In 2019, a research collective called the Settler Colonial City Project was invited to participate in the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Among the work that our collective contributed to the biennial was an atlas of Chicago’s colonial settlement. Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas brings together three geographies that have been at once produced by and held apart by settler colonialism: the geography of Native American displacement in the United States; the geography of colonial land-filling and water-seizing in and around Lake Michigan; and the geography of Chicago’s urban development. Bringing these geographies together allowed us to document the way in which the city of Chicago has been shaped by settler colonialism, as well as the way in which Indigeneity has persisted and thrived even in the context of colonialism’s displacements, dispossessions, and violence.
We entitled our atlas Mapping Chicagou/Chicago in order to reference the way in which settler colonialism not only yielded the city of Chicago but continues to structure relationships between land, people, and the multifarious elements of what in colonial ontology is named as “the environment,” “nature,” or “the natural world.” We also wanted to reflect on the name “Chicago,” which references a French rendering of the Miami-Illinois word for a type of wild onion, the shikaakwa, known in English as ramp. Shikaakwa was later turned into checagou or chicagua, also in reference to a type of garlic that grew in the forests and plains of the region. With the colonization of the place known as Chicagou, along with other related names, the ramps and garlic that were harvested and sustained by Indigenous people in these forests and plains were replaced by wheat, a crop indigenous to the Fertile Crescent brought to North America by British colonialism.
Even as the colonial replacement of shikaakwa by wheat may have been almost total, settler colonialism has yielded practices of displacement, dispossession, and violence that continue to structure the development of Chicago. Mapping Chicagou/Chicago, then, contests the colonial framing of settler colonialism in the United States as merely a historical phenomenon, long since passed in the history of the United States. In fact, our documentation of Chicago as a city located on both occupied and unceded Indigenous land reveals the city’s geography as a product of conflict, violence, and struggle that continue into the present. We therefore pose the maps in Mapping Chicagou/Chicago as a living atlas: counter-geographies of settlement and unsettlement that contests the colonial geography framing colonialism in Chicago as a historical artifact.