As we gather for yet another holiday putting a mythical glow on the land grab—er, origins—of America, it’s encouraging to know that sometimes, in however minor a way, things can actually get better. Case in point: Evanston’s small but worthy Mitchell Museum has a new name.
According to exhibit wall text, it was the middle school graduation gift of a Native American rug that launched a non–Native American—longtime Evanston resident and real estate executive John M. Mitchell—on a collecting path that led to the founding of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in 1977.
The wall text doesn’t mention that, as the Chicago Tribune has reported, the graduation gift included a tomahawk.
Mitchell’s collection was initially donated to and housed at Kendall College, then on Orrington Avenue in Evanston. In 1997, the museum moved into the former home of the Terra Museum of American Art on Central Street, and in 2006 it split from the college and became an independent nonprofit organization.
John Mitchell died in 1985, but his name remained on the museum until last week, when a rebranding was announced. Outside signage might not have caught up yet, but, as of November 21, the Mitchell is to be known as the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum.
Museum director Kim Vigue says the new name reflects a shift in focus. Gichigamiin (pronounced Gi-che-gah-mean) is “Great Lakes” in the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) language. Going forward, the museum’s permanent exhibits will be more specifically focused than they have been on the Indigenous people of Chicago and the Great Lakes region.
Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum
Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM (closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day); 3001 Central, Evanston, 847-475-0911, gichigamiin-museum.org, $8 adults (18-59), $6 seniors (60 and up), youth (3-17), and students/teachers/professors with ID, free for tribal citizens and children under 3.
“It doesn’t mean we won’t cover all of the tribes,” Vigue says. “We have a really diverse community here in Chicago, so they’ll still be represented. It’ll just look different than it does now, highlighting the local and regional community.” Part of what drove that decision, which involved a lot of community input, she says, is that “Native communities in the Great Lakes are often overlooked, and that people who come to the museum, especially teachers, want information about this region.”
Vigue, who grew up in Wisconsin and spent a couple decades working on tribal affairs in Washington, D.C., is Menominee and Oneida. She says the name change also reflects the fact that, since 2022, for the first time in its history, the museum has a majority-Native American staff and board. She arrived in the fall of 2021 and is its first “permanent” Native American director.
The Great Lakes region is home to one of the largest Native populations in the country. “Native Americans are usually undercounted, so it’s hard to say exactly how many are here,” Vigue says, but “a number I’ve seen for the greater Chicago area is about 65,000. And the Chicago community is really diverse—there are about 150 tribes represented.”
She says that the first time she visited the museum, years before she joined the staff, “I didn’t see a single face of a living Native person on the walls or in the exhibits. Everything was in the past tense—all the artifacts and objects. That really bothered me. So when I took the job here one of the first things I said was, ‘We need to flip this.’”
“It’s been a long process, and we’re nowhere near where we want to be, but we want to make sure that whoever comes here knows that Native people still exist and contribute to society.” Many Native Americans are thriving, Vigue says, but erasure and invisibility are major issues: “Kids will say—‘Oh, all Native people are dead,’ or ‘They’re extinct.’ We still hear that on a regular basis.”
Last week a congressional committee held a hearing on the worst kind of invisibility: the disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the lack of official response to their disappearance. Among the statistics cited: the murder rate for Native women and girls is more than ten times higher than the national average.
The upper floor of the Gichigamiin Museum currently hosts a traveling exhibit on this subject—”No Rest: The Epidemic of Stolen Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2Spirits.” Featuring 35 original works by a dozen Indigenous artists and part of a grassroots movement (MMIWG2S), its primary image is a bloody hand, often across a mouth. It’s there through December 30.
On a happier note, Gichigamiin will host an artists’ market on Saturday, November 30, offering free admission to the museum and a chance to purchase goods by Native American artists and entrepreneurs. And, in what Vigue calls a “full-circle” event, the Terra Foundation is funding an exhibit of contemporary Native American art that will open January 27 for a yearlong run in the upper-level galleries.