Chicago, Illinois located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan has long been a place for gathering and community. The lands on which the City is located arethe traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, or Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations. Many other Nations consider this area their traditional homeland, as well, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo and Mascouten. Chicago played a role in the colonization of the western United States, with its location creating a place from which the state and federal government could base its expansion  into the territories of the many Native American nations which call the land that is Illinois, and states further to the west, home. The displacement of these communities via settler colonialism has resulted in Illinois having no federally recognized tribal lands despite the City of Chicago having one of the largest urban Native American communities in the United States.  

Chicago is a city engaged with its history. The flag of the city represents that commitment, reflecting the geography and the events that have shaped the city since its colonial founding, and was intentionally chosen as an inspiration for the ACPA24 Chicago logo. The City’s 77 distinct neighborhoods, have been home to communities of immigrants from across the world and were a destination during the great migration of African American communities from the South to cities of the North throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there is power in the building of community via these neighborhoods, they were created through the explicitly racist policies of Red Lining. The segregation enforced by these codes results in modern day disparities in health, educational, and income outcomes that disproportionately impact the City’s communities of color. 

Chicago’s first permanent non-indigenous resident was a trader named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a free black man from Haiti whose father was a French sailor and whose mother was an African slave. He came to Chicago in the 1770s via the Mississippi River from New Orleans with his Native American wife, and their home was built at the mouth of the Chicago River. In 1803, the U.S. government built Fort Dearborn at what is now the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, located on the same block as the Convention hotel, adjacent to the DuSable Bridge.

Chicago is a destination for students from around the world, with over fifty higher education institutions in and around the City. From one of the oldest and most successful community college systems in the nation, the City Colleges of Chicago, to some of the most elite private institutions in the world, Chicago’s higher education opportunities present students with a diversity of  institutional experiences. Bringing ACPA24 to a city with so many institutions of higher education will give our members an opportunity to connect with colleagues across these campuses and welcome them into the ACPA community.