Illinois Confederation

The Illinois Confederation, or Illiniwek, was a union of twelve or thirteen closely related Algonquian-speaking peoples of the middle Mississippi valley, whose lands at their height reached from Lake Michigan to Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas. The leading groups were the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Peoria, Tamaroa and Michigamea. Their descendants today make up the federally recognised Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, based in Ottawa County.

According to their own understanding, the Illinois had once been a single nation that divided into separate tribes only when it grew too large to hunt and farm together, and the divisions kept a strong sense of unity, sharing language, ceremony and trade. Some historians therefore describe them as a segmented tribe rather than a true confederation. A Great Chief stood over the chiefs of the individual tribes, but decisions were reached by consensus, and peace chiefs led through persuasion while war chiefs earned their place in battle. French missionaries recorded that the people called themselves Inoka; the name Illinois comes from a French rendering of a word for "the men".

Villages stood near rivers with fertile soil, where women grew maize, beans, squash and pumpkins, harvesting part of the maize early in July to store for winter. Bison from the northern prairies were hunted in great communal drives that could involve up to 300 people. Young people sought a guardian spirit through fasting and prayer, and the ikoneta, people who took a recognised third gender role, held spiritual roles in time of war.

French explorers and missionaries, among them Marquette, Jolliet and La Salle, reached the Illinois in the 1670s. Estimates of their numbers at that time range from about 2,000 to about 10,500, with the higher figures generally favoured. The Grand Village of the Kaskaskia near present-day Utica grew to about 6,000 people in some 460 houses, and a Jesuit mission was founded there in 1675. The Illinois controlled river crossings that let them dominate trade in bison products, furs and captives taken from peoples to the south and west. Their region, the Illinois Country, became the vital link between New France on the Great Lakes and French Louisiana. Raids by the Haudenosaunee, at their worst in 1680, when the Kaskaskia town was destroyed and hundreds were killed or captured, scattered many communities.

War, disease and colonial pressure steadily wore the Illinois down. They fought as French auxiliaries against the Meskwaki, Chickasaw and Natchez, and smallpox struck repeatedly from the early 1700s. Widespread conversion to Catholicism brought monogamy and fewer births, while brandy traded against royal orders caused further harm. From the 1740s the Three Fires peoples, the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Ojibwe, pushed into the Illinois valley. Only five tribes had remained since about 1700, and by 1778 the Illinois may have numbered only about 300. A popular story that the last Illinois were massacred at Starved Rock around 1769 lacks contemporary evidence and is regarded by historians as folklore.

In 1832 the Illinois ceded their remaining lands and moved to a reservation in eastern Kansas. An 1854 treaty joined them with the Wea and Piankashaw as the Confederated Peoria, who moved to north-eastern Oklahoma in 1867 and were joined by members of the Miami. After a period of dissolution in the 1920s, the Peoria Tribe was reorganised and federally acknowledged in 1978. Illinois and Miami are dialects of one language; it has no remaining native speakers, but children of both nations are learning it again through revival programmes.

Our maps draw an approximate Illinois territory in 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715, in some years labelled Kaskaskia after the leading tribe. Neighbours on the same maps include the Shawnee and the Osage.