The Chi-Nations Youth Council spoke on the final day of Over the Levee, Under the Plow, the public program for Field Station 2: Anthropocene Drift. We invited this dynamic, youth-led organization because of their work reclaiming Indigenous space, contesting Indigenous erasure, and reasserting Indigenous knowledge in Chicago since 2012.

The United States’ third-largest city, Chicago is also home to more than 65,000 Native Americans from over 150 different tribes—the third-largest urban Indian population in the country, and a legacy of federal relocation programs undertaken during the 1950s. The American Indian Center of Chicago, the oldest urban Indian center in the US, was founded in 1953 to help Native families transition to city life.

Despite their enduring presence, Indigenous peoples remain largely invisible within the city and within Illinois, a state with no federally recognized tribes and no Indian reservations, which stands as a testament to the apparent success of Indian removal efforts that began in earnest in the 1830s following the Black Hawk War of 1832. It is this event that Field Station 2 positioned as the temporal and spatial origin of the Anthropocene in this portion of the Mississippi River Valley.

The City of Chicago, founded in 1833, was a direct product of Indigenous dispossession. It emerged only after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago ceded millions of acres in what is now Illinois and the Black Hawk War supposedly pacified Indigenous peoples to open the region to white settlement. Indeed, the city’s debt to this conflict is evident in the enduring attachment to the Chicago Blackhawks, the local National Hockey League team, whose logo depicts the conquered leader of the Sauk people and contributes to the trivialization and stereotyping of Native Americans.

Chi-Nations, a youth-led grassroots organization, is working to contest the erasure of Indigenous and settler colonial histories. This work has seen the group take a controversial stand against the Chicago Blackhawks logo. In November 2018, the City Council passed a resolution written by Chi-Nations that recognized Zhigaagong (or Chicago) as an Indigenous place. In April 2019, Chi-Nations opened the First Nations Garden in Albany Park on the city’s Northside. “The garden will be a healing space for Native people, a place to grow our foods, and a public teaching and learning hub,” said Chi-Nations co-president Anthony Pochel-Tamez. “With this piece of land, we hope to bring our community back together to heal.”

In coming to Saukenuk, 170 miles west of Chicago, the present-day Rock Island and the homelands of Black Hawk and the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples, Chi-Nations shared their urban, youth-led activism with organizations like the Native American Coalition of the Quad Cities and tribal projects such as the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative. Field Station 2 brought these projects together in order to amplify their work and seed opportunities for ongoing cooperation beyond the timeframe of the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project.