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American Indians leave Uptown behind - Native Land - Chicago neighbourhood
Chicago Reporter, The, July-August, 2002 by Stephanie Williams
Corning Home
The more the American Indian population shifts, the more the community must sustain a cultural base, Miller and others say. Despite the population drop in Uptown, the American Indian Center still brings people "home."
"I don't know how else to describe it--the center is simply the focal point of the community," said Susan K. Power, a Dakota Sioux who was one of the center's founding members. "It's our home away from home. We can come here, be among friends and enjoy a sense of community from our Native perspective."
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On a Friday evening in mid-February, large plumes of smoke from burning cedar, white sage and sweet grass floated through the center's main hail. Father Peter J. Powell, pastor of St. Augustine's Center for American Indians, led a memorial service for William A. Rood, who had died that week. The 81-year-old Lakota Sioux was a respected elder in the Native American community.
At the end of the ceremony Powell sprinkled Flood's coffin with holy water and blessed it by gently waving a large white feather. Men tapped large kettle drums in a slow, steady beat. Moments later someone placed a plate of American Indian frybread, meats and pasta on top of the coffin along with three red carnations and a family picture.
"We were a community coming together to say goodbye to one of its grandfathers," said Podlasek, 40, the center director, who is Ojibwe and Polish.
"You couldn't possibly move this place and get the same atmosphere," Valentino said before a graduation ceremony at the center several months later.
"Even though people move away, like to the South Side or West Side, when there is an event this is where they come."
Tyson, the St. Augustine's program coordinator, who for the past year and a half has commuted to Uptown every day from northern Indiana, said that's also true for the neighborhood as a whole.
"We haven't given it up," she said. "It's just that we don't live here anymore."
Contributing: Steve Sierra, Megan Marz helped research this article.
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RELATED ARTICLE: Uncovering Native Roots
Jeff Abbey Maldonado was 19 when he started looking for books that would help him understand what it meant to be Native American.
The problem was that he couldn't find anything about contemporary people like him, living in a city like Chicago.
"We have all this history, but what about information and writings on what we're like today--what we do and how we live?" said Maldonado, 32, whose mother was a member of the Alabama Coushatta tribe and whose father was Mexican. "I really didn't have anybody I could talk to about [it]. I would talk to my family, of course, but I wanted a different perspective. I really didn't know any other American Indians in the city."
Maldonado grew up in the Bridgeport and Brighton Park neighborhoods. He said he always considered himself "just a city guy."
Maldonado's mother would attend events at the American Indian Center in Uptown, but he has no memories of going with her. Maldonado's father would take him, his two brothers and his two sisters on frequent trips into Pilsen, a mostly Mexican neighborhood. "I guess realistically I felt closer to the Mexican community," he said.
