Native peoples

I noted in a 1983 Illinois Times column that even though what we now call Illinois has been occupied continuously for perhaps 12,000 years, even though there existed near modern East St. Louis an Indian metropolis of as many as 40,000 people which outshone anything white settlers were to build for another 700 years, and even though the state itself bears an Indian name, the series of twelve dioramas unveiled in the 1940s at Springfield’s Illinois State Museum entitled "The Story of Illinois" begins with a scene depicting the arrival of the first white Europeans in 1673.

Remains of the long occupation of Illinois by native peoples are everywhere underfoot, but for decades Indians were less present in history books. Depending on the era, the long Indian interregnum was offered as a preface to the main story of white occupation, an exotic interlude, or a savage struggle for dominance against the primitive.

Some of this was owed to indifference, some of it to racism, some to ignorance of the Native American past. Happily for anyone curious about Illinois, more recent historians of the region have restored native peoples to their human complexity and their social significance.

Nevertheless, the great history of the Indian peoples in Illinois has yet to be written. Until it is, one can learn from several works of quality. Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past by Stuart Struever and Felicia Antonelli Holton (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979) recounts the discovery and exploration of that important archeological site in Greene County. At the time the book set a new standard for popular works on anthropology.

The Indian city of Cahokia figures prominently in the history of Illinois. It has been the subject of many technical studies. One of the best accounts for the layperson is Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis by Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Easily its match is Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat (Penguin Books, 2009).

Shift forward several hundred years and you find yourself in the Illinois that is the subject of Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country by Robert Michael Morrissey (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Morrissey, who teaches at the U of I at Urbana, is especially good on the ways that climate shift altered the lifestyles of the Illini nation, obliging them to adopt ways of hunting, indeed a whole economy, from Indians from the drier grasslands to the west. Judith A. Franke’s French Peoria and the Illinois Country 1673–1846 (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1995) is another authoritative account of that very interesting period.

Historian John Mack Faragher accords the Indian her proper place in the narrative of Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (Yale University Press, 1986). The book examines the frontier era through that Sangamon County settlement south of Springfield where the Kickapoo had a sugaring camp. The fate of the Kickapoo in Illinois also features significantly in Kristin Hoganson’s The Heartland: An American History (Penguin Press, 2019).

While not at all a scholarly account, my history of mid-Illinois has rather a lot about the Indians.

Revised 03/01/2021

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