My guiding question or thought for this little project was mostly based around Chicago newspapers in the mid to late 19th century and the presence of Indigenous people/problems in their newspapers, because we hear about Reconstruction mostly in relation to the abolition of slavery, reuniting the country post civil war, life in the south, the politics, that sort of thing. With Reconstruction, Indigenous people generally aren’t acknowledged or talked about, so I was curious about the presence of Indigenous people in newspapers in a state that no longer had any Indigenous-held lands, a very low presence of Indigenous people, but was and still is one of the largest metropolitan hubs of the United States, a place of importance on par with Washington D.C. and New York City. I did only select a few excerpts from the Chicago Daily Tribune between the 1870 and 1900, so my data set is not very large (but Voyant didn’t want to let me upload the PDFs so I had to past in the URLs by hand and I may have given up after 3 links which is arguably kind of sad but alas). Funnily enough, the word used the most in the documents I selected was “tho” and I can’t articulate fully why that makes me chuckle as much as it does, but it does. In terms of Indigenous people, the articles use the word ‘Indian’ 133 times across the 3 article excerpts, and ‘Indians’ 52 times. This illustrates that during those few decades, Indigenous people were still a topic of conversation and discussion in metropolitan areas like Chicago, although the general topics in the articles focused on the migration of white colonizing settlers making their way onto Indigenous land and utilizing it for their own gain, regardless of the wishes of said Indigenous people. Thus, we can see that the context in which Indigenous people were spoken of (specifically in media in the late 19th century) was still in the same vein as they had been spoken of in the 17th and 18th century. These discussions were mostly about the presence of Indigenous people, their land, the necessity of white settlement, that sort of thing. All of this makes the data found within the text analysis of the excerpts from the Chicago Daily Tribune that much more interesting and comprehensible.
Annemarie– These few newspapers are a great example of how well connected Chicago was to everywhere else in the United States, especially in the late nineteenth century. As your post describes, the discussion of Native-related topics aren’t always contextualized as part of other processes and periods of history (like Reconstruction, local Illinois history, etc.). It makes me think of historian William Cronon’s book, Nature’s Metropolis, which is an environmental history of Chicago (and the surrounding region) and its broader social, political and economic networks throughout the West. Although we may not have the best picture of Indigenous people within and around Chicago from these few clips, these newspapers still offer important insight into how newspapers communicated events, reports, interactions, and other key information about Native Americans.
I’m interested in some of the smaller words from the word cloud– terms like “money,” “congress,” “territory,” and “Cherokee(s).” I”m not sure what these newspaper columns were specifically discussing, but I’d be interested in a close reading of the sources to find out! Some of these aren’t entirely surprising– it seems to be more top-level (federal/national) politics and policies regarding Native peoples. Lots of great questions to keep thinking about!