Beautiful Indigenous Women in Ugly Settler Environments: The Visual Politics of the Chicago Indian Village, 1970–72

In May of 1970, Carol Warrington (Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin) was evicted from her home in an ‘Indian slum’ of Chicago after protesting derelict housing conditions through a rent strike. She then moved her six children into a tipi in front of their former home, and within direct view of Wrigley Field. Choosing to be homeless in a political and explicitly Indigenous way the Warrington family started the Chicago Indian Village (CIV), a group of up to 100 urban Indigenous activists who lived together in tipis, campsites, and repatriated buildings in the Greater Chicago Area for two years, in an act of political protest and placemaking.

On the day of her eviction, Warrington decided to pose for provocative news photographs in front of the derelict former home. This first photoshoot set the strategy that marked the next two years of CIV activism. Following Warrington’s lead, female activists presented themselves strategically in spaces marked by colonial containment, and control, including two Nike Missile sites, a frontier-era fort, a national guard training site, and a zoo.

The limited scholarly literature on the CIV has minimized the role of Warrington and other female participants, reducing Warrington’s contributions as merely a result of her inherently photogenic features. These examinations overlook the ways female CIV activists’ strategically juxtaposed their personal beauty against settler environmental ugliness to generate political power. Working through archival newspaper collections and a collection of hundreds of Chicago Sun-Times photographs of CIV, I examine the ways in which female activists manufactured their own political images. I argue that this unique aesthetic form of protest allowed Indigenous women to circumvent reporters' bias toward interviewing male leaders and exploit the non-Indigenous public’s fascination with Indigenous beauty and contemporaneity to assert their own political influence in the news media.