Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is built on ancestral homelands of Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Myaamia, Hoocak, Menominee, Meskwaki, Sauk, Iowa, Inoka, and Kickapoo peoples. These lands have been and continue to be sites of love and life for Indigenous families, but also where colonial and U.S. (United States) genocidal policy led to violence, dispossession, and forced removal from Illinois.
The Chicago area was at different points home to the various peoples listed above. Chicago has long been a complex, multicultural, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan place. A list of ten Indigenous communities emerges that have called this area home. This list above serves to highlight the scale of Indigenous erasure.
IHMEC staff worked closely with members of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative (CAICC), and faculty of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, Northwestern University to develop this acknowledgement.
Photo credits: David Seide