. Go to an event at the American Indian Center. Read The Red Man’s Rebuke. It’s short, and a man made it out of bark so you’d read it.

None of that fixes four hundred years. But polishing the chain was never about fixing it once. It was about showing up.

Every person in this city says their word every day.

It’d be something if we all knew what it meant.

Sources