About the Project

 Chicago is and always has been a Native American place: the city sits on the traditional homelands of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations, and of the Miami, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk nations, and it is home to tens of thousands of Native American people today.

 Archive Chicago is a collaborative, place-based, digital project that takes the city as an archive: a place that holds stories and arranges them in ways that give them meaning and power.  Far from closed, dusty places of the past, archives create, contest, and recirculate stories.  In the case of Chicago, the most visible narratives are those the city tells about itself as a pioneer space of progress and industry.  But the city has always been and still is an Indigenous place.  Chicago also holds the stories created by Native American playwrights, poets, dancers, artists, museum staff, and educators. These stories frame the city as home and as a space of artistic creation and experimentation; they intervene in stories of absence and disappearance by bringing Indigenous histories into the present and imagining Indigenous futures in Chicago.

The essays that follow were created by Northwestern University undergraduates, who worked collaboratively and with the guidance of advisors from Chicago’s Native American community.  The essays examine the work of Native American artists and activists to understand how their work represents and interacts with Chicago.  We hope to ask Northwestern students and our readers to be accountable to Chicago’s Native American people and stories.  By taking the city as archive, we put into practice the idea that knowledge resides not just in institutions or books but in people and places, and we bring together place-based research with practices of close reading and collaborative writing.

Archive Chicago is supported by a W Award from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.