Before 2024, the small museum of North American Indigenous cultures, located deep in suburban Evanston, was known as the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian. Founded by a non-Native couple of art collectors, John M. and Betty Seabury Mitchell, the Mitchell Museum displayed a comprehensive survey of Indigenous art and artifacts from across the continent, but it was missing one crucial thing: the input and leadership of contemporary Native people.
In 2024, it was announced that the Mitchell Museum would undergo a radical reimagining. Not only would the museum’s name be changed to the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum — “Gichigamiin” being the Ojibwe term for the Great Lakes — but its scope and perspective would also shift. Instead of an outsider’s view of the historical cultures native to this continent, the Gichigamiin Museum would be Native-led, with a focus on representing Indigenous life within Chicago and the greater Great Lakes region.
The rebranding process of the museum was extensive, involving surveys and other community input from the Native community. The new Gichigamiin Museum took two years to complete and opened on Oct. 12 — Indigenous People’s Day. I took a Metra trip up to the brand new museum to see for myself what it looks like when a museum decides to decolonize.
While I never got the opportunity to visit the Mitchell before the rebrand, I can say with confidence that the Gichigamiin Museum provides a fantastic overview of the experiences of Indigenous Chicagoans. The historic wrongs of the colonial museum have been addressed by prioritizing the voices, stories, and perspectives of the museum’s subjects, rather than treating them as relics of a mythic past in need of collection and preservation by outsiders. The museum also serves to remind us that Chicago is Native land, and that Native people are still here and still fighting back.
Upon entering the museum through a garden of important native plants, I walked through a review of Native history in the Chicago and Great Lakes region, from pre-colonial times to the present. Historical artifacts have been slightly deemphasized in the Gichigamiin Museum as opposed to its previous iteration; many of the museum’s collections are no longer on display, and there are good reasons for that.
Many items are in the process of being repatriated to the tribal communities from which they were taken, and others are off view due to their sacred nature. Equally important is the museum’s care to present Indigenous survival and resistance as key themes. This means that, despite several artifacts of traditional Native life on display, such as a birchbark canoe and a cornhusk doll (one of several objects that guests are invited to handle, a fun departure from the etiquette enforced by most museums), more exhibit space is devoted to Native-centered stories.
“Chicago has always been a Native place,” reads one wall label paired with a seventeenth-century map showing the Indigenous settlements that once existed in the region, which was, the label text continues, a center of Native presence “since time immemorial.” Through artifacts and wall labels like these, visitors learn about the Indigenous villages that once existed in the Chicago region; the violence and ethnic cleansing experienced during the area’s colonization by white settlers; Chicago’s history with the American Indian Movement; and the organizing, education, and community services established by Chicago’s twentieth-century Urban Native community, centered around the Uptown neighborhood.
One particularly interesting part of the exhibit showcased a model of Jigzibik, a planned affordable housing complex and community space in Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood that will serve the city’s Native community.
Upstairs, a smaller exhibit showcases Chicago’s ties to the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) community, particularly the surprising connections the city has to Hawaiian music and the Hawaiian royal family, who were forcibly deposed upon the U.S. invasion of the islands in 1893.
The children’s space in the museum has also been transformed. Now known as “The Gifts of Our World,” it remains an interactive play space, but its focus is on educating young museumgoers about Native ethics surrounding Nature, the Earth, and how to live in harmony with the world as a “Nature Keeper.”
Overall, the Gichigamiin Museum is something I have never encountered before: a Native museum that plants the visitor’s focus on Native resilience and activism, fully divorced from the colonizer’s gaze. But museums, as a whole, do not have static missions divorced from their unfortunate histories; on the contrary, they have a responsibility for accountability and keeping up with the ethical standards of the 21st century. If you want to see what a museum can look like when it shakes off the yoke of its colonial gaze, look no further than the Gichigamiin Museum.
Tickets are $8; they are $6 with a valid student ID and free for enrolled tribal members.
