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SETTLER COLONIAL CITY PROJECT

The Settler Colonial City Project is a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization.
The concept of “settler colonialism” has recently emerged as a name for a distinctive form of colonialism that develops in places where settlers permanently reside and assert sovereignty. While the settler colonial dimensions of American cities have been centered in contemporary urban activism, these dimensions have been, at best, only tentatively explored in contemporary architectural and urban studies. Investigating the settler colonial history and contemporaneity of cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas, we aim to foreground Indigenous knowledge of and politics around land, life, and collective futures, as well as settler colonialism as an unmarked structure for the distribution of land, possibilities of life, and imagination of those futures.

SITES
—2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago
—American Indian Center, Chicago

PUBLICATIONS
—Mapping Chicagou/Chicago
—Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center
—The Petro-Biennial Complex
—At the Border of Decolonization
—The Settler Colonial Present

NEWS
—SCCP at Homes on Fields, Harvard GSD
—SCCP at Urgent Pedagogies
—SCCP at Architecture Beyond Capitalism
—SCCP in PIN–UP 30: Legacy
—SCCP in the Architect’s Newspaper
—SCCP at PPEH on the Petro-Biennial Complex
—Unsettled Lands: Architecture, History, Pedagogy
—Conversations on Care at MIT
—SCCP at Chicago Public School Grade 7
—RCA: Co-liberation
—SCCP at Art Gallery of Alberta
—SCCP at LSA Magazine
—Press on the Chicago Architecture Biennial







Mark

1. Mapping Chicagou/Chicago



MAPPING CHICAGOU/CHICAGO
SCCP 2019

Mapping Chicagou/Chicago: A Living Atlas brings together three geographies that have been at once produced by and held apart by settler colonialism: the geography of Indigenous displacement in the United States; the geography of colonial land-filling and water-seizing in and around Lake Michigan; and the geography of Chicago’s urban development. Bringing these geographies together, as we do here, allows for a documentation of the way in which the contemporary city of Chicago has been shaped by still-ongoing settler colonialism and the way in which Indigeneity has persisted and thrived even in the context of this colonialism’s displacements, dispossessions, and violence.

This documentation contests the colonial framing of settler colonialism in the United States as merely a historical phenomenon: a moment, long since passed, in the history of the United States. In fact, our documentation of Chicago as a city located on both occupied and unceded Indigenous land reveals the city’s geography as a product of conflict, violence, and struggle that continue into the present. The maps in this publication, then, constitute a living atlas: a counter-geography that contests the colonial geography posing colonialism in Chicago, in the United States, and across the globe, as a historical artifact. This counter-geography calls for the world to be changed—or decolonized—to do justice to the violence by means of which the world was made. 

We entitle our living atlas Mapping Chicagou/Chicago in order to reference the way in which the colonization of Chicagou not only yielded Chicago but continues to structure relationships between land, people, and the multifarious elements of what in colonial ontology is called such things as “the environment,” “nature,” or “the natural world.” The name “Chicago” references a French rendering of the Indigenous Miami-Illinois word for a type of wild onion, the shikaakwa, known in English as ramps. The word was later turned into checagou or chicagou, also in reference to a type of garlic that grew in the forests and plains of the region. With the colonization of the place known as Chicagou, the ramps and garlic that were harvested and sustained by Indigenous people in these forests and plains were replaced by wheat, a crop indigenous to the Fertile Crescent that was brought to North America by British colonialism.

While the colonial replacement of shikaakwa by wheat may have been almost total, settler colonialism yields practices of displacement, dispossession, and violence that continue to structure its development as long as it exists. Chicagou, then, lives on, both as a name for Indigenous presence in Chicago—a city with the third-largest urban Native American population in the United States—and as a name for all those spaces in Chicago that have experienced colonizing displacement, dispossession, and violence.

In Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago, Pokagon historian John N. Low shows how, in the early 20th century, the Pokagon Potawatomi appropriated colonial strategies and tools to recover land that colonialism had taken away from them. As Low writes, the Pokagon Potawatomi responded to colonialism “by using maps—the very tools that had been used in earlier times to deprive them of their lands—in their effort to regain some of their territory.” Inspired by this effort, we, too, aim to re-purpose a colonial cartography—the cartography of standardized and presumably objective maps—against colonialism itself.

Read and download this publication.
Mark



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