The University of Illinois at Chicago announced recently that it will offer in-state tuition to Native American students residing anywhere in the country. While we applaud this policy change, the challenge to enrolling more Native American students may not be, as some imagine, about their absence from the Chicago area.
In fact, a new report we issued Friday documents that Chicago has the ninth largest urban Native American population in the U.S., the second largest population east of the Mississippi River, and the largest in the Midwest. With more than 38,600 Native Americans in Cook County, Chicago is a significant population center for Native peoples.
This may be a surprise to those outside of Chicago’s Native American community, whose point of reference for Native American Chicagoans is often limited to lifeless representations such as The Bowman and The Spearman statues at the entrance to Grant Park depicting unclothed Native American warriors on horseback, romanticized depictions such as Thomas Cole’s 1830 painting, “Distant View of Niagara Falls,” at the Art Institute, or the Blackhawks logo for the local National Hockey League team. Like these, most images of Native Americans in Chicago provide a narrow view relegating them to a “long-ago” past.
While the original tribes inhabiting the land that is now Chicago were violently displaced over a century ago, shifting federal policies of the 1950s pushed many Native peoples from reservation lands back into large urban areas, including Chicago. On any given day, thousands of Native American Chicagoans move about their daily lives in the city — attending public schools, working jobs, raising families and promoting positive change. Far from a static group fixed in history, the Native American community has always been dynamic and contributed to the social fabric of Chicago. Just a few examples:
The hard work of Chi-Nations Youth Council was central in the recent City Council resolution officially recognizing Chicago as sitting on the ancestral lands of Native Americans. In Albany Park, the American Indian Center and Chi-Nations Youth Council worked with Ald. Carlos Rosa, 35th, to establish Chicago’s First Nations Garden, a space honoring the long history of Native Americans in Chicago. Native American Chicagoans were pivotal in the American Indian Movements of the 1960s-1970s, protesting discriminatory U.S. government policies toward Native Americans. Established in 1953, moreover, the American Indian Center of Chicago is this country’s second oldest urban-based Native American community center.
The strength and resilience of Chicago’s Native American community persists despite numerous challenges — challenges related to the long history of genocide, dispossession and structural racism, but also from continuing marginalization today. Native Americans face disproportionately high rates of homelessness and incarceration in Illinois. In the labor force, they face significant wage disparities, being paid 20% less than similarly positioned whites. Native American students in Chicago Public Schools are more likely to be suspended than whites and also receive lower test scores.
While we find that inequities facing Native Americans are very much not “a thing of the past,” Native Americans in Chicagoland have largely been left out of current local conversations about addressing racial equity.
Native American community groups are diligently tackling issues of housing precarity, job discrimination, health disparities and stereotypical cultural representations, but they do so often with too few resources and too little support.
While we commend UIC for its recent decision to provide access to Native Americans nationally, much work remains to be done locally to provide Native American young people in Chicago and in Illinois a path to prosperity, and we all have a part to play in ensuring that future.
Dr. William Scarborough is a research assistant at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Dr. Amanda Lewis is director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at UIC; and Dr. Angela Walden is a research assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and a clinical assistant professor in the Institute for Juvenile Research at UIC.