Chicago is, and always has been, an Indigenous place. As Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Myaamia, Wea, Thakiwaki, and Meskwaki homelands, along with several other nations whose homelands intersect with present-day northeast Illinois, the Chicago area has long been a historic crossroads for many Indigenous peoples and continues to be home to an extensive urban Native community. In January 2020, a group of scholars, staff from the Newberry Library, and Native community members began discussions about a multi-faceted public history project that would explore the Indigenous past, present, and future of the city of Chicago. The group identified shared goals for the project and brainstormed topics and components that would be most impactful for the Native community. From there, we formed an Advisory Group that would help shape the project and contacted representatives from the tribal nations who were removed from or forced to leave the Chicago area in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries. The Indigenous Chicago project, which includes a 2024 exhibition at the Newberry Library, a digital mapping website, K-12 curricular resources, new oral histories with community members, and scholarly and public programming, aims to explore the history of Chicago as an Indigenous place, center Indigenous voices, lay bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and point toward Indigenous futures.

This presentation will preview each of these project components, with a particular focus on how Indigenous knowledge and expertise has been prioritized across the project. We aim to show the importance of not just inclusion, but co-creation of projects and reciprocity with the communities an institution hopes to serve. Our panel brings together four members of the Indigenous Chicago project team who are each approaching the project from a different position. These members include Rose Miron, a non-Native historian of Great Lakes Indigenous history and Director of the Newberry’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies; Doug Kiel (Oneida Nation) a historian of Great Lakes Indigenous history and Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University; George Ironstrack (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma), a tribal historian and educator and Assistant Director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University; and Chantay Moore (Navajo Nation), Secretary of the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative and Project Coordinator for the American Indian Education Program in Chicago Public Schools. Audience members will have the opportunity to hear how each of us, coming from a library, a university, a tribally directed research center, and a community organization; brings a different background and perspective to this public history project and has different resources and knowledge to contribute. By speaking about each of our unique contributions to the project, we show how a diverse project team that not only includes but shares authority with the people whose histories are being represented is a critical element in developing public history projects that serve Native communities. We expect the session to provide guidance and best practices to those who are interested in creating similar public history projects about Native history or collaborating with Native nations on other history-related initiatives.