They had become a cooperative, cohesive, hybrid set of colonizers.
The thunderbird on the Illinois hide reflects possible social interactions and affiliations between Oneota people and the Illinois newcomers and hints at how the Illinois may have integrated or assimilated outsiders as part of their colonizing history. It is impossible to know for sure how the Illinois newcomers made community and negotiated social life as they arrived in the Illinois Country. But what does seem clear is that as they colonized, the Illinois built a strong and complex network of villages, united by language and probably kinship.
Figure 4. Bison arrow-shaft wrench. Made from bison femur, unearthed at Guebert site, eighteenth-century Illinois village in Illinois Valley. The Illinois based much of their material culture on bison products.
Courtesy of the Collection of the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Ill. Doug Carr, museum photographer.
Figure 5. Illinois hide robe with thunderbird. A long tradition has it that this robe was presented to Marquette when he visited the Peoria Indians on the Des Moines River in 1673. Hide robes like this are an artistic tradition the Illinois picked up from their grasslands neighbors and are not typical Algonquian art forms. They reflect the Illinois’s “transitional culture.”
Courtesy of SCALA Archives, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.
Figure 6. Winnebago pictogram on 1701 Great Peace treaty, Montreal. Note the symbol for the Winnebago, Siouan neighbors of the Illinois, is the “thunderbird.” C11a, vol. 19, fols. 41–44v, ANOM.
Courtesy of the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Although we must rely on post-contact descriptions for much of our understanding of Illinois social life, there are some things we can be reasonably confident about regarding the Illinois in the early 1600s. For one thing, as it was for all eastern North American Indians, kinship was the most important means of separating friends from foreign peoples.79 Contrary to how European observers saw them, the Illinois did not really organize themselves primarily into a “tribe” or “nation” or even a “confederacy.” Rather, they did most things in life—resided, went to war, negotiated, identified—as families. Families were the center of life. While we don’t know a lot of specifics about the social organization of the Illinois-speakers in the pre-contact period, what is certain is that the Illinois created extensive lineages, possibly similar to the doodemag among Algonquians like the Anishinaabeg.80 Among the Illinoisspeakers were at least fourteen distinct subgroups—or familles as La Salle called them—at the time of contact: Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaroa, Coiracoentanon, Chinko, Cahokia, Chepoussa, Amenakoa, Oouka, Acansa, Moingwena, Tapuaro, Maroa, Ispeminkias, and Metchigameas.81 As a later French observer would say of the Illinois, these were inclusive units not necessarily based solely in biological kinship and included “degrees of kinship that [Europeans] … would not even call cousins.”82 In any event, these patrilineal “familles” were the primary units of identity among the Illinois. As Illinoisspeakers moved into their new territory, they likely used intermarriage, as well as adoption and other kinds of fictive kinship, to build bridges, to welcome other newcomers into their familles, and to create borders. For the Illinois-speaking newcomers in the 1600s, the world was organized into “a8enti8aki”—relatives—and “ninaca8atisi”—strangers.83 Kinship created obligations, identities, and responsibilities that helped the newcomers negotiate their immigration to the borderlands.
Extended and intermarried families were almost certainly the basis for the decentralized and autonomous villages, which were the most important social units in pre-contact Illinois.84 One early observer said that there were fully sixty villages of Illinois-speakers in the 1640s.85 On the first contact-era map of the Illinois, Marquette drew seven distinct villages of Illinois-speakers that he saw with his own eyes in just a month’s time, which probably represented just a fraction of the total that actually existed. As Marquette’s map shows, the Pe8area (Peoria) were divided into three villages, while the Moing8ena (Moingwena), Kachkaskia (Kaskaskia), Maroa, and Metchigamea all lived in distinct villages. La Salle noted that the numerous villages on early maps constituted “only some of the tribes composing the nation of Illinois.”86
La Salle also emphasized that the pre-contact Illinois lived in distinct villages, far away from one another, both to the east and to the west of the Mississippi.87 The demands of bison hunting probably joined with kinship to create the bonds and relationships that united local groups into larger familles. Indeed, it is likely that bison hunting, since it required large groups, was helping to “unite” some of these villages in the pre-contact era.88
In addition to whatever kinship ties may have joined Illinois villages in the prehistoric period, trade certainly helped create a loosely unified identity among the Illinois-speakers and structured relationships with neighbors. Over the course of their colonization of the Illinois Country, trade clearly came to the fore of Illinois Indian life. In Native societies in the Midwest, trade was an important way of expanding power, building cohesion, and dealing with outsiders.89 Trade connections could even produce fictive kinship bonds, as trading partners became a kind of kin.90 Illinois-speakers also established trade connections beyond their local region, creating an interregional trade network that allowed them to import materials from foreign regions. Exotic goods in protohistoric Illinois archaeological sites included prestige goods like Olivella shell beads, marine shell gorgets, and other objects from the lower Mississippi Valley, as well as exotic materials from the Plains.91 By the early 1600s, north-south trade networks were augmented by east-west trade networks, spanning the Algonquian and Siouan borderlands.92
Figure 7. Marquette map of 1673. This map depicts the Kaskaskia village in the Illinois River Valley, as well as several other Illinois villages west of the Mississippi. From Sara Jones Tucker, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Museum, 1942).
Courtesy of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The Illinois began trading for European metal as early as the 1620s and possibly earlier.93 Archaeologists argue from this evidence that the Illinois were aggressively pursuing trade with the Wendats, far to the north in the Great Lakes, probably beginning in the early 1600s.94 Other evidence suggests that they then carried these metals farther south and west, toward modernday Missouri, where they traded them for profit and to make alliances among the Siouan neighbors, descendants of the Oneota. In other words, by the mid-seventeenth century the Illinois had emerged as merchants, middlemen, and go-betweens.95 As newcomers to a region that was borderland between Siouan and Algonquians, as well as at the crossroads of cultures, the Illinois used trade to build consensus, friendships, and cohesion.
One sign of the opportunistic stance in the Illinois newcomers’ human relationships is the calumet. Like bison hunting and other aspects of the Illinois’s lifeway, the calumet was a recent adoption. As Algonquians among the Siouan Oneota-speakers, the Illinois probably used it frequently when they arrived in the new territory, relying on it to “speak to strangers.”96 The first and most detailed early examples of calumet ceremonialism among the Illinois reflect the fact that they used the calumet not only for peace but also to intimidate and to declare and celebrate their
