Indigenous Chicago: Community-Engaged Curriculum Development as Public History

AHA Session 221
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Water Tower Parlor (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Rose Miron, Newberry Library
Panel:
Aaron Golding, Northwestern University
Rose Miron, Newberry Library
Meredith McCoy, Carleton College
Josee Starr, Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum

Session Abstract

Chicago is, and always has been, an Indigenous place. As Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Myaamia, Wea, Sauk, Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Kickapoo, and Mascouten homelands, the Chicago area has long been a historic crossroads for many Indigenous peoples and continues to be home to an extensive urban Native community. In January 2020, a group of scholars, staff from the Newberry Library, and Native community members began discussions about a multi-faceted public history project that would explore the Indigenous past, present, and future of the city of Chicago. The group identified shared goals for the project and brainstormed topics and components that would be most impactful for the Native community. Subsequently, we formed an Advisory Group that would help shape the project, including representatives from the tribal nations who were removed from or forced to leave the Chicago area in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The Indigenous Chicago project, which has included an exhibition at the Newberry Library, a set of innovative digital maps, curricular resources for high school classrooms, oral histories with community members, and scholarly and public programming, aims to explore the history of Chicago as an Indigenous place, center Indigenous voices, lay bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesture toward Indigenous futures. The curriculum itself, which will form the primary focus of this panel, introduces five inquiry-driven modules built with primary sources from the Newberry Library’s extensive collections.


This roundtable will highlight Indigenous Chicago’s curriculum as it emerged from our five years of community-engaged resource development, situating it within recent developments for how Indigenous histories are taught in Illinois classrooms. The panel brings together Rose Miron, a non-Native historian of Great Lakes Indigenous history and Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library; Meredith McCoy (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent), Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Carleton College; Aaron Golding (Seneca), Co-Chair of the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative Education Committee and Senior Program Administrator in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University; and Josee Starr (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, Omaha, and Odawa), Director of Operations for the Gichigamiin Museum and former co-chair for the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative Education Subcommittee. Coming from a library, a museum, higher education, and a community organization, each member of our panel brings a different background and perspective to this curriculum and public history project. Golding will introduce recent developments for representations of Indigenous histories in Illinois, including the roll-out of the state’s new mandate to teach Indigenous histories and how community organizations are developing professional development for teachers; Miron will speak to the project as a public history initiative; McCoy will detail the components of the curriculum, including its connections with AP US History; and Starr will discuss the development of the curriculum, its links with other project components, and its significance within the local community.

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