Firsting and Lasting in Chicago

Chicago is built through the violent dispossession of Anishinaabe peoples, lifeways and sovereignties. We use the rather ill-fitting term “Native sovereignty” to refer to distinct political and legal orders, including, but not limited to, over 562 current tribal governments in the territories occupied by the United States. However, intellectual and political traditions of Indigenous nations disrupt European definitions of sovereignty and define political life well beyond the nation state and the tribal government form.  Drawing from Anishinaabe political thought, Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte suggests the term “collective continuance” as an expression of Anishinaabe sovereignties and legal orders, which emerge through systematized relationships of reciprocity between human, nonhuman and more-than-human systems. 

Despite the violence of Indian removal, hydraulic engineering and the dismemberment of entire ecosystems, these reciprocities endure in the land. Anishinaabe Akig. You are on Anishinaabe land.

The violent exertion of settler political authority over and against Native land has come to be called Chicago. It  is perpetuated through ongoing violations against the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox nations.  It requires ongoing violations against other-than-human and more-than-human entities, and a violent transformation of the land itself. 

The title of this website is an homage to the analysis of Ojibwa historian Jean O’Brian who demonstrates how settler society attempts to “write Indians out of existence” through processes she called firsting, lasting and replacing. Firsting refers to settlers imagining themselves inaugurating a New world out of an empty place -- through discovery, first arrival and so on. Lasting refers to the ways Native peoples can only be seen in their supposed disappearance. And  "replacing" refers to ways settler society refashions itself as native to place.

This website focuses on Chicago as a territory of ongoing Indigenous dispossession and contestation. We are interested in mapping the triumphant celebrations of genocide and settler invasion through the city's monuments, architecture, urban panning and public art. We want to probe more subtle modalities of Indigenous erasure and settler denial such as inclusion, multiculturalism, creative placemaking and ecosystems governance. We want to disrupt the ways “land acknowledgement” has become a spectacle for propping up the legitimacy of settler institutions while eschewing questions of accountability and restitution. Instead, we insist on a politics of perpetual acknowledgement oriented towards the restitution of Native lands and the reconstitution of Native sovereignties beyond the structures of settler colonialism. 

This website brings together contributions about, against and beyond settler placemaking.  

We seek to unmask and unpack the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. We seek to support and uplift the knowledges and practices that continue to assert Chicago as a Native place.