Who is dusable of chicago

The story of a man of African ancestry building a business here and raising a mixed-race family is attractive to contemporary sensibilities. Nonetheless, the DuSable narrative shares unsettling similarities to the Columbian myth. We have become a nation composed of peoples from all over the world because of policies and population pressure that pushed the original residents of our land to forlorn and impoverished corners of the continent.

Budding recognition of this history is in part behind the movement to question the appropriateness of Columbus statues in Chicago. Yet if Columbus was the beginning of the settler-colonial invasion, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was in the second wave to hit the beach.

DuSable was a fur trader. Across the continent, fur traders were the advance guard of the international capitalist market and invasive settlement. Many traders were welcomed by Indians because they brought metal tools and, just as important, wool and cotton cloth. Sadly, another staple of the trade was alcohol. Because there were only so many skinning knives, copper pots or guns Indian hunters needed.

Alcohol was an addictive substance that had little place in pre-Columbian American Indian societies. Hence, they initially had few cultural mechanisms for coping with it. Like most other traders, DuSable trafficked in liquor. In , his trading post at the current site of Michigan City, Indiana, was raided by British troops. There, they confiscated ten barrels of rum. Fur traders played a role in introducing the indigenous people to a drug with an enduring and damaging legacy.

But Chicago area Indians saw the building of the fort for what it was, the military occupation of their homeland. In , Indians attacked the garrison and burned the fort. However, the settler-colonial nation would not be deterred. In the decades that followed, the fort was rebuilt and the government instituted a regime of ethnic cleansing that removed the majority of native people.

Chicago rose to urban greatness from the burial grounds of its native and true founders. This common law marriage was solemnized in a Catholic church in Cahokia, Illinois in DuSable became a powerful trader and pioneer of the Midwest, even becoming involved in the American Revolution.

In , he was subsequently arrested by a British lieutenant, Thomas Bennet and sent to Mackinac. However because of his good character DuSable was released within a few months and sent to the Pinery a trading outpost located on the St. Clair River, south of modern day Port Huron.

Upon receiving news that the present manager had been mistreating the indigenous people of the area, Governor Sinclair appointed DuSable as manager where he worked for a period of three years. Bennett, Lerone. Negro who founded Chicago. Chicago, December Cook, Mercer. Lindberg, Richard C. Jean Baptiste Point Dusable. American National Biography. New York: Oxford, Thousands of Algonquian language-speaking Native American families had settled in villages throughout the region by the early 19th century, according to Curious City.

Most, but not all , Indigenous tribes were forced to leave the region in after they were coerced into signing the Treaty of Chicago, which forfeited 15 million acres of land to the U. DuSable, Kitihawa and their two children only resided by the Chicago River for about a year.

In , the family sold their property and traveled west to St. Chicago has renamed major streets before: In , then-Mayor Richard M.